It’s almost a New Year, and you know what that means? There are finally some decent movies in theaters! My personal favorite right now is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer (who looks just like my Bavarian great uncle), etc.

It has everything a person could want out of a thriller: elegant Swedish settings, family history fraught with incest, sex between a young goth girl and Daniel Craig, the best revenge scene of all time involving a home tattoo kit, and a fabulous glass house on a hill. It’s Hitchcock meets James Bond meets Chaos (a feminist French film that I’m sure none of you have seen).

- Haley Hogan

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I’m sure you’ve all heard about this gorgeous must-see Lars Von Trier film starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg as rich people coping with the end of the world. Everyone seems to have a love or hate opinion about Melancholia, and my verdict is: A+

Justine (Dunst) is a gorgeous young bride with a successful career in advertising. Her parents are dysfunctional and divorced, and her older sister, Claire (Gainsbourg), is married to a man who is filthy rich. Luckily for Justine, Claire decides to throw her a lavish wedding at her stately home (which is actually a castle in Sweden).

Claire suffers from melancholia, or “major depression” as we would normally call it, so the whole wedding thing doesn’t really cut it for her. Meanwhile, a formerly undiscovered planet (“Melancholia”) is fast approaching earth and just might crash into it, obliterating all human life. But as Claire so astutely comments:  life on earth is terrible, so it’s not worth grieving the end of it … sounds like the ponderous thoughts of a reformed advertising exec if I ever heard them.

See Melancholia on the big screen, because it’s not meant to be viewed on an iPhone. It’s worth $13 if only for the exquisite lawn furniture and shots of Kirsten Dunst’s surprisingly large breasts.

- Haley Hogan

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Midnight In Paris is yet another delight from Woody Allen. Gil (Owen Wilson) serves as the “Woody Allen character,” a disgruntled Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of reaching a higher level of literary genius by writing a novel. Unfortunately, he is engaged to a pushy girl, Inez (Rachel McAdams), who loves big diamonds and even bigger houses in Malibu.

The setting is Paris, as Gil and Inez freeload on her father’s five-star business trip. But Gil has a different Paris in mind: the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the rest of the expatriate crowd of the 1920s. Gil’s nostalgic delusions lead him to his true literary purpose in life, and, of course, to his real romantic passion.

Paris + Woody Allen + hottie Marion Cotillard + The First Lady of France (as a tour guide) + Adrien Brody (as Salvador Dalí) = a film more worthwhile than anything Steven Spielberg could produce or Brad Pitt could star in.

- Haley Hogan

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‘Please Rape Me,’ my performance art piece at the MoMA was one of the colder experiences of my life, mostly because it was 20 degrees and windy, but also because I was wearing cellophane. But more importantly, it was cold because the art world guests attending the Armory Show Opening Night Benefit Party were so anxious to down a glass of champagne and schmooze that they couldn’t be bothered to examine what was going on with my blasting pop music and seasonally inappropriate outfit. But at least I made the herds of Prada-clad gallery girls, Wall Street collectors, and pseudo-British art dealers dreadfully uncomfortable for a few seconds as they hurried to the glass doors of the museum.

The most disappointing thing about the experience was that the overall female reaction to my piece was dismissive and derogatory. Perhaps it’s because the site of a semi-naked dancing girl in front of a museum was just too indecorous for their refined art-themed evening. Since the message of my piece was subversive and not immediately apparent, they wrote it off and moved on with their evening. Or maybe it’s just too taboo to bring up the word “rape” (unless it’s framed in a serious way).

There were obviously some creepers who peered into the mirror underneath my skirt, along with one fellow who placed a Sugarfree Red Bull in my rape evidence box, and another man who gave me a five-dollar bill. One guy responded to the piece via Twitter with an expectedly immature comment: “hey I thought your performance last night was really hot, or did I miss the point?”

Even though many men took the time to read my artist’s statement and contemplate the performance, almost all the women simply turned their noses and walked away. It reaffirmed my earlier impression that the majority of women would rather suppress any degrading sexual experiences than talk openly about them.

Was the word “rape” just too offensive for them to stare in the face?

