Author Archives: margotmagowan

Teaching your daughter how to pose like a girl

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Yesterday was picture day at my children’s school and, according to my kids, the girls were told to tilt their heads while boys were told to sit up straight.

Why is posing for school pictures an issue we ought to care about?

First of all, why is a kid taught to position her head according to what gender she is? How stupid is that?

Secondly, the classic female head tilt is one of the most annoying qualities of the ubiquitous, submissive princess. In coloring books, toy figures, and on diapers, female figures are most often positioned smiling, eyes lowered, and head tilted.

Imagine you are standing next to someone you love and admire, and that person is giving an important talk. How might you pose? Smiling with a head tilt? That would show you are attentive, supportive, and proud of him. Classic First Lady.

Now if you were the speaker delivering the talk, how might you pose? We’ve made those power positions into figures of speech: “Chin up!” or “Hold your head high” and even “Looking down your nose at someone.” That would be the opposite of a head tilt.

Say you’re Ann Romney and you’ve got to make a speech at the Republican convention. How might you pose to show how grateful, sweet, and non-threatening you still are?

Can you imagine Mitt doing this?

On Reel Girl, I’ve posted about gendered posing from the art of Edouard Manet to Wonder Woman. Ever wonder where our kids get trained to stand like a girl or a boy, besides by museums, toys, and politicians? Apparently, authority figures in America’s schools.

Update: I communicated with my kids’ school and was told by the principal that boys and adults were included in the head tilt, that he was asked to tilt his head ‘ever so slightly,’ but appreciates my concern, and will talk to them about it.

I’m psyched he got back to me right away and is talking to them about it. From what I heard from my kids, it wasn’t a slight head tilt, more like the princess kind, and they were telling me about the individual, not group, photos. Here is the web site from the photoform. What do you think of these images? (After you click, wait a second for them to come up)

Muscles, muscles, ass, muscles and why poses matter

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“Look at the girl, she’s sticking her butt out!” said my daughter. She showed me this photo in a costumes catalog we just received in the mail.

(Sorry about the flash glare.) Technically, its her hip, but the point is the same: emphasis, pelvis.

Imagine the males standing like that. What do these poses communicate?

I’ve blogged quite a bit about sexism in superheroes and ass emphasis. This post on the Avengers has gotten about 700 shares. Check out the great art if you haven’t seen it yet. Why do poses for superheroes matter? Because heroes are heroes!

What are our kids being taught to idolize in females? Weird twitches?

And of course, sexist posing isn’t limited to the fantasy world. Look at this photo in this month’s Vanity Fair, a profile of MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (via Miss Representation/ Salon.)

Did you read that part about hosts on a news channel? Imagine these poses reversed. She’s up front. He’s in back, showing leg. What would your kids think about men and women if they saw this photo?

Salon writes:

the image tells the familiar story of a man who commands the attention of others and a woman who seeks only the attention of that man.

You’d think Catwoman would want to seek something more.

School photos whiten teeth, even skin tone, and banish flyaway hair

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It’s photo day at my kid’s school, and if I pay a little more, my daughter gets treated like a supermodel!

If I order “Basic Retouching,” her face comes back to me blemish free. For even more perfection in my first grader’s portrait, I can buy “Premium Retouching” which  “whitens teeth, evens skin tone, removes blemishes, scars, and flyaway hair.” Think that includes replacing lost teeth?

Unfortunately, Lifetouch, no matter how much airbrushing you offer us parents, you can’t get past those cheesey backgrounds and fake smiles. Even skin tone is the least of your challenges. In fact, your best quality is how you regularly and consistently document the humiliation of picture day. We’d all be better off if you stopped trying to get more money out of us and just let kids be kids, flyaway hair and all.

 

Why is Dora sunbathing in the freezer aisle?

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Look who I saw while searching for fishsticks at Whole Foods:

Remember when Dora used to be cool?

Sadly, Breaded Fishie Dora looks less like her former self and more like sexy Ms. Green getting stalked by Yellow on an M and Ms package:

This pose– one leg out, one leg bent, in a bathing suit and smiling at the camera– is commonly used when toy, food, and game companies are marketing products to girls. Why not show Dora swimming instead of vamping? Does this pose say: “Look what I can do!” or “Look how cute I am?”

Next time you’re shopping, check out packaging featuring boy and girl characters. Boy characters, whether on cereal boxes or toys, will be doing things. Girl characters will be looking “pretty.” What do these stereotypes repeatedly teach our kids about gender? What do they tell our kids that they will get attention for? That they are capable of?

American moms shelling out thousands for girl babies

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Slate reports on moms who are shelling out thousands of dollars to gender select girl babies in order to “balance families.”  Here’s a typical reason why moms want girls: “I’m not into sports. I’m not into violent games. I’m not into a lot of things boys represent and boys do…”

So what happens when your girl baby becomes a soccer star? Should she get a sex change operation?

WTF? This is Target’s gender segregated Jim Crow toy aisles run amuck.

Rebecca Traister tweets:

Do these moms know that not all of their daughters will like pink princesses and that some of their sons will?

Slate reports:

Gender selection now rakes in revenues of at least $100 million every year. The average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year. Fertility doctors foresee an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer. Why not see who your kid grows up to be instead of deciding her personality for her? Can you try that, parents?

If this gender selection really happens, if parents promoting gender stereotypes are backed up and supported by the medical establishment, America is going to have a generation of confused, unhappy children.

