The first kids’ movie posters of 2012 have descended on the Bay Area. “The Lorax” is now pictured on buses all over town.
I’ve seen this one as well, for a game derived from the movie, mostly by bus stops:
If you Google the poster, a few come up showing the token “feisty” female voiced by Taylor Swift, but I have yet to actually see this poster anywhere in San Francisco. Please let me know if you see a poster with the female character from ‘The Lorax’ anywhere in SF, or your city/ town and send me a photo.
The other main character in this movie besides the Lorax himself (played by Danny Devito) is Ted (played by Zac Efron) who goes on a quest to please the girl he’s infatuated with. Here’s the synopsis from imdb.com:
A 12-year-old boy searches for the one thing that will enable him to win the affection of the girl of his dreams. To find it he must discover the story of the Lorax, the grumpy yet charming creature who fights to protect his world.
Republican candidates are going blue in the face telling Americans how much they care about the economy and, if elected president, how hard and effectively they’ll work to fix it. They promise to create jobs and to help businesses grow. Yet, not one of them seems to understand that for at least half of the population, economic status is inseparable from reproductive rights. No matter what kind of tax brackets or bailouts America votes for over the next four years, if a teenager has a child, that alone is the strongest indicator that the mother and baby will spend a lifetime in poverty.
So why does Rick Santorum, who cares so much about our economy, believe that a woman who has been raped should be forced to have a child?
Here’s what he said last week on CNN to Piers Morgan:
Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.
How is this mother going to financially support her child? What are Santorum’s plans to help to get this baby access to health care and a good education? Why didn’t he talk about that on CNN?
As governor, presidential candidate Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that would have given rape survivors access to emergency contraception. As a presidential candidate, he’s promising to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate federal funding for birth control.
As a member of Congress, Newt Gingrich voted anti-choice 72 times. He voted for “personhood” rights, which would make abortion and many forms of birth control illegal. He voted 10 times to bar the city of Washington, D.C. from using its locally raised tax dollars to provide abortion care to low-income women. He voted to eliminate Title X, the nation’s family-planning program.
Don’t these candidates understand that all of these policies are inextricably linked to the economic status of women? To all of those pro-choice Republicans who plan to vote for one of these men because you want to just “focus on the economy” this election, if you refer to yourself as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal:” That division makes no sense when it comes to women’s lives. Choice isn’t “just one issue” and it isn’t one choice.
Reproductive rights mean that women have the choice to graduate from college, the choice to borrow money to start a business, the choice to get a good job with a fair wage, the choice not live in poverty and keep their kids out of poverty. Choice means that women get to be autonomous citizens, just like men do, with the power to determine their own destinies.
Years ago, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, said that pro-life politicians believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth,” meaning pro-life politicians are adamant about protecting the fetus but don’t care much about protecting the child once its born. I can’t think of a more obvious proof of this short-sightedness than the current Republican presidential candidates who pledge to get Americans out of financial crisis while simultaneously promising to deny women their reproductive rights.
Frank’s statement is also strongly supported by the work of Jean Schroedel, a professor and dean of the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University, who examined the relationship between state abortion laws and spending on children. Her research revealed that the states that most severely limit abortion are the same ones that spend the least on foster care, parents who adopt special needs children, and poor women with dependent children. States with strict abortion laws consistently accorded lower political, economic and social status to women. For example, Louisiana had some of the toughest abortion laws and spent $602 per child. Hawaii had some of the most liberal laws and spent $4,648 per child.
Schroedel also discovered that states with restricted abortion laws consistently accorded lower political, economic and social status to women.
Her findings echo the work of Nafis Sadik, who was the executive director of the United Nations World Population Fund. Sadik has been instrumental in turning the debate over how to limit population growth into a campaign for women’s rights.
She is widely credited with bringing attention to the correlation between over population and the status of women. When women are educated, when they achieve economic independence, when they have access to good health care, when they are valued in society for their intellect and their accomplishments, they have fewer babies.
In France, mandatory sexuality education begins when students are 13. Parents are prohibited from withdrawing their teenagers from this program. France’s teenage birthrate is approximately 6 times lower than the rate in the US; its teen abortion rate more than 2x lower, and overall AIDS rate, more than 3x lower.
So what’s wrong with America?
If our presidential candidates really want to help our economy, they ought to be improving the status of women, not taking away their rights. They should be advocating for for preventative policy initiatives to reduce unintended pregnancies, expansion of family planning and funding services, comprehensive sexuality education programs, and insurance coverage for contraceptives.
Last week, President Obama did just that. He passed the Affordable Care Act ensuring that most women will get their contraception covered with no copay. He’ll have my vote, because I understand that reproductive rights have never been “just one issue.”
