Down With Damsels

I was recently at a panel discussion at the New School which featured awesome speakers (including one of my heroes, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna) who each presented a bit about the representation of women in the current media climate. I recall one of the ladies bringing up Amy Poehler’s web series “Smart Girls At The Party,” which  I sadly, at the time, had not heard of. The woman showed this clip, of the precocious child feminist Ruby, and I honestly got a little misty-eyed. THIS GIRL IS TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL. It took all I had to not reach through the screen and adopt Ruby immediately. Anyway, listen to this super smart kid talk to Amy about equal rights between men and women and tell me you’re not totally smitten by the end of it.

Yeah, Tracy Flick is usually the character on most people’s minds when they think of the 1999 film Election, but smart-mouthed Tammy Metzler was clearly the most awesome chick in the film. Talk about not giving a fuck. This speech undoubtedly must go down as one of the best high school election speeches of all time.

This is an extended scene from the 2008 Jim Carrey flick Yes Man, which also starred one of my favorite actresses Zooey Deschanel. In it, Zooey played a really sassy chick (ultimately Jim Carrey’s love interest) who owned a moped, taught a 5AM jogging class in which all the joggers brought their cameras and took pictures while they jogged, and was the lead singer of an awesome art-rock/performance arty type of band named Munchausen By Proxy.

While trolling YouTube for some clips of the Munchausen songs from the film, I was delighted to find that the “band” actually filmed a full video for their song “Sweet Ballad.” This is an amazingly catchy song and kind of makes me wish MbP was a real band. Watch this and run around screaming, “WHORE NO MORE!” for good times.

Dixie Carter, as Julia Sugarbaker, on the classic ’90s sitcom Designing Women.

Totally self-explanatory.

Kicking it off with a classic… Mae West in the trailer for the 1933 comedy I’m No Angel. One of the reasons West was so great was because she tackled roles that were so different from the standard female characters of the time. 

Favorite quote: “It’s not the men in your life that counts. It’s the life in your men.” And OF COURSE: “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” That second quote was actually said by West in real life, and later incorporated into two of her films.

I think my favorite part of this video is the end when West demands her man comes up and sees her, not the other way around.