Feminism and pop-music - a good idea?

Let us talk feminism. Not so long ago I have come across an article on PolicyMic that claimed that Brittany Spears, and Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry were spearheading the feminist pop music and could only say “What?”

I am not the biggest specialist in feminism, but even I know that ‘feminism’ stands for a “collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women.” (Wikipedia)

Fair enough, and it is the rights and equality part that I want to draw my attention to (the emphasis in the quote is mine). When a minority/repressed group (in this case women) strives out for equality with a majority group (men here) they can achieve two different goals.

1) They can strive for equal rights with the majority, as the Wiki suggests.

2) They can strive for equal privileges with the majority instead.

The trick is distinguishing between the two, they are often intertwined and by acquiring one of them a minority can achieve both. However, more often a minority seeks to achieve only one of those goals, and usually it is the privilege.

Cue back PolicyMic. It honestly believes that Brittany, Gaga and Katy are feminists, while Miley Cyrus (we all remember her recent stunts, right?) is “an agent of Patriarchy”. (Their quote & idea.)

Okay, let us see. Miley is many things, but patriarchy is one that she is not. Wait, let me guess, in her latest...stunt she has degraded womanhood (or something along those lines) by dancing nearly naked and in a provocative way. Yes, she has crossed a line, but Gaga’s “Applause” comes close to it – and that is why Gaga spearheading the feminist pop music movement?

Brittany... half the time she appears as a pathetic fat mess, but in her songs she tends to appear as a dominatrix or a “strong girl” that puts the men in their place. Of course she also sings songs like “Toxic”, where the men are more on top...but then again, she hadn’t sung much in a while, so who knows, maybe PolicyMic just forgot.

And Katy’s “Roar”... Do not get me started on the animals. She is supposed to be some sort of a lady Tarzan, right? What does she do? Brushes alligator’s teeth and paints an elephant’s fingernails. Putting the matter of fairness to animals aside, how exactly it is feminist/girl empowering? Do tell, because for me this is a very traditional role of a girl/young woman.

Now about popular music. Without going back to Wikipedia or similar sources, it is a music approved by the masses – the proletariat, so to say – and it is simple. It is catchy but it does not tend to carry any deep meaning. Feminism does not need to be complex, but overly simplifying it is not the right way to go either. The masses, the crowd, tend to express the lowest common denominator of the society – just look at the Roman Empire and its crowd with ‘bread and circuses’. If feminism caters to this majority, it stops being a tool of minority for equality and equal rights and becomes, well, a popular fad – and fads fade with time.

Seriously. Just look at the Spice Girls. In the 1990s they were popular – as much as Brittany, or Christina Aguilera, or etc. Now, when they sang last time at the British Olympics they clearly faded - just a group of middle-aged women that could blend in a crowd without particular effort. And who is to say that feminism will not go the same way?

There is a movie, named “A Little Red Dot”, when a Pakistani girl comes to an American school (that does not have a large Pakistani population) and is teased because of the titular dot on her forehead. It is a cultural thing, a bindi, and it cannot be removed. So, her new friends at school turn this into a popular fad and the heroine is accepted but before long the dot on the foreheads of others turns into stars, triangles, circles, other geometrical shapes of various colors and the initial message, the initial value of the titular dot is lost – and before long the fad fades. The girl does become accepted by the school (aside from few hard cases) but she loses her cultural identity in the process. Does this what PolicyMic wants for feminism? Really?

Equality in equal rights means that both sides of a conflict get equal rights and responsibilities that go with them: it is harder for some, easier for others, but at least in theory both sides are equal.

Equality in equal privileges means that some people have an easier time than other people do, for privileges do not really go to everybody – that is what makes them privileges and there is no equality whatsoever.

Back to feminism. In theory, feminism in North America, Europe and the rest of the world fights for equal rights between women and men and that does not make them popular! In fact it often makes them downright unpopular in their native countries of Third world! Men, like many other majorities, do not want to give equal rights – legal, etc – to minorities, including women. And when popular female musicians/singers/entertainers, etc go on stage – this is not equal rights, it is equal privileges with their male counterparts and nothing else, no promotion of feminism, sorry. And when they go and sing or otherwise entertain rulers of various Third world countries – they do not promote feminism abroad either. Rather, they denote feminism as a fancy of various high-status women – wives, sisters, daughters, nieces, more rarely mothers of various high-ranking men who can embrace feminism as they did embrace other fancies, only to discard them when they got bored or their men told them to. Is that what awaits feminism in the States as well?