This morning, Academy Award nominations were announced and “Adventures of Tintin” was left out of all categories except for best musical score. The snub is significant and surprising. Not only was “Tintin” directed by Hollywood darling Steven Spielberg, but it won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, usually a strong predictor for an Academy Award nomination if not the Oscar itself.
I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’ve written several posts about Herge, the creator of Tintin, and his disturbing thoughts about women. Herge believed that females had no place in Tintin’s imaginary world. What is so offensive and damaging about this sexism is that Hollywood would never allow an animated movie to be made in 2012 for kids where males were almost completely ignored. Yet, excluding females is just fine, even award-worthy. That’s because the male dominated cast of “Tintin” is consistent with most animated movies made for kids today. Leaving girls out of kids’ movies teaches children a horrible lesson: males are more important than females.
Not only did “Tintin” not get nominated for best animation but two foreign movies did. I haven’t seen either but both look as if they feature females in important roles.
Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and romantic desire unites them, but their journey – in the tradition of the Latin ballad, the bolero – brings heartache and torment.
Here’s the synopsis for “A Cat in Paris” also from imdb.com:
Dino is a cat that leads a double life. By day, he lives with Zoe, a little girl whose mother, Jeanne, is a police officer. By night, he works with Nico, a burglar with a big heart. Zoe has plunged herself into silence following her father’s murder at the hands of gangster Costa. One day, Dino the cat brings Zoe a very valuable bracelet. Lucas, Jeanne’s second-in-command, notices this bracelet is part of a jewelery collection that has been stolen. One night, Zoe decides to follow Dino. On the way, she overhears some gangsters and discovers that her nanny is part of the gangsters’ team.
The cat in the title is a male and he is obviously the star of the film, but the little girl Zoe and her single police officer mom look great from the synopsis. I can’t wait to see this movie!
It’s clear that in order to award some diversity in animation, Oscar had to go outside of Hollywood and its male dominated world of kids cartoons. The other three Oscar nominations for animated features all go to films that star males and are titled for those males: Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss In Boots, and Rango.
Yet Peeters squarely faces two issues that hang over Hergé’s career: his resort to ethnic and racial stereotypes, mainly in the early stories, and his record of accommodation in German-occupied Belgium.
The issues can’t be avoided. In both word and picture, the depiction of Africans in “Tintin in the Congo” makes your jaw drop. (“It’s very nice of these blacks to bear us triumphantly to our hotel!”) The villainous financier in “The Shooting Star” has a hooked nose and has been given the name Blumenstein. Some of this work was later revised, imperfectly. And “Tintin in the Congo” has been gingerly treated by publishers and libraries. As for accommodation, Hergé published “Tintin” throughout the war in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Peeters doesn’t excuse any of this (who would?), though he does try to put it in context. He observes that Hergé’s prejudices were those of his time and place, and notes that the cartoonist, as he matured, acquired a more enlightened sensibility. In “The Blue Lotus,” Chinese ideograms on signs in the background say things like “Abolish unfair treaties!” and “Down with imperialism!” (These were drawn by an influential assistant, a French-speaking native of Shanghai named Zhang Chong Ren.) Hergé was not in essence a political man, publishing in Le Soir because collaborationist newspapers were the only ones allowed to exist.
I haven’t read the book, and I hope Peeters explores Herge’s misogyny in it, but if he does, why would Cullen leave that out of his review? Why does Peeters “squarely face two issues” but not that one? If Herge’s sexism is indeed left out, why doesn’t the reviewer ask the reason for the omission? Are women as unimportant in this story to the reviewer and biographer as they were to Herge?
From the LA Times on Pixar’s first female protagonist in the history of the studio:
The film brought Pixar’s artists some new technical challenges — it took two years to achieve the precise degree of frizz in Merida’s hair, for instance. But “Brave’s” biggest mark of distinction is its female protagonist, a first for the animation studio behind the “Toy Story” and “Cars” movies.
Andrews said that Merida’s trail-blazing places “Brave” squarely in the Pixar storytelling canon.
“Pixar made the first old-person-centered animated film with ‘Up’ and the first rat-that-wants-to-be-a-chef film with ‘Ratatouille,'” Andrews said.”Pixar is not one to shy away from firsts.”
Wow, a female hero is as rare and remarkable as a rat who can cook.
She’s coming to a theater near you in June 2012. And she’s a Scot. I can’t wait!
