Stars of the Bratz TV series
Disney’s makeover for Merida (from Spring, 2013)
Elizabeth Arden ad “Beautiful gives her daughter something to look forward to.” (from 2012)
10 year old model in Vogue (from 2010)
Hint: If you were a Martian who landed on earth, what would you think is valuable, important, or powerful about females of the human species? What would you think is important about females if you were a little girl looking at all this? And if you a boy looking?
Did you know that tween girls spend 40 million a month a beauty products? Another fun fact: The percentage of eight- to twelve-year-olds who regularly use mascara and eyeliner doubled between 2008 and 2010.
This info is from Peggy Orenstein’s best-selling book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Here’s the passage where she writes about the difference between the parents of child pageant competitors and “ordinary” parents:
No question, they have taken the obsession with girl’s looks to an appalling extreme; but, one could argue, the difference between them and the rest of us may be more one of degree than of kind. “Ordinary” parents might balk at the $3,000 dress or the spray tan but guess what? in 2007, we spent a whopping $11.5 billion on clothing for our seven to fourteen-year-olds, up from $10 billion in 2004. Close of half to six to nine year old girls regulatry use lipstick or gloss, presumably with parental approval; the precentage of eight to twelve year olds who regularly use mascara and eyeliner doubled between 2008 and 2010, to 18 and 15 percent respectively. “Tween” girls now spend more than $40 million a month on beauty products. No wonder Nair, the depilatory maker, in 2007 released Nair Pretty, a fruit-scented line designed to make ten-year-old conscious of their “unwanted” body hair. And who, according to the industry tracking group, NPD, most inspires girls’ purchases? Their moms. AS a headline on the cheeky feminist Web site Jezebel.cm asked, “How Many 8 Year Olds Have to Get Bikini Waxes Before We Can All Agree the Terrorists Have Won?
Today, on Facebook, my friend, Jennifer, posts this:
As a person with multiple food allergies, I am officially getting annoyed that so many items are marked with “gluten-free” or whatever. I do not have a gluten problem, and I’m feeling very left out. Why don’t other intolerances/allergies matter? OH, because they’re not part of a FAKE WEIGHT-LOSS SCHEME. (Note: Gluten intolerance and celiac disease is real and I take it very seriously. But repurposing legit food restrictions as a diet is idiotic.) Thank you.
She’s totally right and what gets me about all this gluten-free bullshit is the smug people acting like they care about health when all they care about is being thin. Gluten-free, for most people, is just another diet. Honestly, I don’t even know if dieters masquerading as “healthy” people realize they’re fooling themselves. The biggest clue is the way the “healthies” act about the “fatties.” Healthies are terrified of fatties. They don’t want to be near them. They feel contaminated by them. Most of all, they feel superior to them. What drives me crazy about this bias is that it is seriously unhealthy to obsess about calories or fat grams or carbs or gluten or whatever the current trend is all day long. It’s a black hole of hell that many women fall into, never to return.
And, mark my words (here they are, in print) this obsession with gluten? It will shift. I blog a lot on Reel Girl about how “scientific” studies are often biased, and I cannot think of a better example of that than whatever the current doctor or expert is saying about health and what we should eat.
Speaking of, please think twice before you tell your kid what to eat. When my daughters get food in a restaurant, I always remind them to eat what their tummy wants. “Whoever put that food on that plate has no idea how hungry you are,” I say. Even here at home, I tell them “Only you really know how much to eat.” Can you imagine if someone treated you like so many parents treat their kids, making you eat steak if you really want a salad? Making you “finish” your food if you realized you didn’t want to eat it? Bribing you with the reward of one food if you consume another? No wonder why so many kids grow up with eating disorders.
Before you give me the whole “I’m not a short-order cook” argument, please read my posts (some linked below) on Reel Girl about food, health, eating, and eating disorders, because that’s the last thing I am besides a periodontist, or, probably, a member of Apple’s tech support team.
Please, don’t judge people by how much they weigh. You haven’t got a clue how healthy they are. Consider yourself lucky if you know how healthy you are.
