YOU BEAUTIFUL, RULE-BREAKING MOTH: The Top 10 Moments of Parks and Recreation After seven seasons of adventures, laughter, and warm-hearted storylines, Parks and Recreation left our television screens last week. The show was, in words of Leslie Knope, a ‘beautiful, rule-breaking moth.’ Not only was Parks and Recreation hilarious, it was unrelentingly positive: driven…
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What do former Neighbours star Caitlin Stasey, a sex worker, and a breast cancer sufferer all have in common? They are all posing nude and baring their bodies for feminist website, herself.com (NSFW). Herself.com, which was launched by Stasey in January, invites women from across the globe to share their views and individual experiences on…
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Numerous arrests and a slap in the face from border security guards could not contain Amin Palangi’s Love Marriage in Kabul from finding its audience. The documentary is set to screen in March at the Byron Bay Film Festival. After the drowning of her six year old son, Mahboba Rawi made a promise to save…
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Reese Witherspoon produces and stars in Wild, the story of a young woman whose life falls to pieces and her journey to put herself back together, based on the bestselling memoir by Cheryl Strayed. The film opens with Cheryl alone in the American wilderness, clearly at the end of her tether. A series of flashbacks…
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‘I’m super sexy but messed up. I like spanking and sex,’ Christian Grey said sexily. The above quote isn’t spoken dialogue in the film Fifty Shades of Grey. But it could be. Before I get into analysing this film I would like to point out how patronising and aggravating all the think pieces on Fifty…
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Agent Carter, Marvel Universe’s first female-led adaptation, offers a break from your regularly scheduled programming. It’s a wonderful mash-up: part espionage thriller, part comic-book adaptation, and part historical drama. There are secret identities, car cashes and fist fights, gadgets and conspiracies, and crime fighting teams (all in the first episode!). Most excitingly this television…
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The nominations for the 87th Academy Awards came out last week. Amongst the deserving successes for films like Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Boyhood, there is a certain noticeable pattern emerging from the nominees in the major categories. For the first time in almost 20 years every single person nominated in the acting categories…
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Australian women who value traditional femininity are less likely to enter politics following the sexism endured by Julia Gillard, a University of Sydney study has found. More than 150 students were asked about their civic participation and aspirations for a career in parliament. Researchers found a correlation between female belief in conventional gender roles and…
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She is the sensational Diva of Afghanistan and the only female artist/activist of Afghanistan with over 300,000 fans on Facebook. A multiple award winning artist, Aryana Sayeed is one of the rare singers that only performs live in her concerts. Her outstanding performances, her fight for women’s rights, and her beauty have won millions of…
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Every now and then, a Twitter hashtag gets real. It exposes injustice. It strips back a culture to bare experience. On the feminist scene we’ve heard stories from thousands of women through #everydaysexism and #yesallwomen – the newest hashtag to make waves is #writingwhilefemale. It’s the brainchild of Foreign Soil author, Maxine Beneba Clarke. ‘Despite…
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Hollywood rarely turns the camera upon itself. If it does, Oscar-bait biopics about dead actors and filmmakers are usually the way it goes. Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s latest exploration into the grotesqueness of the human condition, depicts the horrors of Hollywood’s narcissistic psyche, relishing in showcasing the demonic egomania and envy that fuels…
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I was absolutely overjoyed when I was offered the chance to review My Old Lady. I think it was because I could get a credit on my resume out of the 2 hours of my life that otherwise would have been written off. That’s not true, those 2 hours weren’t a write off; I considered…
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It’s no surprise that the G20 Summit has a common theme: wealthy, powerful people dictating how we should manage the wealth of poorer, less powerful people. I cringed as I heard my television bark at me that the G20 is a gathering of the ‘most powerful men in the world’. This begs the question: where…
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The Good Wife, as it proved even in its earliest seasons, houses some of television’s best and most complex female characters on television. In the current landscape of television, where women are so often subjected to roles defined by male characters, the show presents dynamic and layered women like Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and Diane…
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