I’m a die-hard Trekker but that doesn’t mean I have to love everyone who’s ever acting in the long-running saga. For every George Takei or Wil Wheaton, there’s a William Shatner. The Star Trek actor has certainly made a niche for himself in recent years acting as the spokesperson for Priceline and performing in other comedic offerings but he’s also turning into a documentarian. Previously he directed The Captains, a film more suited to his expertise, and a Trek fan documentary called Get a Life, but now he’s set his sights on fans of Xena: Warrior Princess and it’s safe to say he’s out of his depth. 

In a year of two behind-the-scenes Alfred Hitchcock projects, a new contendor as emerged. It’s a new drama series from A&E called Bates Motel that explores the relationship between Norman Bates and his mother…Norma. Does anyone want this?

You see the girl in the photo above? That graceful, beautiful, powerhouse gymnast? That’s Gabby Douglas; she won a gold medal last night at the London Olympics. But while watching her amazing performance last night, there are a lot of people out there who weren’t focused on her form or her discipline or her undeniable talent–they were focused on her hair.

Do you ever feel like Hollywood is like your bigger, older brother who makes you punch yourself with your own fist, or is that just me? A prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is in the early stages of development. The who, what, why, and what for after the jump.

Japan’s women’s soccer team scored a huge win for their country last year when they beat the United States for the World Cup. But apparently that amounts to nothing. They flew to Europe earlier this week along with the men’s team in anticipation of the London Olympics. The men had seats in business class. The women sat in coach. And they aren’t the only team seated this way. What gives? 

Earlier this week the Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill that would criminalize abortions in pregnancies older than 20 weeks in all cases including incest, rape, and severe birth defects, leaving exception only for the physical health of the mother; make it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion (but not, of course, to coerce a woman out of having an abortion, coercion is fine, apparently, if it’s going in the right direction); would limit access to abortion to women who are able to find the time, money, and transportation to have their doctor present for the procedure regardless of whether they are having surgery or simply being prescribed abortion-inducing medication; would require doctors who perform abortions to foot hundreds of thousands of dollars more in malpractice insurance costs in order to do so legally; and would require abortion clinics to maintain a surgical outpatient facility regardless of whether they provide surgical abortions, an unnecessary cost and effort that would force most uncomplying clinics to close. It’s being called the nations worst anti-abortion bill, which, unfortunately, is quite the claim to fame at the moment.

But before the bill passed, Lisa Brown (right) and Barb Byrum (left) were among the members of the House minority party (Democrat) who spoke against it, and, for their responses to the bill, both women have been indefinitely banned by the House Majority Leader from speaking on the floor of the Michigan House of Representatives initially without official explanation. And naturally, since it was without explanation, theories have run rampant this week.

Update: Crystal Dynamics has responded to some of the concerns about the direction of Tomb Raider.

Ever since announcements of a new Tomb Raider game started to surface in 2010, diehard fans of the series have been anticipating a reboot of the franchise led by the strong, ass-kicking Lara Croft. “Forget everything you know about Tomb Raider, we are exploring things that have never been done before in this game,” said Darrell Gallagher, Head of Studio, Crystal Dynamics. There was a lot to wonder about the new Tomb Raider — given the success of Uncharted, a similarly styled but throughly modern action-adventure platformer, would the new iteration of Lara Croft’s adopt its gameplay and the badassery of lead character, Nathan Drake? However, after the official E3 preview trailer, it became quite clear that Lara Croft had been shifted from being a badass to being utterly victimized. “A big part of that journey is seeing some of the hits she’s taken along the way and why she had to get that inner strength and the inner core to become the woman that we all know. There is that sense of seeing it and being explicit about that. It’s part of the narrative,” Crystal Dynamics head Darrell Gallagher told to the Penny Arcade Report, suggesting that it is the violence and tragedy that Lara experiences, not her strength, that makes her admirable.

And so it wasn’t particularly surprising when, Ron Rosenberg, executive producer of Tomb Raider, has gone on record with Kotaku to state that players “will want to protect” Lara Croft as she is “turned into a cornered animal” in the face of extreme violence and the threat of rape. Gee, a woman protagonist facing sexualized violence, how original. Hit the jump for more from the article.

[Warning: the rest of this post will contain discussion of violence against women and rape].

Fifteen-year-old Paige Sultzbach didn’t get a chance to play in her school’s baseball championship because the opposing team of boys refused to play her, forfeiting the match instead. Not cool, dudes. 

We’ve brought you stories before about texting in movie theaters and musical venues but now, some major theater executives have put their hat into the ring. The boxing analogy fits here, you see, because these executives are considering allowing cell phone use in theaters and a lot of moviegoers are not happy about it. 

A little while ago we posted a video making a joke out of the stereotypical but not universally true awkwardness of male geeks, particularly around women, and the comments on the post exploded. For every guy who came in to say, reasonably if perhaps with little humor, that all dudes aren’t like that; there was a guy there to tell every woman who’d commented to say she’d known guys like that once that her personal experience and anything she’d ever done based on it was wrong. It was a clusterfuck of anecdotal experience and gendered slurs, and the only thing it really made me want to do was get all the commenters in a room and say, loudly and clearly:

“I’ll make a deal with all you dudes who are angry because this is how your demographic is portrayed. You let me have this one video making this one joke, and I will let you have the entire “fake geek girl” meme, comprising hundreds of jokes, many of them misogynist, that perpetuate the idea that women never do anything you like unless it is to “get attention” and then betray you when they get it. This should seem more than fair.”

Because that’s what the idea of the “fake geek girl” is all about, right? “Oh, she’s just doing that for the attention.” Which, by the way, is also a thing said when women claim they’ve been raped, or beaten by people close to them; it’s one of the foundational assumptions behind the reasoning that women lie or will lie about being raped to get abortions; it is the idea that excuses the behavior of a society that minimizes the concerns of women.