So. Here is what any feminist who reads PolicyMic articles should do. Either she should strive to distance feminism from popular music and popular anything. It will make her job that much tougher, but it will also ensure that feminism will survive and go strong, at least in First world countries and women will really have equal rights with men, for that is what feminists strive to achieve, right?

Alternatively, she should strive to close the gap between feminism and popular everything, ensuring that feminism becomes just another fad, harmless to the “patriarchy” just as rap and hip-hop are. In this scenario equal rights will be given only to some women and only grudgingly. If the feminist in question is not one of those women – tough, if she is – she is really lucky. But that is how the cookie crumbles, it seems.

And as for Hannah Rosin, whose statement that patriarchy is dead and the feminists should get over it, has launched an initial reply that it is very much alive as evidenced by Miley Cyrus? She is merely “running before the train”, so to speak and does not equate feminism’s struggle with Miley Cyrus. But that is just her opinion. 

Live with it.

End

Jaguar: the ghost of the rainforest

And so it came to be that about last week I got to see some very interesting photos on ngm.com – how a jaguar stalked and killed a caiman (South American alligator); interesting not just because of the actual events depicted in them, but because of the jaguar.

What can be told about the jaguar, where does he appear? So far I have seen it on TV only twice, and at least the first time it was controversial to say the least: it was an Animal Face-Off episode, facing off against a green anaconda; unsuccessfully too. And unlike the Lion vs. Tiger episode, which caused various arguments as to whether or not the lion really should have won against the tiger, in case of Anaconda vs. Jaguar it was largely unanimous: the jaguar was duped.

Let us dwell on this for the moment. For all of AFO’s supposed data, the final CGI face-off was straightforward: the two combatants would basically stand face to face at each other and then just charge in a direct confrontation. Other shows, like Deadliest Warrior and Death Battle do the same thing, but their combatants are humans, or at least – sentient creatures who do fight like this (though they have other styles). Animals (mammals, reptiles, fish, etc) do not do that: in the NatGeo’s photos, for example, the jaguar clearly ambushed the caiman, attacking it from the back, not face on.

And in AFO that is exactly what happened: the CGI anaconda and jaguar attacked each other face on. In such confrontations the bigger and heavier animal is often the stronger combatant, which is exactly what happened: the anaconda was able to overpower the jaguar with its mass and brute strength. In real life this situation would probably be different: there are videos on YouTube where a jaguar runs down and eats an anaconda instead...

The second time I saw a jaguar it was a nature documentary called “Jaguar: the Year of the Cat” and unlike the AFO episode it was strictly professional and real life. In this documentary, the cameras followed a life and times of a jaguar in Belize, as it (well, technically ‘it’ was a ‘he’, because there also was a female jaguar) lived free in the wild.

In the wild, the jaguar is a powerful and graceful wild cat, but when it came to hunting, its record was relatively lackluster: it was able to catch a terrapin, an armadillo and a fish – all relatively modest sized, while larger animals – peccaries, curassows – escaped. For all of its strength and power is not exactly the ultimate hunting or killing machine as it may appear at first – it has its flaws.

Well, not exactly flaws – more like strokes of good and bad luck related to its hunting strategy: ambush. This was shown particularly vividly in case of a coati that the jaguar failed to ambush and chased up into a tree – unsuccessfully. Size, strength and weapons are not everything in the animal kingdom.

And what are the jaguar’s statistics in size, strength, weight et cetera? The males can weigh up to 160 kg (that is fairly heavier than the leopard), reaching up to 1.95 m in length. The tail can add up to another 75 cm to the overall length, and the jaguar stands about 75-76 cm in height.

By contrast, the leopard does not go over 1.65 m in length (it is actually smallest of the big cats) with a tail up to 110 cm in length. It weighs no more than 90-91 kg, almost half as much as the jaguar does, and reaches up to 80 cm in height. In other words, it is a much graceful animal than the jaguar, with a much weaker bite: according to some sources, the jaguar’s bite is almost as powerful as a spotted hyena’s with its bone-shattering bite. Jaguar may not go as far, but in the documentary I have seen the jaguar bit through the terrapin’s shell without any problems – not an easy feat for anyone, even a large animal.