In my post about “Tom and Jerry,” I wrote about the exclusion and stereotyping of female characters. I didn’t write about the extreme violence in the cartoon. If I blogged about other animated male duos who relentlessly, brutally attack each other– Sylvester and Tweetie or Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd– I’d also complain not about the violence, but that the girls have gone missing as well. In fact, on my blog that rates kids’ media on how appropriate it is, I’ve hardly written about violence at all. Why?
I’m no fan of tons of blood and gore, but I also believe that violence is a crucial part of fantasy play. I don’t take the violence in fairy tales, myths, or stories literally. That is, I think of the violence in narratives mostly as a metaphor. For example, you could look at the story of David and Goliath as primarily a violent one (along with many stories in the Bible.) David kills Goliath. Or you can look at as story about the little guy going after the big one and winning: Erin Brockovitch taking on a corrupt power company. We all look at the story that way, right? So much so that the characters have become part of our language when we describe contemporary battles.
What happens when that language leave girls out?
Everyone slays dragons. In myths, in our dreams, in movies, we see it happen visually and literally on huge scales. In our own lives, we do it every day, in ways that are smaller and less dramatic, but can seem enormous in the moment: getting a project in on deadline, winning a debate, or organizing a messy closet.
I also think the violence in narratives provide useful metaphors and imagery for kids to experience emotions in a healthy way. Little kids live dramatic lives. They don’t get to go to a movie and they feel like their whole world is caving in. Narratives are a safe way to practice experiencing intense emotions: they actually see a world cave in.
Just in case you’re missing my point: I’m not advocating for violence where the males are always the heroes and the females are the victims. Violence shown as men hurting women in kids’ media, the way it is in the adult world of “entertainment,” is not my goal. I’d like to see female heroes acting bravely. If we had more female heroes, it wouldn’t be weird to show female victims as well.
“Violent play is not by definition bad or harmful for kids. Any child shrink worth her sand table will tell you it can help them learn about impulse control, work out the difference between fantasy and reality, and cope with fear….Children of both sexes crave larger than life heroes. They need fantasy. They also, it seems, need a certain amount of violent play…something that allows them to triumph in their own way over this thing we call death, to work out their day-to-day frustrations; to feel large, powerful, and safe.”
If you watch “Tom and Jerry” on DVD, before the cartoon begins, a disclaimer appears on the screen informing the viewer that while some episodes show racial stereotypes, they haven’t been censored because editing them out would be denying the racism ever happened which is worse than showing it. There is also an introduction by Whoopi Goldberg, which does not come on automatically but can be selected on the menu, essentially explaining the same thing.
The racism in “Tom and Jerry” is often shown when a character gets too close to an explosive, it goes off, and he turns up in blackface. Ha ha ha.
I know this because I have three daughters ages 2 – 8. A while ago we saw a “Tom and Jerry” episode on TV (no racism in that one.) They loved it, and I enjoyed it as well. I liked the old fashioned, no bells and whistles animation, and I thought the classical music accompaniment along with the minimal dialogue was pretty cool. So I bought them a couple of DVDs full of cartoons.
But as we watched them together, not only was there some racism, but in all of the episodes, there were practically no female characters. If one did finally saunter onto the screen, she was so sexualized with her bow-red lips curling and spidery eyelashes incessantly batting as Tom and Jerry competed over her, I wanted to put my hands over my daughters’ eyes.
The non-sexualized female in Tom and Jerry? That would be the African-American one, Mammy Two-Shoes, most often shown headless with a pink ruffled apron snugly tied below her large breasts.
So why is there no disclaimer that appears on the screen about the female stereotypes in “Tom and Jerry?” Where is the introduction from Gloria Steinem explaining the historical relevance of this distorted gender stereotyping as a product of its time?
Unfortunately, the reason that there’s no disclaimer and no introduction is because sexist stereotypes in kids’ cartoons are just as accepted in 2012 as they were sixty years ago. Sexist jokes in animation are, apparently, still hilarious. In fact, if you go to theater right now, you’ll be treated to two of them prominently featured in previews for upcoming films: one about how girls can’t fight in Madagascar 3and an ugly woman joke in The Lorax.
Keep in mind that these movies are made for kids. Parents, do you really want to pay $10 a pop so your sons and daughters can be taught to laugh because girls supposedly can’t toss a pillow or aren’t skinny enough to be pretty?
What can you do about the rampant sexism in animation? That girls have basically gone missing from kids’ films? If you’re in a theater and you see one of these sexist jokes, start with calling out: NOT FUNNY. Do it for your kids.
Update: I’ve gotten a couple comments on SFGate about how in her foreward, Whoopi Goldberg refers to “women.”
