Aspiring Equal Oppertunity Feminist Granola girl.

Lola Bunny is one of animation’s more controversial characters, and I don’t know why.

When you boil the whole thing down, Lola exists for one reason: to give Bugs a girlfriend. Porky has one, Daffy sorta has one- heck, Sylvester had a wife once. Might as well give Bugs one and sell merch to the little girls of the ‘90s, y’know?

Bugs had several one-shot love interests in the original cartoons, but none of them really stuck. In the comic books (during the ‘60s-‘70s), he had a girlfriend named Honey Bunny, but she was a fairly typical one-dimensional character, not unlike many other girlfriends that Western Publishing gave their licensed cartoon characters at the time.

The problem of Looney Tunes lacking a real female star came up in Tiny Toon Adventures. While everyone had a counterpart to look up to, Babs didn’t have anyone. The writers have to resort to another character named Honey- girlfriend to Bosko, Warner Bros.’ first cartoon star from the early 1930s- and give her personality traits and talents she never actually had. It’s a great episode, but it’s not exactly historically accurate (but then again, neither is Roger Rabbit).

When Space Jam was in development, plans were made to use a redesigned Honey Bunny. Troubles with the character were there from the start. Early designs were basically Bugs with eyelashes and a hair bow. From what I’ve read about her, their were concerns that this version looked too young, and the execs asked to make her more mature.

Lola’s development was still troubled however. According to artist Bob Guthrie, now that Lola was obviously an adult, the execs were worried that now she was too sexy. Some of his art for promo material was sent back with notes telling him to tone down the curves. On top of that, for some strange reason, Lola had two different models- one for the movie itself and one for merchandise and elsewhere.

I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it was around this point that the crew behind Space Jam started thinking about how to handle the character. Political correctness was a major factor in kids’ entertainment in the Nineties. Probably someone realized that Lola had to be an actual role-model to girls rather than just the Token Female.

And so we wind up with the Lola we see in the film. Is she just there for Bugs to fall in love with? Basically, yes. Is she eye candy? Most definitely. If you need to convey to your audience that a character is supposed to be sexy, you kinda have to do that.

But on the other hand she’s probably the most competent player on the team, aside from Michael Jordan himself. All the other toons couldn’t play basketball if their lives depended on it (and they do), so they need somebody besides Michael who’s good at the game if they’re going to stand a chance. Lola fits the bill, and she even manages to make the usually imperturbable Bugs go goofy.

Then comes the next big issue: is Lola Bunny funny? Does being the talented role-model sap her of any potential for Looney Tunes-style humor? I’d say no. According to one source (a post by designer and animator Ashanti Miller which I can’t seem to find now), Lola was supposed to be more gruff, and even less tolerant of any disrespect towards her. Cartoon violence would ensue. It was in earlier versions of the script, but didn’t make it to the screen. There’s also concept art by her that ties into this idea.

So yes, the potential is there. I have a couple Looney Tunes comics from DC that demonstrate her comedic abilities. In these, Lola is a pizza delivery girl for various gods and monsters. An odd premise, but it works. She has no patience for demons and curses, and in one story decides to quit her job. She’s relieved at first, but soon finds herself bored with her new job where nothing interesting happens. Her old boss tries to replace her, but soon finds that Lola is the only one who can handle these creatures and not run away screaming. In the end, Lola is back delivering pizza, but not without a giant fly swatter to keep annoying imps at bay.

To say that this influenced the way I see Lola is an understatement. Heck, it may have even influenced I how create female characters of my own. I see no problem with giving Lola a huge mallet and whacking Bugs on the head if he says something stupid. It’s her personality that makes me like her so much, not the way she’s drawn.

So when I see people diss the original Lola and defend the Looney Tunes Show version, it baffles me. I don’t know what the show’s writers were going for, but a lot of other people seem to think that Lola’s new personality is an improvement- that somehow being a blonde airhead is better than being a tough, sporty type. Even if you think ‘90s Lola is boring, even if you think the whole action-girl-role-model thing was forced just to sell merchandise, how is making her stupid a good thing? It’s like you’re saying that women can’t be pretty and tough or smart at the same time, because it’s “funnier” that way. It’s practically a regression back to Honey Bunny.

Sometimes I wonder if the writers got her and Daffy’s old girlfriend Melissa mixed up. Making Lola the level-headed one and Melissa the ditzy girly-girl for contrast would have been incredibly easy. All I can figure is that they wanted “Tina” to contrast with Daffy by being smart, and then realized that they had Lola already- and in a huge break from logic, decided to change Lola completely instead of just keeping her the way she was.

