I have been a fan of Fox’s Bones for a few seasons now. What started out as a rather forced procedural has settled into a fun combination of science mystery and screwball comedy, with an awesome cast full of powerful women. Plus, David Boreanaz is just so dreamy… Ahem. Moving on.

Angela and her new girlfriend on Fox’s “Bones” (Fox TV)

The show has recently introduced a new romance for resident artist and flower child, Angela Montenegro. The object of her affection? A mysterious woman from her past. While the show seems to have blundered into this storyline in a rather unplanned manner, Angela has long been depicted as an openly sexual character. She flirts with whomever is nearby, male or female, loves having sex, and lives life to the fullest, even managing to forget at one point that she was married, having gotten hitched while, if I recall correctly, drunkenly swimming nude in the moonlit Caribbean sea. With so many TV shows depicting women as either henpecking harpies, constantly trying to “trick” men into marriage, or frigid, career obsessed bitches who hate sex, free-loving Angela has been a much needed breath of fresh air.

I just hope ABC takes a few lessons from Fox. While Angela happily moons over her new girlfriend on Fox, ABC has managed to split up the one lesbian relationship left on TV in favor of a love triangle with a ghost, kick off the only remaining major lesbian character on TV, and dump their star transgendered character, Ugly Betty’s Alexis Meade. Shame on ABC! And lets just hope Fox doesn’t manage to screw things up too badly.

Apparently you can use sex to sell anything, even organ donation:

From the Belgian men’s magazine, P-magazine. Ad by Reborn to be Alive.

This is so gross. If this woman was actually in need of someone’s organs, she’d be laid out in a hospital somewhere at death’s door. These are not acceptable circumstances to want to be “inside” someone.

Also, do people think sex is the only reason men do anything? Why don’t they get more worked up about the fact that most advertising assumes that men are callous and sex-obsessed?

Hat tip to Feminist Law Profs.

I’ve only watched this video once but I felt really moved by it. If nothing else it seems to be asking those of us who are heterosexual to just think about our partners, think about the effects our actions have on our relationships and to think about what its like in someone else’s shoes. You can’t go wrong with that, can you?

So I thought (and hoped and prayed) that Canadian Club’s incredibly obnoxious (and homophobic, and racist, and sexist) “Damn Right Your Dad Drank It” ad campaign was dead and gone.

The campaign, which had been my sole topic of conversation for what seemed like ages, had vanished from the hoardings, bus stops, and telephone booths all around Toronto, so I foolishly figured it had come to a close, like all ad campaigns do eventually.

On odd occasions, I even allowed myself to entertain the fleeting thought that it was my ceaseless nattering at Beam Global that had actually ended the campaign. Like the efforts I made had come to something, enough people had voiced their displeasure, and between Shameless and Time Out, Canadian Club had felt they had gotten enough bad press and alienated enough people to make bringing the campaign to a close their only reasonable option.

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Hot off Hollywood entertainment news is Beyoncé’s bid to play the role of Wonder Woman in the upcoming Justice League of America movie.

She’s quoted in the UK Daily Mail as saying: “A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing,”

“It’s time for that, right? It would be great.”

The role was supposedly favoured to go to Hollywood unknown Megan Gale from Australia.

Now I know for sure that I want to see a woman of colour take the role of Wonder Woman, and like her or not, she’s kinda only been White all these years. I’ve always related somewhat to the notion of Wonder Woman, but that’s probably because of the strong women warrior stories and family members I grew up with, that I of course, never saw represented in any mainstream media.

I just don’t know if Beyoncé should be the one to do it. But then again, it’s not like this is an activist-y production focused on grassroots feminism.

What do you think? What has the image of Wonder Woman meant to you?

Just a few months ago I was feeling really positive about the advances made by queers in North America. Lindsay Lohan was dating a woman, and rather than being made into a to-do of Ellen proportions, the relationship was treated to the same amount of gossipy speculation and paparazzi photos as any other boring Hollywood pairing. Gray’s Anatomy had ended its season with a climactic kiss between two women, and all of lesbian fandom was a-buzz with the burgeoning love affair between Pepa and Silvia on the Spanish soap opera, Los Hombres de Paco.

Cyndi Lauper guest starred on a very special Gay Pride episode of As the World Turns, serenading the show’s adorable gay couple, Luke and Noah with “True Colors.”

I started seeing “Vote No on Prop 8” amended to the signatures of emails I received from many of my friends and coworkers, most of whom are straight. Gay people on traditional soap operas? A strong and united front against a ban on gay marriage? I felt a sea change coming.

And then…Lindsay Lohan admitted Ronson was her girlfriend and then felt the need to have her publicist deny they had ever been a couple five seconds later, Brooke Smith got kicked off Gray’s Anatomy for no apparent reason aside from homophobia, Prop 8 passed in California, and Kanye West has a new, offensive video that is playing every five minutes on Much Music and MTV.

Kanye West’s vision of lesbianism

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Anyone watching Grey’s Anatomy recently will have witnessed the budding romance between two of the female characters, Callie Torres (played by Sara Ramirez) and Erica Hahn (played by Brooke Smith). Beginning with some mild flirtation last season which culminated in a season-finale kiss that blew the lesbian fan base away (not to mention wooed back a few of those who had given up on the show after the whole Isaiah Washington F-word fiasco), the relationship between these two has begun to develop into something more akin to the other heterosexual relationships on the show: funny with a side of sexy.

However, in a somewhat expected turn, things soon began to get questionable.

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When I was a little kid, I hated the color pink and all associated toys with a passion. It wasn’t that I had such a problem with the aesthetics, so much as I hated what that color stood for. The pink toys, the Barbies and the princesses and the baby dolls just didn’t speak to me. I didn’t want my toy to sit around waiting for Prince Charming. I wanted my toys to explore space or faraway lands, fighting evil villains and having glorious and heroic adventures.

Wedding Barbie just wasn’t up to the task, which led to many arguments with my grandma as to why she should buy me “boy toys” for my birthday. Since I was a kid, it has seemed to me that the toys marketed to girls have gotten even more insipid and PINK PINK PINK. The Disney Princess cult and its many imitators have always been the bane of my existence. The idea of a toy that does nothing but wear a sparkly tiara and wait for a man to rescue her didn’t sound fun to me at all. Is this what we want our young girls to aspire to?

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I have been an aficionado of crime procedurals on TV for at least a decade now, fed in recent years with a constant diet of CSI and Law & Order spinoffs, new young ensemble casts of model-icious criminal profilers, FBI missing persons investigators and cold case cops. What a smörgåsbord! I’m getting full.

Thankfully, this season’s TV roster seems to have picked up on an emerging demand in the TV market for old school sci-fi/strange phenomenon dramas, à la The X-Files, perhaps due to the recent release of the second X-Files movie (so, it was a flop; they didn’t know that when they picked up the new shows!) or the recent seasons’, to my mind, inexplicable favouring of shows like The Ghost Whisperer. Whatever the reason, there are some new phenomenon shows that have piqued my interest, and one in particular: Fringe.

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