I think the prejudices are because (1) television traditionally has to compromise itself to accommodate advertising and that's seen as less artistic and (2) television has to work much more quickly and with much smaller budgets.

Most leading ladies are pretty, most leading men are too. I hate to play the obvious Meryl Streep card, but she's bankable because of her charisma and talent more than her looks. Susan Sarandon, Angelica Huston, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Dian Keaton... all carry on even after they weren't juicy girlfriend material…

I don't think this is a new thing. People have been complaining about the lack of roles for women when they hit their late thirties for a long while.

You're taller. Courtney used to claim to be 5'9" in the 90s, then 5'10", now 5'11". It seems that, in Courtney World, you can continue to grow even well into your forties.

Courtney Love's Food Diary is as Passive-Aggressive and Vain as the Woman Herself.

The Coppertone kid is from a time when letting your kids bake their skin in the sun was considered healthy. When the little girl's swimsuit bottom gets pulled down you see her tanline. Coppertone wasn't sunscreen, it was designed to help you get a tan.

I did know that — I love 80s British movies, largely because so many of the films were born of theater and radio plays, I love the leanness of them. :)

I love Dodai's dream team. I'd also like to see some porn stars in the mix. Some contestants would be thrilled, others very deeply confused, good television for all.

Not quite on the money for me, but I hear you. I love my Mr. KLondike, but if they make Manic Pixie Dream Norwegians...

They're about middle aged women, but the Greek younger lover in Shirley Valentine and the teacher in Educating Rita both open the working class women in their lives to the possibilities of a bohemian lifestyle. Then they leave, without anyone having a broken heart about it. IIRC, I think both Shirley and Rita return…

I do research too (on the corporate side, not academic research), so I feel you re: the distortion of work in the media that makes a study look ridiculous.

Yes. Racism: the belief that you can draw conclusions about a person's character or intelligence based on the way they look.

Well, no. Babies don't perceive "race" — that's a social construct. Babies perceive significant differences in looks, which is pretty logical, and they feel more comfortable with people who look like the people who have been caring for them so far, also pretty logical.

Word. In any scenario, that's celebrity spokesman money well spent. His ads for AmEx are really cute.

If a snack food manufacturer would like me to buy their product, a commercial humiliating Ashton Kutcher for being such a smug, unfunny, ballsack might persuade me.

Vanity Fair also features a lot of Plastic Surgery Disasters, but not the right kind of those either. :(

There's a great book about fairy tale imagery called "From the Beast to the Blonde" that talks about (among other things) tragic blond girls. That archetype goes back literally for centuries.

If you're talking about the early 80s punk band from San Francisco, you may have my co-sign.

Pop culture nostalgia is different from an ideology like racism in that it isn't connected to a power structure. That is, no one gets any special privileges from celebrating the movies, music, TV, or literature from a certain era. Or not any really meaningful privileges, just magazine covers and the like. I guess it…

Good point about the kids. It's probably her lack of heirs that make her feel more like public domain, and the fact that she never transitioned from sex kitten into mother figure that makes her feel even more like an unfinished story.