Princeton group cuts ‘The Little Mermaid’ song over ‘toxic masculinity’
PRINCETON, N.J. — An all-male a cappella group at Princeton University has pulled a Disney movie song from its act after a student newspaper column that suggested the lyrics helped promote “toxic masculinity.”
The Princeton Tigertones have performed “Kiss the Girl,” a song from “The Little Mermaid,” for years.
During performances at the Ivy League school, a female audience member would be brought onstage to decide whether or not a man from the crowd could kiss her.
Noa Wollstein, who wrote the column, claimed the song’s message is misogynistic and that too many women have been pulled on stage for unwanted encounters.
“I have seen a queer student brought on stage have to uncomfortably push away her forced male companion,” Wollstein, a sophomore from New York, wrote in her column.
“I have heard of unwilling girls being subjected to their first kisses. I have watched mothers, who have come to see their child’s performance, be pulled up to the stage only to have tension generated between them and the kid they came to support.”
In a response published in the newspaper, Tigertones’ President Wesley Brown apologized to anyone made uncomfortable by the tradition.
He said the group won’t perform the song until it can find a way to do so without offending any audience members.
Brown, a senior at Princeton, wrote the group has taken steps to try to make audience participation voluntary and consensual, but did not provide specific examples.
He said the group had tried to bring a lighthearted, youthful energy to its performance of the song but failed to ensure comfort for audience members brought on stage.
“Performances of this song have made participants uncomfortable and offended audience members, an outcome which is antithetical to our group’s mission and one that we deeply regret,” he wrote.
In “The Little Mermaid,” the song’s lyrics are sung by Sebastian the crab as he encourages Prince Eric to kiss Ariel, who can’t talk because she traded her voice in order to become human for him.
“My oh my/ Look like the boy too shy/ Ain’t gonna kiss the girl,” the crab sings with help from other sea creatures. “Ain’t that sad?/ It’s such a shame/ Too bad/ You’re gonna miss the girl.”
Other lyrics include, “Don’t be scared/ You better be prepared/ Go on and kiss the girl.”
Wollstein also criticized “The Little Mermaid” song for “unambiguously encourage men to make physical advances on women without obtaining their clear consent.”
“Removed from its cushioning context of mermaids, magic, and PG ratings, the message comes across as even more jarring,” Wollstein wrote.
Article via KDVR
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications.
BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.
A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”
The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.
“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.
T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.
Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.
Abuse, Fear and Intimidation: How Viral Videos Masked a Prep School’s Problems
T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Louisiana, boasted about its record of sending black students from working-class families to top universities. But there’s more to the story.
In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.
The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.
The colleges “want to be able to get behind the black kids going off and succeeding, and going to all of these schools,” said Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at N.Y.U. He said that Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application.
“It’s a good look,” these colleges “getting these bright, high-flying, came-from-nothing-turned-into-something students,” Mr. Smith said.
Editors’ Picks
This portrait of T.M. Landry emerged from interviews with 46 people: parents of former Landry students; current and former students; former teachers; and law enforcement agents. The New York Times also examined student records and court documents showing that Mr. Landry and another teacher at the school had pleaded guilty to crimes related to violence against students, and police records that included multiple witness statements saying that Mr. Landry hit children. The Breaux Bridge Police Department closed the case after deciding it was outside of its jurisdiction.
“That dream you see on television, all those videos,” said Mr. Sassau’s mother, Alison St. Julien, “it’s really a nightmare.”
In an interview with The Times, the Landrys denied falsifying transcripts and college applications, but Mr. Landry admitted that he hit students and could be rough. “Oh, I yell a lot,” he said. He goads black and white students to compete against one another because that is how the real world works, he said.
In 2013, Mr. Landry was sentenced to probation and attended an anger management program after pleading guilty to a count of battery. Despite the documentation, he insisted that he did not plead guilty or serve probation. Mr. Landry said that the victim was a student whose mother asked him to hit her child, and he said he had eased up on physical punishments.
“I don’t do that anymore,” he said.
Instead, he calls himself a “drill sergeant” or “coach,” and asks children to kneel before him to learn humility, for five minutes at most, Mr. Landry said.
That is not how the students have experienced it. Tyler Sassau, Mr. Sassau’s brother, said he can still feel the humiliation and smell the stench on his clothes from kneeling last year on a bathroom floor for nearly two hours.
“I wasn’t going to get up without asking him because if I did, I could’ve got something worse,” he said. “I could barely stand when I got up.”
In their defense, the Landrys touted the school’s ACT scores and high graduation and college enrollment statistics.
“We get pushed under the microscope, or under the dagger,” Mr. Landry said, because “it had been just black kids going. Society kept saying all these negative things about us because it was just easy to beat this broken-down school.”
The students who navigated the Landrys’ system and made it to the nation’s top colleges now face their own quandaries.
“I really believe that we all thought we were doing the right thing at the time, and didn’t have a choice,” Mr. Smith said. “It was a cultish mentality.”
