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Surprising no one, music festivals are disproportionately dude-heavy again this year.

Every summer, Lollapalooza brings some of the biggest names in music to Chicago for four days of fun.

On March 21, the festival announced its 2018 lineup, highlighting acts like The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Jack White, Arctic Monkeys, Travis Scott, and dozens of other bands. Almost immediately, people noticed a trend: The headliners were almost entirely made up of guys.

Just 13 of the 85 bands showcased on the festival's announcement tweet were fronted by women. The big name headliners are totally worth the price of admission and are worthy of that sort of top billing. It's just a little frustrating to see some of the country's largest music festivals (like Lollapalooza and Tennessee's Bonnaroo) skip out on booking women in prominent slots.


In recent years, people have become more vocal about underrepresentation at festivals. And yes, it matters.

According to Nielsen Music, 32 million people attended at least one music festival in 2014, with those numbers pretty evenly split between men and women. California's Coachella — which, to its credit, does include acts like Beyoncé, SZA, St. Vincent, HAIM, and Cardi B in prominent spots in the lineup — has struggled to shake its "Brochella" stereotype.

When the 2018 Bonnaroo lineup was released, writer Trish Bendix commented that it was "such a bummer to see so few women on the lineup," and she was right — less than one in five Bonnaroo artists included women. Tegan and Sara, who have performed at the festival in the past, replied, calling for "a movement within the fan world and the press" to challenge gendered imbalances.

Writing at Into, Bendix slammed the imbalance, saying that it contributes to a culture where a festival can become "a very unfriendly place for women and LGBTQs to be as participants or attendees."

Are music festivals "unfriendly places" for women and LGBTQ people? They certainly can be, and some are fighting to change it.

The issue isn't the performers or the bookers, but the crowds. In a May 2017 Los Angeles Times article, music promoter Sara St. Hilaire discussed the time she was harassed at Bonnaroo, saying that a man followed her through the crowd, groping her.

"One time a guy even lifted up my shirt in the crowd," she said. "There's a sense of community and 'we're all in this together' that gets misconstrued at festivals. I remember being younger and not understanding that kind of thing as sexual assault. Society raises everyone to think 'boys will be boys' and it gets excused."

The full Lollapalooza poster.

You may be wondering what this has to do with who gets booked — and that's totally understandable.

The answer lies in a festival culture that promotes a free-for-all with a dangerously loose interpretation of consent.

The Pitchfork Music Festival, also based in Chicago, listed a "zero-tolerance harassment policy" on its 2017 festival website: "The Festival believes everyone should feel safe during the event and works to ensure this. We will help maintain this by not tolerating harmful behaviors, which may include non-consensual touching or verbal harassment. If a participant chooses to break these policies they may be removed from the fest." Lollapalooza's website contains a "Safety" page with a copy of its own harassment policy.

While these are good, important steps towards improving festival culture, change can't truly happen until the most visible women there — the performers — are treated as more than a mere afterthought.

A photo from Lollapalooza 2006. Photo by Roger Kisby/Getty Images.

Joy

Homeless man catches family's two children and dogs dropped from burning apartment building

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them.'"

Man catches entire family as they jump from burning building.

House fires are devastating for families. In a matter of minutes, you could lose all of your belongings and a place to live, or worse, you could lose loved ones. A family in Phoenix, Arizona, recently found themselves facing the reality of their own home in flames. Claudia Jimenez told CBS News that she woke up trapped in her burning apartment with her two daughters, with nothing to do but yell for help in the hopes that someone would hear her.

The mom's screams were answered by Joe Hollins, a homeless man who was camping nearby with his wife. Hollins didn't hesitate to try to find a way to help. With no way out and the fire department still nowhere on the scene, Jimenez had to trust the stranger who was standing below.

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them,'" Jimenez told CBS.

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Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
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Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

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Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

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Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

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Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

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