Preventing eating disorders by teaching intuitive eating to kids
Creativity is not icing on the cake. It is the cake.
Artists have a false reputation of being neurotic, pessimistic, and depressed. But artists, if they are depressed, create in spite, not because of depression. I wrote a blog about this controversial view presented in the book Against Depression by Peter Kramer. His whole theory is basically this: Creating consistently requires a sense of optimism. You’ve got to believe there is a way to tell your story or paint your picture. It makes sense. You’ve got to be resilient. Your plot is going to fall apart hundreds of times, and you’ve got to figure out a way to put it all together and make it work.
Besides Kramer’s book, I’ve learned elsewhere that creativity is essential for mental health. I’ve taken classes on forgiveness and anger management and both teach the same skill: story-telling. According to Fred Luskin of Stanford University, there are 3 steps to creating and holding a grudge:
(1) You take something too personally
(2) You blame someone else for how bad you feel
(3) You create a grievance story.
The grievance story is something that you, the “victim,” repeat over and over in your head. The way to forgive, to move on, is to tell a new story where you are the hero.
In anger management, you learn the same thing. The feeling of anger lasts 90 seconds. 90 seconds. Please check out this amazing video about the teen brain where Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor says the same thing. So what keeps the anger going for hours, days, years, a lifetime? The story you tell yourself about the event. That is where you can intercede and step in. Change the story. Become the hero, not the victim.
To do all this, you need to be creative.
What made me think about this today (not that I don’t every day) is a New York Times post headlined Marketing to Children Drowns Out Innovation.
Creativity — our ability to invent, conjure, envision, think divergently, and change the status quo — is essential to a thriving democracy and is rooted in children’s creative play.
On the Huffington Post, Lori Day writes:
I was talking to a teacher friend recently who said that 10 or 15 years ago, if she asked her Kindergarten class what their favorite colors were, she heard many different answers. Now, she still hears the boys name many different colors, but the girls almost all say pink…
Doesn’t that suck? A classroom of girls and all the colors in the world, and this is what they say? What are the longterm affects of groupthink in little kids?
I keep asking on Reel Girl: Why do parents put up with the gender stereotypes marketed to little kids? At least with “progressive,” urban parents, those in my world, I think a major reason is that they believe it’s just a phase, so harmless. Kids will grow out of loving pink or loving princesses. But kids who learn groupthink instead of creativity will have a harder time thinking independently. And I mean really independently, not reactively, which is just another form of groupthink. Again, you’ve got to watch Taylor’s teen brain video.
On developing brains, psychologist/ author Stephen Mitchell writes in one of my favorite books ever, Can Love Last?:
However, the traditional dichotomy of nature versus nurture that has dominated Western philosophy and psychology has been profoundly challenged by recent advances in neurophysiology. The stratification model of human experience, nature versus nurture– was predicated on the assumption that human biology was a complete package at birth…
The brain of the newborn, we now know, is only partially developed. Nerve cells and neural pathways are incomplete at birth; they are shaped to a considerable extent by the baby’s experience with others.
Mitchell is echoed by neuroscientist Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain. She writes:
“Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds, grammar, and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires it up only to perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, its possible to learn another language but far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly. The ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. This contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired.”
Both Mitchell and Eliot support the idea that humans are born into the world with “potentials.” Qualities humans are designed for can “turn on” or “emerge.”
These ideas on brain development take on the basic assumptions of Enlightenment, the driving theory behind the last century, which Mitchell summarizes as “a correct, rational, scientific, fantasy-free way to understand the world.” Mitchell summarizes the Enlightenment world view into three basic assumptions:
(1) All genuine questions have answers
(2) All true answers are discoverable and teachable to others
(3) All answers are in principle compatible
Mitchell describes reality, or realities, instead where fantasy and reality continually create each other. He writes:
It is the hallmark of the shift in basic psychoanalytic sensibility that the prototype of mental health for many contemporary psychoanalyitc authors is not the scientist but the artist. A continual objective take on reality is regarded as neither possible nor valuable in contrast to the ability to develop and move in and out of different perspectives of reality.
