A fun, feminist find

It’s no secret that I think  reading is fun. It’s an activity that should be enjoyable. I like a book that makes me laugh out lout, a book that keeps me on my toes. I like my books to be fun.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had as much fun with a book as I did with “Beauty Queens” by Libba Bray.

In her book Bray strands fourteen girls on an island after a plane crash. These girls have to learn to fend for themselves when they realize no one is coming to rescue them. The girls have to learn to let go of petty pageant ideals in order to band together to survive. As they learn more about each other, they also start to learn more about themselves.

The book is sprinkled with a healthy amount of absurdity. While the girls are stranded on the island, they have no idea they’ve unwittingly become part of a grand plan between an evil Corporation and a lovestruck, gun-happy dictator who carries around a stuffed lemur and calls it his advisor. (Absurd, right?) Meanwhile, The Corporation is responsible for literally everything. It’s basically every evil corporation wrapped into one. The Corporation sells the beauty products the girls tote, they produce all the hottest television, and they make secret weapons. The Corporation hosts programs like “Captains Bodacious” a reality series about hot male pirates picking up girls in port, and “Your Blood is, Like, So Hot,” about a group of hemophiliacs “who lie around looking anemic and sexy.”

The goofy absurdity had me laughing out loud, but beneath the absurdity, there is a layer of truth. The Corporation hopes to brainwash a generation with television and then sell them their products. Reality peeks out through the absurd.

The most important reality in this book is that society places too much pressure on girls. And that’s where we get to the good stuff. As the girls fight for survival, they unlearn what The Corporation and their parents have been shoving into their heads. Tiara, for example, is fairly dumb. When she completely loses it and starts chopping her hair with a machete, she starts to share her pageant experience, she started when she was two weeks old. All her life, she’s been told that all she can be is pretty, because she’s not smart. With help from her friends on the  Island, she finds her talents in interior decorating, and learns about feminism.

Shanti, an Indian girl obsessed with winning lies about her heritage in order to get ahead. She obsesses about bringing down her competition, Nicole, a black girl saying “they’ll never let two brown girls into the top five.” The two have to work together to save themselves from quicksand, and in the process, Shanti confesses her lies to Nicole, while Nicole confesses that all she cares about is becoming a doctor. She only does pageants because her mother wants her to be a star.

Taylor, proud Miss Texas, continues to obsess over the pageant, even when the girls are stranded. Pageants were all she had after her mom left, and she was left feeling heart broken. Wanting to feel stronger than her mother, she worked tirelessly to make sure she was pageant perfect. She starts out as the bitch of the group, making the girls practice their dance numbers in the hot sun, rather than working on survival. Later on, she saves them countless times because of her iron will and need to impress.

Petra, who is still in transition to become a girl, gets found out when Tiara sees her bathing. Half of the girls accept her willingly, but several of the other girls have a difficult time understanding Petra’s feelings of dysphoria. In the end, she shows that she is proud to be trans, and the girls, and hot boys, accept her easily.

Mary Lou is obsessed with her purity ring, a fact which riles up her best friend Adina. Adina argues that sexuality is not just something for a man, but something that a woman should embrace for herself. After she loses her ring, Mary Lou takes some time to get to know her sexuality a little bit better, while also getting to know a hot revolutionary.

The girls come away with a better understanding of what it is to be a woman. Mary Lou comments “Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one’s watching them so they can be who they really are.”

Away from the strict gaze of society that holds impossible standards over their heads, the girls discover themselves. And though  their adventures were a little absurd, the reader comes away with a whole host of new ideas about what it is to be a girl living in today’s corporate run society. While learning about the 14 beauty queens, I learned a little more about myself.

And what could be more fun than that?

An Emotional Ride

Pixar has, as usual, nailed it with their latest film “Inside Out.”

For the past two decades, Pixar has been teaching me some of my most important life lessons. Pixar has taught me lessons about everything including family, growing up, loss, friendship, and love. And “Inside Out” did not disappoint on any of these things.

In this animated film, our protagonist, Riley, is moved from her home in Minnesota to San Francisco, a totally foreign planet for her. However, the movie does not focus on Riley, but on her strange team of anthropomorphized emotions; the constantly bright Joy; the short-tempered Anger; nervous, twitchy Fear; critical and sassy Disgust; and mopey Sadness. They control “headquarters,” or Riley’s brain.

Throughout the movie, we see that every emotion is equally critical in the whole operation. In fact, when Joy and Sadness end up stuck in Long-term memory, the whole thing starts to fall apart, literally. With Fear, Anger, and Disgust in charge of Riley’s brain; she makes rash decisions and lashes out. The things that were once important to her that made up her personality “islands” fall apart. It gets to the point where Riley can’t feel anything; the trio left in headquarters are locked out of the board that lets them control her actions.

Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness are on an epic quest to make it back to Headquarters. Joy  wants to take care of “her girl,” as she calls Riley, and make her as happy as possible. But when Sadness starts touching memories, Joy finds that she can’t change the memories back to happy. This creates tension between the two, and Joy finds it hard to spend time around wobegon Sadness.

We also see in the movie that, as we get older, we look back on our memories with mixed emotions. Pixar has always been good with nostalgia; just watch Toy Story Three. With the entrance of Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, we see a nostalgia for things past. He is surprised when, in “Imagination Land,” there is an imaginary boyfriend being cooked up. And when he sees how big she has gotten in her memories, he remarks that she won’t be able to fit into his rocketship anymore.

With the help of Sadness and Bing Bong, the previously controlling Joy, obsessed with making Riley happy learns a valuable lesson about feelings. That sometimes you have to feel sad in order to feel happy again.

It was fantastic to see a girl Riley’s age (11), showing her emotions. This is the kind of movie that reminds girls that it is okay to cry, in fact, it is a good thing to let our emotions out. It shows us our emotions are not a weakness. It’s a lesson girls have not seen often enough in media.

A lot of other stuff happened, and I promise I didn’t cry the whole time. In fact most of the time I was laughing. The mislead trio of Anger, Fear, and Disgust is a hilarious trainwreck as they try to make Riley happy. And Sadness, despite her name, often had me rolling with laughter.

The star packed cast includes Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Bill Hader as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Each truly brought their emotion to life. Amy Poeler was perfect for Joy. In fact Joy was kind of a Leslie Knope: the positive-thinking boss, constantly coming up with new ideas. Anger not only sounded like Lewis Black, but mimicked his overall agitated persona.

It was not only the message that was beautiful, but also the animation. The colorful world of Riley’s mind was stunning.

Pixar knocked it out of the park once more with this fantastic film. It was a great film for anyone, young and old, with it’s life lessons that teach us a little bit more about feeling.