- Haley Hogan

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Soon after I graduated from Yale in 2009, I was drugged, cut up, and violently raped by my ex-boyfriend, but at the time I didn’t realize it was rape. I called my sister from the hotel room in which the incident had taken place: I told her that I had the worst headache of my entire life; that I had no idea how blood got all over the bathroom door; that there were black-and-blues on my arms and cuts crisscrossed up my back. I dismissed it as just a little S&M sex that had gotten out of hand. My sister had to say, “This is rape,” for me to understand that something serious had happened to me. I went to the Rape Crisis Center at Beth Israel Hospital where they examined me to make sure that I didn’t have any internal damage or a concussion. They made a rape evidence box that they would keep on file in case I decided to press charges.

There is nothing unique about my experience with sexual assault. My feeling of shame followed by denial followed by a desire to resist taking action is a typical progression of thoughts for those who have experienced some form of sexual violation. Whether it be a stranger rubbing up against them inappropriately in a subway train or a first-date watching as they get drunk, taking them home, and then having sex with them even after they say, “No, I don’t want to have sex,” women have a hard time recognizing when something is inappropriate and standing up against their aggressors. After discussing this issue with my female friends, it became evident that most of them have had an experience where they felt forced into sex against their will and didn’t struggle physically because they wanted to avoid making the situation more traumatic. Moreover, my friends with past histories of sexual violence frequently considered the situations fundamentally harmless. It’s important to note that all of these girls are well educated and come from stable families.

There are many explanations for this mental disconnect between experience and realization. The one I want to focus on is the fact that we live in a rape culture that not only anesthetizes us against sexual violation toward women but also holds women responsible for and glamorizes rape. This rape culture, and more specifically, the songs of Lady Gaga and Kanye West, both entitled “Monster,” is the inspiration for my performance art piece, “Please Rape Me,” in front of the MoMA during the opening night benefit for the Armory Show 2011.

I’ll be standing next to a sign that is covered in generic nightclub party flyers, all of which display the promise of semi-naked women and alcohol to lure men. Mixed in with the nightclub posters are my own posters advertising the performance, with the words “Please Rape Me” across them and my legs splayed out in a provocative pose and my face in a hysterical scream of drunken excitement. I will be wearing a skimpy tube top and mini skirt made out of translucent red cellophane and clear duct tape, along with high heels, to emphasize the message that I am “asking for it” by wearing a revealing outfit. I’ll be standing directly over a mirror with my legs spread, thereby showing off the area between my legs to any onlookers who come close enough to peer into the mirror. This sensationalism of my own sexuality is yet another part of the “Please Rape Me” ploy, along with the writing across my body with expressions like “Asking for it” and “No means yes.”

The Lady Gaga and Kanye West songs, “Monster,” will be playing on loop in the background, representing the glamorization and popularization of rape and violence against women. While Lady Gaga’s “Monster” plays like an upbeat trance soundtrack for a dance club and the words are hard to discern unless you pay close attention, the song is about a girl who is at a nightclub and just wants to keep dancing. But she sees a guy who’s like “a wolf in disguise” and even though she wants to just dance, the guy takes her home instead and  “Uh oh! There was a monster in [her] bed…He tore [her] clothes right off/He ate [her] heart and then he ate [her] brain.”

The music accompanying these lyrics is monotonous, trance inducing, and de-sensitizing, as though Lady Gaga wants to conceal the meaning of the lyrics or thinks that they are negligible, in spite of their disturbing and violent nature. This is a song about date rape: girl is intrigued by boy, boy “licked his lips” and said to girl, “you look good enough to eat,” boy “put his arms around [girl],” and girl said, “Boy now get your paws right off me,” but boy ends up taking girl home against her will and “eating her brain” anyway.

