Oh, Slate...

Battlestar Galactica: not so frakking feminist. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine:

"Perhaps because science fiction has historically appealed to men who don't leave home much, the genre has often used alien mores and alien technology to rationalize pornographic depictions of near-naked women."

There are two things going on here.

The first one being Slate’s wonderful reputation for being contrarian simply to be contrarian.

It’s cute. Really. No, the aging “Xers” who make up the staff at Slate have that bemused indulgence for the great unwashed schtick down so pat they could give lessons. Consider the faux tastemakers at Slate to be the Tony Robbins-es of snarky condescension, they keep giving because they want us to be better.

BSG doesn’t have a feminist slant, however, it doesn’t have a misogynistic slant either. It is a (sometimes convoluted) about the frakkin’ apocalypse and I would suspect that traditional norms of behavior (like gender roles) are going to be thrown out the window if the population suddenly ends up being 1% of what it was say 24 hours earlier.
It’s about the end of the world, people, the end of humanity, and what it means to be human, and that is going to be ugly. Very ugly. Bad things are going to happen and people are going to make bad choices.

The second thing is that I am a fan boy, and I am going to defend the show for even some of the bad choices that they make.

Anyway…I wonder what Paglia thinks of the show…maybe she can offer something a little more nuanced than a well…paper that I could have written for one of my WS classes fifteen years ago.

Read the article.

It does read like an aborted position paper for a social sciences elective.

*sigh*

Edit: Someone at the Atlantic seems to agrees with me...even using the same quote as the one that I found a bit...offensive.