I’m not a scientist. I’m a writer and a mom, and I’m appalled by what people are calling “natural.” In the future, people are going to look back on this time and be mystified by what we did to little kids.
My radio was on scan. I was driving when I heard a woman’s voice sing the first line:
When people ask of me
What would you like to be
Now that your not a kid anymore…
I really wanted to hear what she was going to say, so I turned up the volume.
I know just what to say
I answer right away
There’s just one thing
I’ve been wishing for…
Here it comes…
I want to be Bobby’s girl
I want to be Bobby’s girl
That’s the most important thing to me…
At which point I said, to no one, “Seriously?”
Apparently, yes. Here’s the next verse:
And if I was Bobby’s girl
If I was Bobby’s girl
What a faithful, thankful girl I’d be
“This is a joke, right?” I said.
Each night I sit at home
Hoping that he will phone
“Come on, woman, go out. Get a life.” And then she says this:
But I know Bobby has someone else
Wait a minute, here. Hold on. After all that, Bobby has someone else? You are fucking kidding me.
Here’s the finish.
Still in my heart I pray
There soon will come the day
When I will have him all to myself…I want to be Bobby’s girl
I want to be Bobby’s girl
That’s the most important thing to me…And if I was Bobby’s girl
If I was Bobby’s girl
What a faithful, thankful girl I’d be
What a faithful, thankful girl I’d beI want to be Bobby’s girl
I want to be Bobby’s girl
I want to be Bobby’s girl
I knew it was an oldie, but I Googled for the details (and to check the lyrics.) Turns out the song is from 1962. That doesn’t make me feel less depressed. It’s not like I can say, “Look how far we’ve come, now we’ve got ‘Blurred Lines.’
What’s so upsetting to me about this idiotic song is that it describes a young woman’s fantasy life. Her dreams. Not her hum drum existence, but what she aspires to be.
There’s an awesome video of hilarious, brilliant, and beautiful Sarah Silverman on my Facebook feed from Jezebel that speaks to this. Right before Silverman hands the host a T-shirt that says “Feminist,” she talks about her reaction to the “Housewives” franchise.
Your heart-breaking attempts to look younger is the reason your daughter doesn’t dream about her future.
Silverman is talking about a hit show in the year 2013. What are women dreaming about right now? Really? What do we aspire to be? What are girls dreaming about? What do we think will make us happy? And don’t we grown-ups get how important it is for our kids to see us risk and try and fall on our face and get up again and go further? Every time take some step towards chasing our biggest dreams, no matter how small a move we make, we give others permission to do the same. It’s so much more fun to be your own girl.
Actress, comedian, and talk show host, Whoopi Goldberg, was a “Star Trek” fan as a kid.
She’s spoken about her ecstatic reaction when she saw U.S.S. Enterprise crew member, Uhura, on TV for the first time.
“Well, when I was nine years old Star Trek came on. I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.”
Do you see how reality influences fantasy influences reality and creates our world? Just to remind you, that’s the same world that our kids live in. Art inspires us to dream big, except when it doesn’t.
Last week, actress and writer Jennifer Sky wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times about her experience working as a model.
I was given drugs, then coerced into going topless for a shoot. I learned the hard way that my body was not my own.
After a series of horrible experiences, Sky quit modeling. She got a job acting as a warrior princess. That role changed her life, how she saw herself, and how she experienced the world.
During my time on the show, on six episodes from the fourth to the fifth seasons, I kicked butt. Off screen, I was trained in numerous fighting techniques, in archery and horseback riding. On screen, I hung with a Christ figure called Eli; I had a same-sex lover and a boyfriend of a different race than mine; I threw bombs and walked along high wires. I killed so many bad guys that they began to look the same…Gender was not relevant in the Xenaverse. There, a girl or a boy could be a warlord or a farmer, a bard or a sad sack needing protection.