The leopard’s bite, of course, is quite weaker by comparison, but as the numbers show, the leopard is the more graceful and less powerful animal of the two: it got more finesse. Why? The answer lies not in anatomy, but in ecology: in New World the jaguar is the top predator of its environment; in Old World the leopard is not – it has to content with tiger and lion and possibly the brown bear, whereas the jaguar does not live where the grizzlies do and the spectacled bear of South America is not only a smaller beast, it also prefers to live in the mountains that the jaguar tends to avoid as it is too cold for the big cat.

Admittedly, there was once a big cat in New World that dominated the jaguar the way the tiger dominates over the leopard, and it was a famous one: smilodon, the famous sabre-tooth. While it was alive other big cats had to adapt to its power, and as a result both the jaguar and the puma became something of a Jack-of-all-trade, surviving in a variety of habitats both north and south of Panama, at least until humans came and seriously decimated their numbers... Now both of those big cats are considered to be Near Threatened: it is far from the worst state of affairs for an animal to be, but it is not the best either...

So there we have it, ladies and gentlemen: the jaguar. It is big, it is powerful, it is the top cat of the Americas – and that makes it different from the leopard, but more similar to the tiger, which is the top cat in Asia instead: both the tiger and the jaguar are masters of their domains, both are solitary assassins (not fighters as the lion is) and both are only big cats that enjoy a dip in the pool, at least on occasion, as opposed to the lion and the leopard that shun the water as the other cats do, big and small. Sadly, humans have seriously decreased the number of the jaguar population, so now, perhaps, it is time to go out and conserve, save our nature before it vanishes – and the jaguar with it.

What do you think?

Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators. Review.

Few days ago I have watched a DVD: “Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators”. What conclusions can be drawn from it?

Firstly, Beyond T-Rex: this program deals with the discovery of two of T-Rex’s biggest competitors: giganotosaurus and carcharodontosaurus, two closely related carnosaur cousins. As such, they were closely related to the allosaurus of the Jurassic time period, meaning that they were more primitive than the T-Rex, in some ways, mainly in regards to smarts. T-Rex itself had an IQ somewhere between the American alligator and the common house cat, and the carnosaurs were even less intelligent.

Furthermore, size for size, the carnosaurs had a weaker bite than the T-Rex’s but stronger – and larger - forearms with bigger claws to compensate this relatively weaker bite; if T-Rex and its cousins acted like modern crocodiles do, bit down hard and tore deep, gaping wounds, the carnosaurs acted more like the sharks’, inflicting shallower, but heavily bleeding wounds – hence the difference in their teeth. If the T-Rex’s teeth were ‘railroad spikes’, then the carnosaurs’ teeth were more like blades, more easily broken and which slashed rather than stabbed.

This was demonstrated in both Beyond T-Rex and Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator, which featured yet another carnosaur: acrocanthosaurus (acro). At 8 meters in length it was smaller than the carcharodontosaurus and giganotosaurus, but still larger than the T-Rex with much more developed forelimbs yet a slimmer, and relatively weaker, snout. That said, this weaker bite was compensated by its neck and backbone ridge that allowed acrocanthosaurus to clamp on, like a vise, onto its prey – giant sauropods like paluxysaurus, now apparently re-named into sauroposeidon. T-Rex could not do that for all of its awesomeness, if it bit down, it would bite right through, unlike the carnosaurs, which could not bite through bone.

On the other hand, at the end of the Cretaceous, when T-Rex walked the Earth, there were little to no sauropods in North America, so who knows how tyrannosaurus would have handled them overall.

Finally, there was Clash of the Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators, which focused on T-Rex, deinonychus and quetzalcoatlus. The latter, incidentally, is a pterosaur – a flying reptile, not a dinosaur. This feature showed clips of the predators hunting herbivores, including paluxysaurus/sauroposeidon, and it was done by deinonychus the raptor, (also featured in Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator), not tyrannosaurus.

In other words, here is how the cookie crumbled. The carnosaurs, featured in Beyond T-Rex and Monsters Resurrected: Giant American Predator had remained relatively basic, somewhat primitive creatures, only growing larger in size and specializing in feeding only on sauropods: when acrocanthosaurus, for example, had to deal with an armored dinosaur called sauropelta, it failed completely, and when the sauropods died out, so did the carnosaurs.

