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Yes, the movie is totally inaccurate. The bees collecting honey in the
movie are “pollen jocks” that use powerful suction guns to collect
nectar from the flowers. It’s the same prototype of Macho men using
guns to do hard, dangerous work and being glorified for it. The pollen
jocks in the movie are the “babes” that the girl bees fawn all over.
Yeah, it’s sickening.
The movie does have this vague environmentalism theme that I really
appreciated. It is revealed that the bees are necessary for all of the
flowers to bloom and all of our food to be produced. They are the link
that ties it all together. Without the bees, all of the food and all
of the creatures can’t exist. So, at least they got that part right.
As far as portraying the bee society as a matriarchy, I tried to
imagine a bee animation film that accurately told the story of the
bee culture:
The queen is a manipulative single mother that controls all of her
female offspring to keep the hive perfectly maintained and to produce
a maximum amount of food. The males that the queen mates with would be
lazy, unemployed, free-loading males that just have sex and then get
kicked out of the hive for not doing any work. The hardworking
sisterhood worker bees would be glorified for being diligent, smart,
and protective.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that does not recognize hard
working intelligent women, and so we certainly don’t have a
recognizable motherhood or sisterhood stereotype to colorfully portray
on the big screen. Pop culture tells us that women are not tough.
Women are nagging, soft, dumb, pretty little things that exist to
satisfy men. Thus, all of the bees in the bee movie have little curly
antennae, big eyelashes and curvaceous thoraxes. They don’t do any
work, or contribute to the honey production in the movie. Yes, it’s
grossly inaccurate. Once again, women’s power has been stripped and
co-opted as masculine. Ugh.
The movie is a cookie-cutter, shiny, plastic, brightly-colored piece
of crap wrapped up in a big masculine bow- just like every other big
hollywood film. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised!
November 23rd is Buy Nothing Day.
Don’t be a sell-out.
It’s true. The Chicago Reader was really bought by Creative Loafing (a Florida-based media company, bleh).
I didn’t believe it until today when I picked up a copy of the most recent “Reader” in its new format. It looks like the fucking Red Eye. I hate the Red Eye. Even worse, it looks like the Weekly Planet, the so-called independent weekly newspaper published in Sarasota, FL.
Read what other people have to say about it:
As a free-lance Chicago Reader cartoonist for these past 28 years, I can smell my own blood in the water following the Creative Loafing acquisition. I have been fired from virtually every alternative weekly carrying my stuff almost immediately upon takeover. Much like the dailies, cartoonists with alternative weeklies are often first to go. I’m sad to see what is happening to a newspaper that literally made my career and is still going quite well. I owe a lot to so many editors and art directors long gone from purchased papers that have been converted to lifestyle rags, yet retain the label “alternative.”
Peter Mueller
None of the Chicago Reader distribution drivers that I know of are planning to become independent contractors at the newspaper. We’re also distressed about the changes that are happening at the newspaper. While the political coverage at the Reader may not have been as good as that at the Sun-Times, it’s still been quite good, and the cultural coverage is probably the best of any local paper in the country, if not the world. Carrying more syndicated material is a tough one to swallow. The local emphasis is what draws in serious fans of the Reader. It was about us, Chicagoans. And it’s over for us. And the paper. We know it.
The real story here is the crumbling of a number of larger independent media outlets in Chicago. WLUW radio? Gone. Punk Planet magazine? Gone. The Chicago Reader as we once knew it? Gone. It’s damned distressing. That is why we’ve lived here. That’s why we never moved away. How will we stand as an example to others in places where they’ve never had these outlets? Are we still capable of being a world-class city, a beacon to those who came here for the vibrant arts and lively politics. Am I making too much of it? Or not . . . A Chicago Reader driver
The Chicago Reader was started in 1971 by a group of friends. The paper was mostly paid for by extensive classifieds and advertisements. Perhaps we can use the Reader’s success as a boilerplate for a new independent publication.
I bought a suit today. I told myself yesterday to just suck it up and buy a nice suit that fits well. My grandmother bought me a really nice suit as a graduation present as if to say, “Welcome to the real world, you’ll need this if you ever want to get a real job”. She was right. A nice suit makes the right impression. Unfortunately, I have lost a significant amount of weight and the suit given to me by grandmother is much too big and I look shrunken in it. And with a very important job interview on the horizon, I needed a suit. A nice suit. Walking through the store and looking at the price tags and thinking about how the people working there probably don’t even have health insurance, I was oh so very tempted to leave immediately and spend hours looking for a well fitting suit in a thrift store. The problem is that I hate buying new clothes. Buying new clothes is so easy and convenient because you find exactly what you want in any color, length, cut, etc. This convenience comes at the price of others’ hard labor. All of the garments are made in Ecuador, Honduras, etc. After less than a month on the racks, unsold clothes are sold to the overstock stores, clothes usually make it to a thrift store or the landfill, and the thrift stores eventually ship used clothes to third world countries. Then the poor people buy the clothes at an outrageous price. That’s right. They buy back the clothes, in used condition, that they got paid pennies for making. It’s a fucked up world.
The lifecycle of the fashion/clothing industry was racing through my head when I gave a big sigh, grabbed the size 6 regular length pants and blazer, and took them to the dressing room. It looked amazing-perfect cut, fit perfectly in the shoulders, the waist, the butt, the hips, everything. And then I took it to the cash register and bought it. To do so, I had to turn my brain off and I’m still angry with myself about the whole affair. I feel ridiculous. I try so hard to be anti-consumerist. This is one of the reasons I hate buying new clothes. I have a problem buying new clothes from large retail stores in particular. I despise the waste spewing from these places and how unfairly they treat their employees. My little sister has worked at Victoria’s Secret for more than two years and she still doesn’t make a living wage. She doesn’t even get health insurance and she’s a manager. Fuck, that pisses me off so much.
Am I a sell-out for spending so much money on something so cheap, so replaceable, so ephemeral, and so socially unfair? Deep down, I think I am a complete sell-out and the only way that I can justify buying the suit is that I’m hopefully getting a job that will do good things for the world. I’m not just some fashionista who buys a new suit every season (cough, cough, like most of the women in my office). The other thing is that it’s part of playing the game. You want a good job? You have to look the part. You can’t just show up in a dress and flip flops…. like I did that one time. I’ll save that story for another post.
With the summer business casual dress code in my office going full swing, I can’t just walk in there in a new suit. My co-workers will know that something is up- especially because I’ve been complaining a lot about wearing high heels. I’ll have to change into the suit before my interview. Ah, this just gets more ridiculous.
