As a precursor to the video posted below: the girl making these videos appears fairly young as sounds pretty rehearsed. However, she raises some interesting points and this one in particular (Tropes vs. Women: #6 The Straw Feminist) ties particularly well to a lot of our earlier conversations from this class.

My best friend from forever ago was home two weekends ago so we met for breakfast one morning to catch up. I started explaining to her about this class and she responded by telling me about these videos. She told me that one of her friends from college is, what she would describe, as a textbook definition of a "feminist". This led to an interesting conversation about what exactly it means to be a "feminist" and societal problems regarding this taboo term (our conversation essentially mirrored a lot of what was said during the first week of school in class). Anyway, she said that her "radically feminist" friend from back home had introduced her to these videos and, while they are nothing particularly impressive academically, the creator of the videos (FeministFrequency) does have some interesting statistics and information regarding the other side of society, the side where women are still struggling with minor (and sometimes major) everyday oppression and where feminism therefore is a necessity.

I skimmed all the videos and they were interesting enough, particularly the one about "The Smurfette". However, when I went back over the weekend to check it out again, she had posted a new one (which is the one I attached below) that I found to be particularly relevant to our class so I thought I would share. Her point about Hollywood's creation of television societies where gender inequality is nonexistent was actually something I had not previously considered. Her best example of this, I think is when she analyzes the 90s television show "The Powerfuff Girls" and highlights the character "Fem-fatal", the villain in this particular episode, who is a radical feminist, with the scientific sign for woman as the primary feature of her costume and with some realistic points about women in society.

Another character she highlights as a "straw feminist" is Phil and Lil's mom from "Rugrats" who also has the scientific woman sign radically displayed on her sweatshirt. This something I completely missed as a child but what does it say about society that we let Hollywood and others who control these major media industries display women in these tainted lights?? If anything, the video shows an interesting clip at the very end where an older woman delicately lectures a younger woman about the real definition of feminism after the younger woman states: "I'm no feminist."