Susannah Elf
Susannah Elf's JournalWhat movies have done the best job of depicting dating?
I was chatting with someone the other day who was talking about a terrible movie he'd just seen. The man in it behaved like a piece of cheesecake and when he actually spoke it was ridiculous dialogue. Unfortunately the movie wasn't named.
I told him about "Enough Said" because there were similar plot points but it was a really good movie. Both characters (played by Julia Louis Dreyfus and James Gandolfini) were decent and sympathetic, they made mistakes and then handled them like adults.
So what are your favorites? Which depict the person of your sex most accurately? Any nominations for the Hall of Shame?
I just heard an interview with Jon Ronson.
He wrote "Them" and "The Men who Stare at Goats",
among other books. His latest is "So You've been Publicly Shamed". In it he examines different cases where the internet community becomes aware of a person's behavior, and makes a collective decision to "ruin" him or her.
Justine Sacco ( who tweeted a joke about white privilege which didn't go over and lost her job amid the backlash against her) is an example he uses. And I confess to having "shared" Ricky Gervaise's tweets about the giraffe killer.
So what are your opinions about this? Have you participated in anything like this? Regrets? If you think it's a really bad use of social media, what would you do to reign it in?
Note: I am aware that most of you probably know who Jon Ronson and Justine Sacco are and didn't need me to explain.
Can men write women? Can women write men?
I know we've all had the experience of reading a book and rolling your eyes at how unlike the heroine is to every woman you've ever known. Men, substitute "heroine" and "woman" for "hero" and "man".
So what are some books where the author does do a good job portraying the opposite sex?
I'll start off.
"The Antagonist " by Lynn Coady. The narrator is a former hockey enforcer at a pivotal point in his life, which causes him to review his behavior and history.
Now, of course I am a woman, but I've read thousands of books by men, so I think that I'm able to recognize the male voice. I believed in the narrator so much that I had to look at the back photo to make sure Lynn Coady was a woman.
So - what good examples of opposite sex portrayals have you read?
One difference between our countries
is that, in Canada, religion is considered very much a private thing, while in the U.S. it seems to influence every aspect of public life. I think that's why I am always a little bit shocked at the vitriol that atheists (or agnostics or humanists) and people of faith (including spiritual-but-not-religionists) hurl at each other. Religion is never part of the discussion at election time. I really don't know what any of our members of parliament believe in and it wouldn't occur to me to cast my vote using that information.
There are a lot of smart people who post on this site. I would like to understand how it came to be that religion and politics are so closely entwined in the U.S.
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Member since: Sun Apr 12, 2015, 10:54 PMNumber of posts: 140
