Girls can talk

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Originally uploaded by benster1970.

The thing I appreciate most as a result of my years in student organisations is gender sensitivity. I learned to realise to a greater scale how gender structures work which made it even more painful to go back to studying and seeing how male-dominated my faculty and department still was.

Same goes for entertainment. I cannot watch a film or a television show without paying attention to the ways gender is built. Don't get me wrong, I value highly this approach. I find myself ranting very often about the way women are shown merely as objects, preferably pretty objects. This goes especially for youth media where several tv series keep reproducing the stone age masculine and feminine behaviour patterns.

This all worked as an introduction to a positive experience from today. I saw a Finnish film called Tyttö sinä olet tähti (Girl you're a star) that had its premiere on Friday. It is a story of a rich girl called Nelli (played by the wonderful Pamela Tola) who wants to become an r'n'b star and therefore starts working on a demo with a hip hop producer Sune (street credible Samuli Vauramo). Youth film --> I do not need to tell you what happens between them.

I was expecting a lot from the film based on the critiques and also due to the fact that the set was designed by a friend of mine. But what really surprised me positively was the way how the role of Nelli was written. She was not a bimbo wanna-be idol but a girl who was able to stand up to the guys. She responded to sexist comments in a way that made the boys fall silent. Brillant piece of work. The scriptwriter Pekko Pesonen (also behind the wonderful Lapsia ja aikuisia film) had performed magnificently in showing a young woman with self-esteem who was equal to the guys. Really a film worth seeing.