You can sort of see this transformation begin with the webtoon Dating Dos and Don’ts. In it, Lola’s no more than a generic girl, just there to be “Bugs’ girlfriend”. She doesn’t even talk.

I think the main problem is not Lola herself, but how no one seems to know what to do with her. It just goes to show that writers still struggle with female characters, even in this day and age.

Relevant again. Don’t care much for the new movie being CG-animated, but Lola looks like Lola, and hopefully her personality is still pretty much the same. What I don’t get is that the director for the movie (some guy named Malcolm D. Lee apparently) has made the strange claim that the original Lola was “politically incorrect”. The phrase “politically correct” gets thrown around a lot these days, and not always… well, correctly. You’ll see a lot conservatives claim that political correctness has stifled free speech, and crazy stuff like that that I won’t talk about here. But personally, going by the definition of the term I learned as a kid, I believe being PC is extremely important. It does no good to offend oppressed minorities of any sort, and that goes for women.

That said, I think it shows just how ignorant this director is of how Lola was originally envisioned. If you read my post above, it’s quite clear that she was meant to be a strong-willed, talented woman who had no patience for sexism of any kind nearly from the start. We just don’t get to see it much in the original movie, which is a crying shame if you ask me.

I’m sort of puzzled by the idea that a woman being depicted as attractive is considered sexist. Yes, a female character should not be just an object for creepy men to lust over. But I think it’s perfectly possible to have an interesting, fully-rounded female character to also be good-looking. It happens in movies all the time, so I don’t see why it can’t happen in animation.

And like I said, when it comes down to it I don’t give a darn if Lola is “sexy” or whatever you want to call it. She’s cool and competent, and it makes me sad that the person directing this new movie couldn’t see past the surface level and just saw the original Lola as some bimbo. Maybe it’s just me, but she was already so much more than just a pretty face. What does it say about him if that’s how he viewed her? Lack of imagination? Something worse? I can’t say.

(Of course, it’s a bit problematic that it was a man who decided that Lola who needed fixing. Not to mention that the look and personality she has in the original movie was created by a woman.)

In the end, I’m cautiously optimistic about Space Jam: A New Legacy. It sounds like Lola is going to be more or less how I always envisioned her, regardless of how she was misinterpreted by the director. I’ll let you guys know how I feel about it when it comes out, you can count on that.

Lisa Simpson at Stuff-n-Hug

This really says a LOT

simpsons is so next level

Justice League Season 1, Episode 14 (2002) | Wonder Woman (2017)

Etta and the lipstick lady are absolutely right. It’s a completely easy thing for Diana to say and do, because she looks literally perfect. Not just perfect, but perfect in a way specifically approved of by this society. Apparently the “beauty of Aphrodite” means “beautiful in the exact way that heterosexual patriarchal man’s world values most”. And even if that wasn’t the case, even if she didn’t have a perfect body and shave her legs and what all, she comes from a society that doesn’t care. Whether it man’s world or her world, she has no sense of social pressure or social consequences that come from not looking like Sports Illustrated model.  So it makes sense for her to ask these questions. It does. It makes sense for her to not get it. And I’m glad that the women she asks get to fire back. But I wish that, instead of being relegated to just a quick joke scene of women being jealous at Diana’s gods-given beauty, the answer would actually be discussed. Because you’ll notice neither Etta nor lipstick lady give her an answer. And I think that’s because the answer is one that would be uncomfortable for (male) audiences: Because of the power structures dictating women’s “acceptable” appearances that were designed by a male-dominated society, and how women are taught to adhere to them from an early age just to get by with a modicum of respect in that society. But, that wouldn’t be funny. It might make audiences balk at Wonder Woman being, horror of horrors, too feminist, or worse, man-hating. It would be too political or too preachy. Better just to have it seem like something silly vain women do to themselves just because we’re frivolous and insecure by nature, dohohoho! Good thing that the (absolutely beautiful with no effort because she was literally created that way) Diana is there to teach them that REAL beauty is natural and/or on the inside! So long as you naturally look like Gal Gadot, anyway.

Listen, if performing femininity is an “empowering choice,” then it needs to be an actual choice. Meaning that woman can opt out of it without negative consequence. Meaning a woman can go to an academic event without heels or in a simple suit and still be “professional.” Meaning that a woman can go to a job interview without a full face of makeup and not be “tired” or “disheveled.” Meaning that a woman can walk around in shorts with unshaven legs and not be a dirty, unclean gremlin. Meaning that a little girl can play and break barriers and like STEM while wearing jeans and a t-shirt and not be considered less empowered or “just trying to be a boy.”

Meaning that a woman’s femininity and womanhood is not contingent upon the extent to which she buys and performs a time-consuming, expensive, uncomfortable mold of a very specific type of packaged femininity. 