In Charlotte Hilton Andersen’s article for the Huffington Post, “Lady Gaga and The Glamorous Rape,” she speaks to these issues, explaining, “thanks to examples ranging from the mostly innocuous Edward ‘Do I kiss you or kill you?’ Cullen in Twilight, to the twisted media coverage of the Chris Brown-Rihanna debacle to the galling rape-fantasy video game genre, the media is selling us an image of rape and domestic violence as being artistic, dramatic, the result of misguided love and — most terrifying – wanted.” Andersen also references Lady Gaga’s music video, “Paparazzi,” in which Lady Gaga gets thrown off a balcony by her boyfriend and is forced into a Louis Vuitton wheelchair with Chanel wheels. The most upsetting part of this video is the seemingly arbitrary incorporation of images of beautiful female corpses strewn about Gaga’s mansion. They have all been brutally murdered, but their images read more like casual quotations from a high-end fashion magazine than part of the story, and if they are part of the story, then they are merely casual references to Gaga’s rapist/killer boyfriend.

Cut to Kanye West. While many people give Lady Gaga some grossly undeserved “but she’s a feminist” free card and dismiss her violent and degrading images toward women as merely subverting stereotypes (saying ridiculous things like, “since she’s a woman, it doesn’t count”), Kanye West is a straight-up misogynistic man. He starts off his song, “Monster,” by addressing someone, “Bitch.” The song is directed at this “bitch” in his life, and some of the most telling phrases include his command for “Less talk more head right now,” and his question, “Have ever had sex with a pharaoh?/I put the pussy in a sarcophagus/Now she claiming I bruise her esophagus.” Kanye’s music video for “Monster” is a horrifying hodgepodge of images of dead women who have been violently murdered. At one point he holds a modelesque woman’s severed head in his hands while he raps. One recurring shot is of Kanye in a luxurious bed with two gorgeous women, who appear to be sleeping, but then he starts rearranging their limbs and it’s clear that Kanye raped and murdered them and is merely savoring the moment in a throwback to American Psycho.

But this is popular American culture. Rape is hot, and dead raped women are even hotter. If you start to look for them, the images are everywhere. The problem with this cultural phenomenon is that it’s a symptom and perhaps even an instigator of the actual social problem of sexual violence against women. I was appalled to hear about the DKE fraternity at Yale that forced their new pledges to march around the Freshman campus (where almost all the Freshman girls live) at night chanting the words “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women, and fill them with my semen.” If a throng of some of the best-educated male college students in the country accepted this mission, then maybe rape culture in America has reached a point of crisis. Even worse, almost one-third of the Yale population responded to a poll by saying that they weren’t offended by the rape chant.

Perhaps Lady Gaga and Kanye West have succeeded in anesthetizing us against rape, and it hasn’t just affected young teenagers in mediocre public school system who struggle to find valuable role models. It is affecting the so-called mature and intelligent future leaders of America. Of course, it’s not just Lady Gaga and Kanye West who are the problem. They are merely selling records and trying to give the American public what they want. So why do we want to look at mutilated and raped women and sing along to dance tracks about date rape? The scary result is that even I, a “Yale feminist,” didn’t realize when I had been violently raped.

In my piece, “Please Rape Me,” while I seem to be begging to be raped, by re-contextualizing these sexualized images that have come to seem second-nature to us, I am inviting the question, “Why do we accept the sexualization and degradation of women so easily and readily in our culture and personal lives?” Furthermore, I am implying that there is no such thing as “no means yes” (beyond the sheer linguistic absurdity of the phrase) and that no one is “asking for it.” The very phrase “Please rape me” is supposed to shock and disturb, because it cuts to the quick of so many images in popular music, fashion, advertising, and the media, but by distilling it to its essence (“Please rape me”), its sinister ideology is revealed.

- Haley Hogan

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It’s not easy to be an entrepreneur these days, especially in Manhattan. I know one or two clever commoners who have spun good ideas into gold, but New York’s young entrepreneurial set is dominated by the children of the rich and famous, or the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. For many of these people, all it takes to start a fashion line is an infinity pool of financial and social resources.

Take Lauren Santo Domingo, for example. She’s a statuesque blonde socialite who not only comes from old money but also married new money. She “works” at Vogue and has recently conceived an online venture that will allow fashion’s biggest (and richest) fans to buy clothes fresh off the runway, bypassing the season-long wait for collections to retail. Mind you, her father was the CEO of Perrier, her husband is a billionaire Columbian heir, and Anna Wintour is amongst her admirers. Talk about resources.

