Cherry-picking.

God, I love syntactical humour.

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Strange Horizons, if you don't know it, is a "weekly speculative fiction magazine" that houses a huge assortment of wonderful stories, essays and reviews. It's a great archive of quality SF and worth a visit.

Yesterday, they published a beautiful essay by Athena Andreadis entitled, "We Must Love One Another Or Die: A Critique of Star Wars." It's a feminist critique of an entire mythopoetic / pop-culture tradition disguised as a movie review... sample:

Just as the boys in Star Wars are given the false choice between glory or love, the girls are given the thankless task of being feisty but unthreatening, without any guarantee of clemency for good behavior. Worse yet, since there is only one female per Star Wars trilogy, she has to be mother, sister, and lover at once to her fellow characters. That, of course, is a no-no because it blurs the sacrosanct divisions between virgin and whore—and also because it implies dominance (to underline the transgression, Padmé is explicitly older and of higher rank than her tercel boy-husband). The girl is a threat to the boy's purity of purpose, an Eve in the making; when she crosses the sexual and emotional boundary, she is speedily dispatched, abandoning her defenseless children—the girl condemned to be left untrained in her power, the boy slated to undergo the brutalization already meted out to his father. Once again, Mr. Lucas is swift to punish those who partake of the fruit of knowledge and threaten to become independent moral agents.