The tyrannosaurs and the raptors, on the other hand, were more specialized. Size for size, tyrannosaurs – especially T-Rex itself – were more stocky and robust than the carnosaurs, probably ambush hunters than long-distance chasers. Their forelimbs were smaller, especially in proportion to the rest of the body, but their heads and jaws were much larger and their bite – much stronger.

The raptors, on the other hand, had well-developed claws both on front and especially on the hind legs, but their teeth, though sharp, were small and probably relatively ineffective as killing tools, especially for smaller species such as velociraptors. (An utahraptor, easily 6 m long, was probably a somewhat different story.)  Thus they used their claws to deliver the killing blows, as Clash of the Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators demonstrated. So...

So, the DVD “Dinosaurs: Perfect Predators” demonstrated three ways that the evolution of dinosaur predators occurred. One was the basic design of the carnosaurs, similar to that of the original carnivorous dinosaurs, but blown to gigantic proportions. The second – that of the tyrannosaurs – was the increasing specialization of jaw power. And the third – that of the raptors – was the increased specialization of claws instead. Put otherwise, the carnosaurs were the biggest, the tyrannosaurs – the strongest, and the raptors – the fastest. Neat.

As for the DVD itself, it is well put together and the viewing quality is quite good. The images on the cover, admittedly, belong to none of the features mentioned inside, but that is beside the point. I rate this DVD 4.5 stars out of 5.

"Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives" movie review

A small, but stable branch of Animal Planet is creating monster quasi-documentary films. There was “Dragons: Fantasy Made Real”, “Mermaids: The Body on the Beach” and “Mermaids: The New Evidence”, and now “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” – and it is this movie that I am going to rant about. Let us begin.

What is so special about megalodon? In the previous films AP can shoehorn mythical creatures, dragons and mermaids, into real life while doing it realistically. Seriously, a dragon or a mermaid in a sci-fi/fantasy show is expected, it belongs there – in a documentary show not so much. AP had to come up with some really fancy explanations how dragons and mermaids really worked and where they come from...with a mixed success, in my opinion (do not get me started on the mermaid/aquatic ape theory). 

Megalodon is another story. It already is a real-life creature (albeit one that is supposed to have died out during the Ice Age) – a shark, that may be 15 m in length on the average, but nothing more. People have encountered and studied sharks for a while now, and outside of its length megalodon does not appear to be very different: extreme in its size, but nothing else.

But...

Ever since humans have encountered sharks they feared them. The sharks are some of the biggest predators in the oceans and unlike their terrestrial counterparts – lions, tigers, hyenas, etc – they cannot be controlled. Nowadays it is relatively easy to track down a lion or a tiger if they become man-eaters; a shark – not so much.

Shark attacks are also random: lions and tigers tend to treat humans as a steady and regular source of food once they start eating them – sharks do not. To a shark a human has considerably less blubber and more bone (sharks do not really eat marrow) than a seal or a sea lion of a matching size does. That is why they tend to leave us alone...after they bit off an arm or a leg or a chunk of torso – not that that is any consolation to a shark attack victim, you know? Sometimes one bite is enough to kill you, if the shark is big enough or the bitten place is vital enough in its anatomy.

Sharks are also highly mobile and thus unpredictable. A great white or a tiger shark can travel – in fact, it almost constantly travels across the world for different places to get a meal: one week it is in South Africa, the next – at Mexico or Hawaii: why not? It is humans who are aliens in the underwater world of fish and other creatures of the depths, and the sharks are perhaps some of Mother Nature’s most formidable reminders that that is so, alongside giant octopi and squids. Naturally humans fear them – megalodon is just the uttermost manifestation of those fears inflated to an extreme size – big enough to sink a boat in one bit and swallow a human in another.

How realistic are those fears? Firstly, people want to believe that sharks are giant carnivorous monsters that just want to eat people attacking them from below (as in “Jaws”) or from above (“Sharknado”). There is probably nothing that can change this picture so the idea of the monster-movie megalodon is going to persevere for decades to come.