Back in the good old days (the ’80s and ’90s), it was enough just to be a charming, bright, and persistent individual with some charisma, and voila, you could get the resources to start a boutique, a magazine, a multinational corporation. Now these qualifications might get you a waitressing job, if you’re lucky.

- Lizzie Crocker

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Considering its NC-17 rating, Blue Valentine was not as chock full of titillating sex scenes as I had expected. The few moments of lust fail to compensate for the film’s heart-wrenching story. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are flawless as two lost souls who fall deeply in love, get married, raise a child, and over time fall into a dysfunctional hellhole of a relationship.

Gosling is hopelessly adorable as Dean, a high school dropout who, in spite of his many talents, wants nothing more from life than to make do as a mover and meet the girl of his dreams. Williams plays the delicate and beautiful Cindy, Dean’s love at first sight, who is a talented but insecure pre-med student. Unfortunately, Cindy’s wanker of an ex-boyfriend knocked her up just before she started dating Dean the dream boy. In a painfully realistic abortion scene, Cindy bails at the last minute and runs out of the clinic and into Dean’s arms.

If you’re into emotional roller coasters, bittersweet love stories, and the idea of Ryan Gosling naked and sexy at one moment and crying hysterically at the next, then Blue Valentine is a must-see.

- Lizzie Crocker

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I don’t know about you, but New Year’s Eve usually makes me really depressed. That is, unless you’re madly in love with the man/woman of your dreams and that person is the one kissing you at midnight.

In 2011 I hope to:

1. Get a prestigious job.

2. Get my novel published, or at least get a literary agent.

3. Get hired as a bartender, since neither 1 nor 2 will happen.

4. Avoid all creepers, wankers, and other degenerate characters — unless they have something to offer me that is relevant to any of the above three.

5. Get everyone to start reading and cooking from my sister’s brilliant new food blog.

6. Stalk the following celebrities (all pimps in their own ways): Hugh Hefner (he only has a short time left! the clock is ticking!), Kristen Stewart (she is so hot right now), Jack Nicholson (not sure why that hasn’t happened yet), Blake Lively (just cause…).

7. Finally discover a legitimately good reason for having a blog.

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & read my other blog about WASP culture]

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Somewhere is Sofia Coppola’s newest film, which deals with all her favorite themes: Hollywood, celebrity, loneliness, meaninglessness, love, romance (or lack there of), travel, and hotel living. Stephen Dorff plays a very attractive famous actor who is a total pimp but doesn’t enjoy it — he drinks Coronas in his empty hotel room at the infamous Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles; he drives his black Ferrari around in circles on a track; he answers inane questions at press conferences; he has sex with hot girls he meets in the hallway; he hires twin pole dancers to entertain him in his room.

But nothing really happens in his life until his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo, played by the magnetic newcomer Elle Fanning, enters the scene. She whips him into shape, emotionally that is. And then she literally whips up some amazing home-cooked eggs Benedict for her dad. She’s like the balm of life for him. And little by little, the soulless movie star man transforms into a real person. In the last scene of this predominantly dialogue-free film, he drives his Ferrari down the highway into the Californian desert, and then he gets out of his car and walks, because sports cars symbolize going nowhere, and finally he has somewhere to go (that’s not a hotel). Or maybe ’somewhere’ is synonymous with ’someone.’

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & read my other blog about WASP culture]

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I attended the Kiehl’s Holiday Party in Manhattan and had the chance to stalk two of my all-time favorite celebrities: Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Koons. I love Kyle because he is responsible for the Twin Peaks TV icon Agent Cooper; I love Jeff Koons because he is responsible for installing large pink poodles at Versailles Palace. These two cultural tycoons just so happened to be chatting in a corner when I sprung myself on them. I had been lurking in the darkness nearby when I almost bumped into the Showtime star of Dexter. I apologized and he pervily responded, “Don’t be sorry.”

But I plowed through to Kyle and Jeff and told them I was a journalist (not completely false — though definitely a good line to use if you are ever wondering how best to approach a famous stranger). They answered my inane questions and I even snuck my video camera under their chins to get some slammin’ footage of their nostrils. All in all, it was a very good holiday party.

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & read my other blog about WASP culture]

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