It’s clear that the emphasis of her intro is race. She talks about the how “racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in the name of entertainment” and how people were made fun of “especially when it came to racial and ethnic groups.” She talks quite a bit about Mammy Two Shoes and the talent of the actress who voices her as well as the artist who drew her. She never refers to the sexualization of women and girls. I never get the impression that this is the kind of stereotyping that she is referring to. Because the racism in “Tom and Jerry” is worse, more blatant, and less accepted today, just as with Tintin, it gets called out while most of sexism is allowed to pass unnoticed. The same kind of sexism is rarely called out when it appears, as it often does, in animated films today. You can watch Goldberg’s intro here.
It’s well known that in domestic abuse and rape cases, too often, the victim gets put on trial. But I can’t recall a time where the one who reported the crime was personally attacked the way people are going after Ivory Madison, the neighbor who called police to make DV charges against San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.
Madison’s motive for calling police has been the subject of much debate. Mirkarimi, who has denied the allegations of domestic abuse, at one point suggested nefarious political forces behind the scandal. In an interview with a Venezuelan radio station Tuesday, Lopez — who has publicly denied being abused by her husband — suggested the sheriff was a victim of dirty politics and questioned Madison’s reasons for going to the police.
Since the incident, Madison has declined to be interviewed, leaving many questions unanswered, including why she waited four days to call police and then refused to surrender the video.
If we’re guessing about Ivory Madison’s motives for reporting the abuse to police, here’s mine:
Madison and Eliana Lopez were neighbors who reportedly met in a parenting class. Maybe Madison gave a party for Mirkarimi’s campaign in Hayes Valley and supported him financially (reportedly with $500 checks from herself and her husband) in part because of her friendship with Lopez. Not long after Mirkarimi won the election, Lopez told Madison she was abused by him. Lopez also allegedly told Madison that her husband was powerful and that she was afraid he would take their child from her.
Madison has a history of working with and supporting women’s organizations. Most likely, she knows how dangerous reporting these crimes are for women and also how hard DV cases are to prove. Here are some stats:
One in four women (25%) has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime.
Nearly three out of four (74%) of Americans personally know someone who is or has been a victim of domestic violence.
On average, more than three women are murdered by their intimate partners in this country every day.
Domestic violence is one of the most chronically under reported crimes.
Only approximately one-quarter of all physical assaults, one-fifth of all rapes, and one-half of all stalkings perpetuated against females by intimate partners are reported to the police.
My guess is that Madison filmed Lopez because she wanted her to have proof and protection. Madison promised Lopez that she would not release the tape. That’s most likely why she refused to give it up until the police had a warrant to get it.
So why did Madison decide to report the incident to police? Again, my guess is that she realized she had to, that it was her moral obligation. The sheriff plays a leadership role in how all DV cases are responded to in this city. It’s not up to Madison to decide whether or not the charges have merit. It”s a much bigger issue than her personal views or her relationship with Lopez. It’s an issue for the courts. What would you do?
The Bay Citizen reports:
Mirkarimi’s supporters say law enforcement may have overreached in pursuing a domestic violence charge without the victim’s cooperation, adding a child endangerment count even though his son was not physically harmed, and requesting a protective order temporarily separating Mirkarimi from his family.
However, a domestic violence expert, and the police department’s own procedural manual, suggest officials played this case by the book.
It’s often the case that victims of DV recant their stories. That’s why police are instructed to pursue the charges without the victim’s cooperation. In reporting the crime, Ivory Madison did exactly what she was supposed to.
Full disclosure: I supported Chris Cunnie for sheriff, primarily because he actively campaigned to fight domestic violence. I blogged about it here. I met Ivory Madison once at a party. We talked about the lack of female superheroes.
Lego now has a Lego Club Girls Magazine, which according to a mom whose kids are members, is the only place where Lego will feature pictures that girls send in of themselves with their “builds.” They no longer plan to put pictures of girls in their other magazine, which is both the defacto “boy magazine,” but will continue to be called the Lego Club Jr. Magazine. This segregates girls’ play. Boys should see girls building, and girls should see boys building. For boys, the one place where they might have previously seen girls in official Lego marketing, is now a boys-only space.
Tell me what you know.
Update: From the comments I’ve gotten here and on FB, it seems to me– and this is a guess– that Lego is in the process of deciding, Look at the comments and see what you think. Here is the comment I got back from LEGO on its FB page:
FROM LEGO: Hi Reel Girl! The pages in the magazines displaying children’s builds will feature pictures from girls and boys in both magazines. Thanks for clarifying with us! 🙂
I left LEGO more questions clarifying the clarifying. Will there be girls in Lego Jr Club? Why 2 magazines? Are you going for pretty much equal representation of genders in each or is your goal to primarily have boys reading one and girls reading the other?
