Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with contemporary American culture likely understands that female fertility has been a hotly contested, and highly politicized, issue for over forty years. Typically, these discussions revolve around abortion. There is, however, another side to reproductive choice: the right to reproduce. It is this often overlooked aspect of “a woman’s… Read more →
Tag: movies
Nursing Clio’s Best of 2015!
With acknowledgments to our friends at Tropics of Meta who thought of the idea first, here are Nursing Clio’s “best of” the year. Favorite Book Lauren MacIvor Thompson I got nothin’. #dissertationproblems Lara Freidenfelds Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing, and a Habit of Thinking, by Erik Parens. Parens is wise, humble, insightful, and pleasingly… Read more →
Clio Goes to the Movies: “Selma” in History
Ava DuVernay’s Selma has sparked a robust discussion about the civil rights movement, memory, and the filmmaker’s role in creating “accurate” and teachable history. The film has garnered much pointed criticism for “artful falsehood,” “distorting” history, and “villainizing” Lyndon Johnson. The problems with these assertions are threefold. First, deploying terms like distortion and villainizing does not reflect a… Read more →
Crimes Never Committed: Thoughts on The Imitation Game
Spoiler Alert: This isn’t exactly a movie review (if you’d like one, I recommend Alex von Tunzelmann’s review in The Guardian) but it may give away elements of the film. Be forewarned. If you watch The Imitation Game, the Oscar-nominated biopic, you’ll learn that Alan Turing betrayed his country when blackmailed by a Soviet spy… Read more →
Mature Audiences Only: Sex and Censorship at the Movies
By Carrie Adkins
Can we all just finally agree that the ratings system currently used by the Motion Picture Association of America is misguided, outdated, and increasingly irrelevant?
I realize I am not saying anything particularly original or revolutionary here, as people are basically complaining about the MPAA everywhere and all the time now. These complaints vary, but most of them fall into two major categories. First, there’s the inconsistency issue: the ratings sytem seems to be applied subjectively and arbitrarily. So, for example, using the word “fuck” more than once is supposed to result in an R rating, except sometimes, as with The Social Network, it inexplicably doesn’t. Meanwhile, the sexually explicit The Wolf of Wall Street avoids the NC-17 rating for no perceptible reason aside from being directed by Martin Scorsese, while less explicit (but sadly Scorsese-less) films either have to cut material for an R or else accept the NC-17, knowing that the NC-17 typically results in much lower profits. This situation was discussed perceptively by director Jill Soloway, who was forced to make a number of cuts to Afternoon Delight in order to avoid an NC-17.
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage: A Night at the Drive-in
Sex education is tricky stuff. We’ve heard some about it already here on Nursing Clio. And many of us awkwardly shuffled through it one way or another in public school. The only real “talk” I remember from my parents was a noticeably scientific explanation from my microbiologist father, which pretty much cleared up my curiosity at the time, I recall. The public school side of it was mostly anatomy