“The Daily Beast”

Trends: Actresses Demanding Equal Pay

Emmy Rossum in 'Shameless' (TV By The Numbers)

Emmy Rossum in ‘Shameless’ (TV By The Numbers)

“Shameless” actress Emmy Rossum must’ve heard of Levo League’s negotiating slogan #Ask4More, which encourages women to ask for raises and/or equal pay. Earlier this week, Rossum was negotiating to earn equal pay, if not more, than William H. Macy, her co-star on the Showtime series. (And Macy was all for that.) Her reasoning is that her character features significantly in every episode.

Yesterday, Rossum decided to settle her negotiation with a new contract. Though there’s no word on the terms of her new contract, The Hollywood Reporter mentions the following:

Sources say Rossum had an offer of equal pay on the table. It’s unclear if she received more than Macy.

(I, for one, hope she achieved equal or greater pay.)

Actresses speaking up about, and publicly negotiating for, payment parity on par with their male co-stars has become a trend as of late. Robin Wright, the lead actress in Netflix’s “House of Cards,” threatened to take her fight for fair pay public when she realized she was getting paid less than the series’  lead actor Kevin Spacey:

“I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ And they did.”

Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence most notably spoke out on the issue of pay parity  in 2015 when she penned an essay for Lenny. Lawrence acknowledged that she and fellow co-star Amy Adams got shortchanged with their pay for “American Hustle:” The two women each got 7% of the overall profits, which the leading men received 9% each. This information became public knowledge during the Sony Pictures Entertainment server hack in late 2014.

Let’s hope that more and more women start speaking up and asking demanding for equal pay. As Lawrence recalls, she “failed as a negotiator because [she] gave up too early.” Don’t give up!!

Condoms Provided during the Summer Olympics: By The Numbers

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

By this point, it’s no secret that Olympic Village is famous for hook-ups. (Though whether athletes are partaking before or after their events, who can say?) It makes sense: Throw together thousands of elite athletes from all over the world who are in peak physical shape who’ve trained most, if not all, of their lives, for a sport with a laser focus that more than likely excludes almost everything else. And what better way to blow off some steam during this once-in-a-lifetime experience?

Officials at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) clearly had the same thought, because athletes at the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics have been provided with a record number of condoms: 450K+ condoms were ordered for 10K athletes. This breaks down into 350K male condoms, 100K female condoms, and 175K packets of lube. This further breaks down into 42 condoms per athlete, assuming said athlete stays for the duration of the Games.

Providing condoms to the athletes isn’t a new phenomenon; the practice began during the 1988 Summer Olympics held in Seoul, South Korea. Only 8.5K condoms were provided that year. But that number has steadily grown over the years, and has grown exponentially in the recent past. During the last Summer Olympics held in London in 2012, 150K condoms were provided.

Here’s a data table that shows how the number of condoms has risen during the Summer Olympics:

Number of Condoms Provided During the Summer Olympics, 1988-2016

Number of Condoms Provided During the Summer Olympics, 1988-2016

And a data table that shows the same data for the Winter Olympics:

Number of Condoms Provided During the Winter Olympics, 1992-2014

Number of Condoms Provided During the Winter Olympics, 1992-2014

(Somehow, no data was available for Turin in 2006.)

This data table shows how the number of condoms provided has risen through both the Summer and Winter Olympics:

Number of Condoms Provided During the Summer and Winter Olympics, 1988-2016

Number of Condoms Provided During the Summer and Winter Olympics, 1988-2016

There is one problem with these numbers: Aside from the data from Rio, we can’t tell how many, if any, condoms were female condoms, or if they were all male condoms.

It’ll be interesting to see how the number of condoms provided grows over the next few Olympic Games.

 

 

 

Thursday Trends: Censorship of Cunnilingus on Film

'Black Swan' cunnilingus (That Just Won't Do)

‘Black Swan’ cunnilingus (That Just Won’t Do)

With the announced remake of the 1973 film “Don’t Look Now” on the horizon, there’s a good chance that one of the film’s most controversial scenes will once again make the cut: Laura Baxter receiving cunnilingus from her husband John. (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland played the roles in the original film.) But this time, it might not raise much of an outcry.

Movies began to be bolder about depicting cunnilingus around the end of the last decade. In the 2009 movie “Away We Go,” the opening scene shows Burt (John Krasinski) going down on his partner Verona (Maya Rudolph). Two years later, “Blue Valentine” showed Dean (Ryan Gosling) pleasuring Cindy (Michelle Williams). However, this depiction led to some pushback on the part of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which tried to give the movie an NC-17 rating. Interestingly, the 2010 film “Black Swan” was in theaters, which also featured an oral sex scene, but with two women: Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. “Blue Valentine” star Ryan Gosling spoke out against the hypocrisy of rating a film with an oral scene involving two women an R, while a film that depicts the act with a heterosexual couple (as well as within marriage) would get slapped with an NC-17. “Blue Valentine” eventually received an R rating.

Within the past two years, more films involving cunnilingus scenes have been released: “Wild,” “Charlie Countryman,” and “The Counselor.” A very notable example occurred in 2014’s “Gone Girl.” Amy (Rosamund Pike) ecstatically receives pleasure from Nick (Ben Affleck) after their first date, which occurs within the first 15 minutes of the film. There was no pushback from the MPAA regarding ratings for this one (presumably, they didn’t need to fight that battle twice).

It’s great to see cunnilingus depicted as normal within the smorgasbord of sexual acts. Let’s hope media depictions of the act continue to grow so more people become normalized to it.