This isn’t even going into the effect these double standards have on women who in some way, by their very existence, do not fit the standard white western beauty mold and are expected to perform hyperfemininity to be “women” at all. I.e. women of colour esp. darker-skinned women of colour, hijabi women and tznius-keeping women, fat women, disabled women, trans women, etc. 

Lisa Simpson at Stuff-n-Hug

This really says a LOT

simpsons is so next level

Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled

Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.

This is so fucked up.

To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)

Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post. (via 360degreesasthecrowflies)

I’m sorry if you were ever hurt by something someone angry said. It doesn’t mean you have any idea what it’s like to live like this. You cannot equate a rotten apple in a bushel to a swarm of wasps, one of which might be a pacifist.  // r.i.d (via inkskinned)

Don’t be fooled; this Street Harassment Campaign is a new tactic to replace Stop & Frisk and justifies legislation to disenfranchise Black Males.

#staywoke

oh snap

did this guy really just say “2-3 men per hour. hardly harrassment at all”??? yes this shit was edited to be racist but men shut the fuck up, we do not get to define what street harassment is. they edited it to be racist but they sure as hell didn’t edit what was said. own up to what we fucking do.

I did think that it was suspect that the only dudes I saw in the thumbnail of this video were non-white dudes. (I didn’t watch the actual video because seeing street-harassment is upsetting regardless)

This is racist no matter how you slice it, there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it!

[TW: Rape Culture] The woman who made a video about catcalling is already getting rape threats | Vox

Shoshana B. Roberts — who walked around New York City for 10 hours while being filmed by a hidden camera so that she could record the harassment she received from men on the street — is already getting rape threats.

Roberts’s video, which after a day online has already racked up more than 1 million views, documents the over 100 catcalls, whistles, and other forms of harassment she received over the course of the day. One persistent character walked alongside her for five minutes and wouldn’t leave her alone.

The video was produced by Hollaback, an organization dedicated to stamping out street harassment and intimidation. Last night, Hollaback tweeted: 

"The subject of our PSA is starting to get rape threats on the comments. Can you help by reporting?"

The threats are still coming today. These, for instance, were posted while I was writing this article (See above photos).

"The rape threats indicate that we are hitting a nerve," Hollaback director Emily May told Newsday. “We want to do more than just hit a nerve though, we want New Yorkers to realize — once and for all — that street harassment isn’t OK, and that as a city we refuse to tolerate it.”

The Worst Part Is That This Isn’t Surprising 

Roberts’s video is so offensive because it’s so familiar. Any woman who has ever walked anywhere, especially in New York, knows the constant, terrifying din of catcalls following behind her. It’s a way men make women feel unsafe walking the streets of their own neighborhoods — and then, when challenged on it, profess innocence: "what, you can’t take a compliment?" Women quickly learn that as awful as catcalling is, they can’t respond to it. To respond is to risk being harassed more, or followed, or worse. To respond is to risk making the man who is shouting at you on the street, after dark, actually angry.

Similarly, the response to Roberts’s video is so offensive because it is, again, so familiar. Rape and death threats have become a standard response to any woman who dares to speak out on the internet about, well, anything. Look at #Gamergate. Look at Emma Watson. And there, too, to respond is to risk making it worse. When geek hero Felicia Day lamented the harassment of women in #Gamergate, her home address and other personal information was posted online. To respond is to risk making the men who are digging through your personal information and threatening to rape or kill you actually angry.

This video wasn’t made for women facing harassment. It was made for men who remain blissfully unaware of how women are treated when they walk down the street. But instead of listening, instead of taking the time to realize how women might feel when men yell at them, these commenters — backed by their anonymity and privilege — have threatened to rape Roberts for daring to talk about it.

Let’s lay this out in plain terms. Women are forced to feel uncomfortable and scared for walking down the damn street. Then, when one woman takes the time to show just how uncomfortable those interactions are, people threaten to physically assault her. If the video reminded us that women are constantly made to feel unsafe when they leave the house, the response is a reminder that women are constantly made to feel unsafe when they simply turn on their computer.

The problem here isn’t just that men are ignorant of how women are treated. The problem is that many know exactly what they’re doing to women, and will try to intimidate and silence women who try to fight back.

The last paragraph is KEY!!!!!!

You were saying?

*ahem*

The fact of the matter is that BOTH genders are sexualized in advertisements a great deal- it’s the media telling us how we should look....

When the men get sexualised in the media just as much as the women then this complaint will be valid

a girl at our school got dresscoded for wearing this shirt because it promotes bullying

but a guy at our school was able to wear this shirt and our principal thought it was funny when he saw it

Neutralize all forms of bullying shirts.