If playing and seeing powerful females in fiction is so inspiring and life changing, why, again and again, in kids’ media, do girls go missing? Why do we hardly ever see female protagonists? This summer, all the movies that came out for little kids– and I saw every one– starred a male character. When I blog about this pattern of sexism– as I did, regarding the lack of female competitors and winners in “Planes”– I receive hundreds of comments dripping with sarcasm like this one.
The actual race in Planes is totally dominated by male competitors.” How shocking! You mean in real life the actual race is not dominated by male competitors?… This stuff is silly nonsense.
WTF? This is a movie about planes who talk to each other, and the commenter is concerned about “real” life? “Turbo” is a movie about a snail who wins the Indy 500. A snail. Who talks. And befriends a human. (A human male, by the way, with a brother, but I digress.) And that’s all well and fine, but a female winning a race, that is totally unbelievable.
I can go on and on with examples of sexism in the fantasy world justified because there’s sexism in the real one. In “Lion King” the lionesses have to sit around, doing whatever skinny, weak, old Scar wants because only lions can lead a pride. Yet, Simba is BFFs with a Warthog and a meerkat, not to mention, he sings and dances. All that is totally plausible? “Ratatouille” is a movie about a rat who can cook. We get to see just one female chef, Colette, who has a brief monologue explaining the lack of females in the movie. French kitchens are sexist so the film is too, got that?
While we’re talking about “real life,” here’s a question for you. If, when it comes to gender, writers and producers of movies for kids, not to mention viewers, are such sticklers for “reality,” why are there so many, should we say, discrepancies? Reel Girl commenter, Nebbie, keeps a list of male characters in animation who, in the “real” world, would be female:
1) Barnyard movie and video game, Back and the Barnyard: male cattle with udders
2) The Madagascar movies and specials, The Penguins of Madagascar: Joey the male kangaroo with a pouch, male hornets with stings, King Julien the dominant male ring tailed lemur (Only female kangaroos have a pouch, ring tailed lemurs are matriarchal.)
3)Bee Movie: male worker bees, male bees with stings, Mooseblood the male bloodsucking mosquito (Only female bees, wasps, including hornets, and some ants have a sting because the sting is a modified oviposito)
4)Turbo: male snails, Burn the one female snail (Garden snails are hermaphrodites)
5) A Bugs Life, The Ant Bully, and Antz: male worker ants (Worker ants, bees, and wasps are all sterile females, the males are drones and they die soon after they mate with the queen– fertile female– ant, bee, or wasp.)
6) The Jungle Book: male elephant herd and leader (elephants are matriarchal)
7) Fantasia: female ostriches with male black and white plumage
8) Puss in Boots: The Three Diablos: Gonzalo the male tortoiseshell kitten (Most tortoiseshell cats are female. A male cat can only be tortoiseshell if it has Klinefelter’s Syndrome– XXY, usually sterile– has chimerism, or has mosaicism.)
9) Finding Nemo: Marlin the clownfish stays male after his wife died (Clownfish are protoandrous hermaphrodites; they are born male and the the most dominant male turns female when the dominant female is removed from the group.)
What’s so creepy about this is how often what is “natural” is used to justify sexism. Girls “naturally” love pink, princesses, shopping, and gazing at themselves in the mirror. Bullshit.
So here’s my question: Why, as parents, do we allow our kids to see, again and again, an imaginary world with the same manufactured sexism as the real world? It limits children, to say the least.
In the fantasy world, anything is possible. If we can’t even imagine a world without sexism, we can’t create it. And we must. If we live in a classist, racist society where women of color are maids for rich, white people, we owe it to children to show them a world where women of color are depicted as leaders and heroes. Recycling sexist narratives keeps a new generation stuck in a biased world. Don’t we want something better? When will Uhura get to captain the ship?
Having been out at a pool for a little too long yesterday, my daughter asked me to take a pic and post her favorite toy, Sunburn, on Reel Girl. Here are the two of them.
I’m being asked where to get her. To clarify, my daughter named her Sunburn. I bought her in a store in San Francisco. Will find out more about her…
We got this at the Ark.