T.M. Landry produced its first graduating class in 2013, and since then, 50 students have graduated, according to the school’s promotional materials. They have had mixed success in college.
Some alumni, especially those who spent only a short time at T.M. Landry, have been successful. Bryson Sassau did well in his classes at St. John’s, although he had to quit some advanced science and math courses. Mr. Smith also did well, but with debts mounting had to drop out after his freshman year. Another Landry graduate said he feels at home at Brown in his junior year, has maintained good grades and was recently accepted into a program that prepares students to pursue a doctoral degree.
The student in the most viral video, who spent only a short time at Landry, is in his first semester at Harvard. Other Landry students have been admitted to Harvard over the past three years, but the university declined to provide information on their status.
For more on this story visit The NYT
Netflix and Chill December
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In an uneven finale, American Horror Story says you can’t outrun your fate
The apocalypse has finally come to an end. After nine episodes that seemed practically plodding after the overstuffed episodes of last year’s Cult, the season finale packed in everything, including so many clips from those last nine episodes you’d have to be forgiven for thinking an editor had been sleeping on the job and accidentally spliced the “previously on” in every five minutes.
The return of Angela Bassett was as welcome as it was wholly unnecessary. Marie Laveau barely has time to glare at Michael before he’s eating her heart. Her triumphant, blink and you miss it cameo captured the overall feel of the episode. There was a lot to smile about. Kathy Bates exploded! And her oozing head sang “Daisy Bell!” But what was it all for?
Likewise Cordelia’s sacrifice was so inevitable it seemed strange for it to play out like a surprising choice, to anyone involved. Since Mallory was first identified as the next Supreme, it was clear Cordelia would have to die so Mallory could rise and reach her full potential. Could Myrtle really be shocked by Cordelia’s suicide, especially when she offered an “I love you,” before walking very slowly and intentionally out of the room where their last hope seemed to be bleeding out in the bathtub? Billy Eichner’s jilted lover returning just long enough to stab Mallory was surprising. Where it ultimately brought the storyline was not.
Maybe the biggest problem the writers had to deal with was the fact the dots laid out in this season had, for the most part, been connected before the finale. If the audience understood Mallory and Coco must have been put under an identity spell for their protection if they were bumping around the bunker completely powerless, did we need to see it performed? If the pilot had already offered a peek into what their assistant/boss from hell dynamic looked like, did we need to see it play out under the watchful eyes of Madison? And while you don’t really need an excuse to watch Jessica Lange act, if we knew Michael eventually ended up in the loving arms of Ms Mead, desperate for a maternal figure, did we need to see his Grandma reject him completely then throw him out? It’s possible that scene even undercut, just a little, the moment when she leaves him to bleed out in the street after Mallory the time traveler hit him with her car. The moment just after he begs her to put him in the murder house does offer the night’s best moment of suspense. In a world where people often act against their own best interests in a spectacular fashion, it didn’t seem implausible that she might have preserved her grandson’s murderous spirit in the house with the rest of his family forever. But maybe she knew it was time for a new son of Satan to rise.
Getting past the terrifying new bit of world building that says you don’t need anything as specific as an evil ghost in the mix to give birth to the Antichrist, just two nice twenty-somethings who like coffee, going back to the season’s narrative beginnings (actually, to the series’ beginnings) could be seen as capturing an idea about the inescapable nature of fate. But while last season’s cyclical moment, the cult victim turned cult leader assassin turned cult leader at least captured an evolution, a second bouncing baby Antichrist, with the exact same MO as toddler Michael, just seems like a let down. The good guys won, and while it can be satisfying in a twisted way to see the people you’re rooting for realize their victory will be short lived, allowing only the audience to realize this bleak development felt hallow. Here’s hopping it’s all a set up for season nine— American Horror Story: Demonic Preschool. Maybe all Michael needed was some equally bloodthirsty kids to play with so he’d reach his full potential without so much angst.
That’s it for AHS: Apocalypse. Thanks for reading this season!
Stray Observations
- It was obviously suppose to be a call back to the pilot when the top secret apocalypse police picked up Timothy because his 23andme kit proved he had desirable DNA, but there is no way Emily, protestor against child labor, would go on even an apology date with a dude who said with no trace of irony he was .07% Brazilian.
- Even if you run over the Antichrist three times, you should probably just double check he actually died. Better safe than sorry when the literal fate of the world is in your hands.
- It makes sense Mallory would want to keep the whole knowing the future because she averted the apocalypse thing a secret, but in a school for witches, would it really be a big deal to tell Queenie she’s heard of the hotel, and it traps your soul? It seems less dangerous than counting on her frustration with traffic to keep herself out of harm’s way.
- So Coco, Mallory, Mr. Gallant and his Grandma were in the bunker because the witches set it up, Timothy and Emily were satanic plants, and Dinah and company got seats after she sold her soul. But Palo Alto tweedledee and tweedledum told Myrtle outpost three was full. So where were the rest of the celebrities? Surely they could have gotten some premium impersonators to round out the ensemble.
- Nan is the best. That is all.
Article via AVClub