Secondly, cryptozoologists want to believe that megalodon exists. Basically, this is the same point as the one above, save that fear has been replaced by awe. They are going to seek out proof that megalodon exists no matter what. So far official science says that no, it does not, but when ever did this stop people? Ergo no, I do not think that the hype around sharks in general and megalodon in particular will ever go away.

As for the movie itself... the name “megalodon” was used mostly as a brand: people know this name and associate it with a giant shark, so AP just appropriated it for their newest monster. They showed it quite realistically too, save for the fact that in real life megalodon (well, Carcharodon megalodon, if you want to get technical) was not a deep-sea fish: the depths of oceans and seas are cold, have little food and not much more oxygen – hardly a place for a warmth-loving whale-eating shark!

Furthermore, megaldon did not start out as a whale-eating giant: the first years of its life were probably spent in shallower coastal waters (BBC Sea Monsters) hunting smaller prey – dugongs and manatees, dolphins, sea turtles, maybe even large fish - and avoid the adult megalodon which would probably eat the youngsters instead (as modern sharks tend to do). This would have brought them into contact – and conflict – with humans much sooner than “just now” and I do not know who would have won...

Then we have the humpback whales – that was probably the most annoying part of the movie. Why humpback whales? There are 15 species of modern baleen whales (you know, the ones that feed on plankton as the humpback whales do), plus the sperm whale (that has teeth rather than baleen), all of which can be food for megalodon if it existed in modern day and age. 

Why the humpback? Sharks do not have the sort of food specialization that the carnivorous mammals, birds and reptiles may have. Great white shark prefers to eat sea lions and fur seals, but it will probably try anything to see just how edible it is. The bull and the tiger sharks eat anything, including garbage that ended up in the sea; so does the blue shark but it is a fish of the open ocean and encounters people less often than the great white, bull and tiger.

And so probably had megalodon – it was willing to eat anything if it was big and meaty enough. If it lived in modern times, the humpback whale would have had no preference: megalodon would have eaten it just as willingly as it would have eaten the blue and pygmy right whales, for example.

The closest I can come up with for the reason behind the humpback whale is that it is one of the more popular and well-known species of whales among people (at least for now): its footage is easily obtainable, the audience would just look at the humpback knowingly and return back to concentrating on the shark. Fair enough.

As for megalodon's coloration – dark above, light below – I believe that it is called cryptic countershading and many of ocean-dwelling animals have it. The fish have it: not just the sharks, but also jacks, mackerel, tuna, etc; the penguins have it as well, especially smaller species like the African penguin: it helps them blend in with the waters around them. (Terrestrial animals often have lighter bellies than backs as well, but for slightly different reasons.) This does not make megalodon some sort of an unstoppable super ocean monster, but-

“Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” was released as part of Discovery Channel’s 2013 Shark Week, when the Discovery channel does its best to cash in on the shark hype that was discussed before. And it seems that 2013”s version is going to be the most commercial Shark Week yet, as Discovery Channel is actually airing “Jaws” and “Sharknado”, regardless of the fact that they are fiction. They are about sharks, they are popular with the TV audiences, so Discovery Channel is airing them.

And “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” is just a manifestation of the same hype. People wanted to see it because it was a movie about a monster shark that lives in the ocean’s depths – a giant bogeyman rather than a real-life monster, a creature no more real than the mermaid is. If that is what they expected they got it; if they did not – they probably turned it off and watched a megalodon-related documentary on YouTube or elsewhere. Still, as a movie “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” was a decent one, without any particular political hype, unlike the mermaid duology, even if it was also taking place in South Africa – but I’m guessing that someone in AP management has a very complicated or weird relationship with South Africa and just cannot let it go. Oh well.

The final bit of weirdness was the movie script. “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” did its best to cash in on the hype and fear that surrounds sharks, especially the mythical giants. The fact that it did not end with Collin Drake and his crew duking it out with Meg in a Captain Ahab-Moby Dick style a la “Jaws” was a good thing in my opinion but in the first parts of the movie it certainly sounded like it was going to end thus. I am guessing that someone remembered that Animal Planet is for nature conservation, not destruction, and changes had to be made...just not very thoroughly.

In any case, I believe that I am rating “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” three and a half stars out of five; well, maybe three and three quarters. It was not the best megalodon-related movie that was ever made, especially a documentary one, but it was not the worst either.

Peace out!