I’m reposting Reel Girl’s list of great movies starring girls because I just updated it. Please let me know if you have movies to add. I’m also posting my initial preamble to my recommendations, explaining why it took me so long to make the list and why Reel Girl’s list is hard to get on.
This is a list of girl centered movies with strong girls. That sentence may seem redundant but sadly, it’s not. Many girl centered movies feature a girl who is a princess in distress or a cheerleader trying to keep a boyfriend or Barbie worrying about how to dress for the prom.
Or, if Hollywood allows a strong girl to appear in a movie that is not about a typical, cookie cutter “feminine” dilemma, her screen time is limited; her role is supporting: she is there to help the boy on his quest.
To clarify: the following is a list of movies with strong female main characters where the narrative is based on her brave quest.
This is not a list of HHH (triple Heroine) movies. Some movies may be included on this list such as a Barbie adventure or Kim Possible that would not get a HHH because of the main character’s plastic looks or typical princessy dilemma, but the movie is listed here because, in spite of that stereotype, it is still centered on a brave female hero who has cool adventures.
A few movies are not included on this list even though they are centered on a girl and her brave quest because the movie is simply too awful, meaning boring. “Judy Moody,” unfortunately, fits that category.
Wow, this is why it has been so hard for Reel Girl to recommend, but here we go.
These movies are for kids, not young adults.
Remember, these are movies to show your sons as well as your daughters.
This is a list in progress. Please send in your suggestions.
Reel Girl’s list of great movies starring strong girls:
Spirited Away HHH
My Neighbor Totoro HHH
Kiki’s Delivery Service HHH
Ponyo HHH
Mulan HH
Alice In Wonderland (2010) HHH
The Golden Compass HHH
Barbie Fairytopia: Mermaidia HH
The Powerpuff Girls HH
Wonder Woman HH (2009)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind HHH
Coraline HHH
The Wizard of Oz HHH
Mary Poppins HH
Pippi Longstocking HH
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe HHH
The Last Unicorn HH
The Secret World of Arrietty HHH
Avalon High HHH
Wrinkle in Time HHH
Matilda HHH
Nim’s Island HHH
Brave HHH
Epic HH
The Croods HH
Ramona and Beezus HH
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl HHH
Fly Away Home HHH
Movies suggested to me that I have not yet seen:
The Secret Garden
Anne of Green Gables
Tinker Bell
Tinker Bell sequel
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Nancy Drew
National Velvet
Samantha: An American Girl Holiday
The Fox and the Child
Leafie a Hen Into the Wild
The Cat Returns
Whisper of the Heart
The Secret of N.I.M.H.
Castle in the Sky
The Wolf Children Ame and Yuki
Empress Chung
Yobi the Five Tailed Fox
Akeelah and the Bee
Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken
Nanny McPhee
An American Girl: McKenna Shoots for the Stars
Heidi
Ronia the Robbers’ Daughter
Sailor Moon, the movie 1 & 2
Pippi Longstocking sequels
Madeline
The Worst Witch
Return to Oz
The Secret of Roan Inish
Laura’s Star
Olive, the Other Reindeer
Home on the Range
Cave of the Golden Rose
Cardcaptor Sakura
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Totally Spies
More Reel Girl lists
After finishing the book this morning, we downloaded the movie, “A Wrinkle in Time.”
It’s really good. Watching it, I realized there’s even a female I missed mentioning in my review of the book: the Happy Medium. Though in the movie, this character is played by a man, yet still referred to as she.
No surprise that the book is better. The special effects are low budget and cheesey, but I don’t think my kids noticed.
One scene from the movie that is better than the book is when Mrs. Which explains a tesseract, or a wrinkle in time. In the book, Mrs. Which brings a string together, in the movie a piece of material, to show how a bug can shortcut across a big space by ‘wrinkling’ the distance. In the movie, Mrs. Which refers to the bug as “she.”
One last cool thing about the movie. My four year old daughter burst out: “I want to be Meg! Don’t you?”
