Whoever’s pulling the strings at one major tampon-maker has had it with euphemisms. It’s Kotex-ploitation! Finally, an ad about tampons spoofs stupid ad lingo—”down there,” “sanitary napkins,” “that time of the month”—and dares to actually say the word vagina (you know, where it goes) in a television commercial. The run-down: “How do I feel about […] More »

After six years as an online-only webseries, Pure Pwnage — that’s “ownage”, or “supreme dominance of anyone in anything” in square-talk  — invades real television tonight when it premieres on cable channel Showcase. A mockumentary-style series about an obsessive Toronto gamer and his entourage of equally oddball friends that began its run in 2004, Pure Pwnage bears […] More »

60 Minutes aired this report last night on Bloom Energy, a California company officially launching this week that says it has perfected a fuel-cell technology that is capable of making the conventional energy grid obsolete and producing clean(er), cheap(er) power. I get the strong whiff of bullshit off this whole story, and yet there’s something […] More »

Emily Hunter, This Magazine‘s resident environmental blogger, took an MTV Canada documentary crew to Alberta’s Tar Sands over the summer to see the devastation that’s unfolding there for herself. She’s currently working on a feature story for the magazine, but the documentary she made is airing tonight on MTV Canada, at 8:30 PM EST. The […] More »

The sky is falling on news, said Mike Katrycz, but this isn’t the first time. The veteran news director joined a panel discussion called “Local TV News Under Siege” at Ryerson Journalism School on Wednesday night. With him were CTV managing editor Adrian Bateman, CBC managing editor Sophia Hadzipetros, and CITY Toronto reporter Farah Nasser. […] More »

Generally if I find myself awake at four in the morning, the best thing on TV is Vince Shlomi pitching the SlapChop or Billy Mays yelling at me from beyond the grave.  But this morning, I caught an unapologetic and often uncomfortably unflinching documentary on what day-to-day life in a wheelchair is like. More »

If you missed the Daily Show this week, on Wednesday it offered a kind of condensed, sweetened version of the current political moment in the U.S., a methodical and droll demolition of the out-and-out insanity that has gripped the American right. In the segment—which, by the way, earns every ounce of smugness it exudes—the archives […] More »

I’m a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which premiered its third season last night. The show has always occupied an awkward cultural space, both fetishizing and pathologizing its subjects: meticulously styled and artfully shot, it depicts a glossy, nostalgic vision of the early 1960s in America, but continually undermines that nostalgia, exposing the […] More »

Has a transsexual ruined your life lately? Because if you believe what you see on TV, trans people are lurking everywhere, just waiting to pounce on unassuming heterosexuals. Trans characters on TV are like those early depictions of gay men, before they started cropping up as every woman’s best-friend-slash-fashion-adviser. It’s depressing to argue that the […] More »

Coming out is a near-universal queer experience. The coming-out story recurs again and again in queer cinema: it’s our version of the coming-of-age tale. But where the traditional narrative and reality diverge is at the assumption that coming out is something that only happens once in a lifetime. In the movies, the quiet boy starts […] More »

Like many of the contributors to Girls Who Bite Back, I grew up on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake. When it came to biting back, the only superheroes and ass-kicking role models I had were Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman and Charlie’s Angels (the small-screen version). Thankfully, things have […] More »