Why not see who your child grows up to be instead of trying your hardest to decide all that for her? Can you try that, parents?

This blog, Reel Girl, is dedicated to imagining gender equality in the fantasy world. There isn’t a mom out there who hasn’t fantasized about who her baby is going be when she grows up. But what if moms tried harder, while doing all that fantasizing, to be a little more creative in what they imagine? I know it can be challenging when we’re surrounded by art, books, films, TV, science, and stores that relentlessly promote gender stereotypes. But what if moms, for example, instead of worrying that their kids might turn out gay, worked to create a world that treats gay people more fairly? Your kid is going to be who she is going to be, right? The best we can do is support them and help to provide real choices for them as their destiny unravels. If moms could truly imagine gender equality in the fantasy world, let it exist in our own heads, I have no doubt, we would change the world. And maybe that’s why it’s so scary to even try.

Who was healthier post-baby: fat Jessica Simpson or thin Jessica Valenti?

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Founder of Feministing.com and author of Full Frontal Feminism Jessica Valenti recently came out with her book Why Have Kids? While pitching stories to media outlets about issues on motherhood covered by her book, including paid parental leave and affordable childcare in America, a major news organization came back to her, emailing this suggestion for a story:

Would Jessica be interested in writing something about weight loss after having a baby? We’re doing a lot of coverage around Jessica Simpson’s efforts to lose the baby pounds, and we’d love to hear from Jessica Valenti about what it was like for her to shed the weight.

So here is a feminist writer– probably the most well-known one of her generation– with a new book out on motherhood and all this so-called “news” organization wants to know is how she lost her baby weight? Seriously?

On her own web site, Valenti posts a video where she reveals her secret for losing that weight so fast, so easily: she had a preemie. Her baby weighed just two pounds. Valenti was living in a hospital, stressed out and sleepless, watching her baby cling to life.

I am so happy Valenti posted this video, because in doing so, she takes on the bullshit myth that this obsession with women and fat has anything to do with health. It doesn’t.

Contrary to popular belief, all thin people are not healthier than all fat people. There are plenty of thin people who smoke cigarettes, yo-yo diet, do drugs, and are actually sick. There are plenty of fat people who exercise daily. There are fat vegans and fat vegetarians.

When you see a “fat” person, in a magazine or walking down the street, you often don’t know if she’s just lost fifty pounds. You don’t know if she just gotten sober and is healthier than she’s ever been in her life. Or maybe she just got out of an abusive relationship. What’s more, her own doctor often has no clue what’s going with her, because doctors rarely ask, yet, magically, they still know everything about what their patients should be eating.

After the birth of her baby, Valenti was sick and her baby was sick, but she lost that baby weight. So its all good, right?

After Jessica Simpson had her baby, her baby was healthy (9 lbs, 13 oz) and she was healthy, yet, she was mocked for being fat. She’s still talking about how she can’t lose the weight as fast as she’d like, and how she really needs to, because, you know, “extra weight” isn’t healthy.

Fat obsession is not about health. It’s about judging and controlling women’s bodies. Thank you Jessica Valenti for calling that out in this great video.

Lee Miller and Man Ray at SF’s Legion of Honor

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Ever heard of Lee Miller?

She was an artist, photographer, war correspondent, model, and girlfriend of the famous surrealist Man Ray.

There’s an exhibition right now at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor “Man Ray/ Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism.” It was fascinating for me to see this show the day after I went to the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the SF MOMA. In many ways, Miller seems like a precursor to Sherman. Like Sherman, Miller was obsessed with depicting females and female body parts in a way these subjects, though done so many times before, hadn’t yet been presented.

Miller’s photographs show heads that appear to be severed by using lighting techniques or positioning them over cloaks, and one that I loved of a hand that appears to be floating, fiercely clutching an elaborate hair do. The creepiest and most Shermanesque image– or I suppose Sherman is Milleresque: the photographer stole severed breasts from a hospital (where a patient had a radical mastectomy)  and photographed them on dinner plates. It amazes me that Miller had the guts to create this photograph, in 1930 no less. Miller has many more fascinating shots in the show including a female head suffocating under a  bell jar (before the more famous Sylvia Path used that image) and a model pinned against the wall by knives thrown by another woman.

The next gallery documents Miller and Man Ray’s break-up. When she left him, he was tormented, writing pages of her name: “Elizabeth.” There are also framed love letters and a series of art works of Miller’s body parts by the obsessive Man Ray: giant lips floating through the air, an eye attached a  metronome, severed legs. You can see why Miller experienced herself as so fragmented and disembodied. Her career as a model obviously contributed to this experience.

In one fascinating pairing in the exhibition, there is nude portrait of Miller by Man Ray next to Miller’s nude self-portrait. While Man Ray’s photograph has Miller in a typical seductive pose with typical soft lighting, Miller’s joyful art in a powerful pose is far more unusual and striking. When I looked at Miller’s photograph, the highlighted biceps and subtle smile– it also reminds me of poses made famous so many years later by Madonna.

Another gallery shows Miller’s war correspondent work, she was one of the few females to photograph war time– still not a profession that many women venture into.

This show is a beautiful and fascinating documentation of how a passionate relationship creates great art.

Reel Girl rates “Man Ray/ Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism” ***HH***

Cindy Sherman has her way with Old Masters at SF Moma

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If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at entering yet another museum gallery full of Carvaggios or Della Francescas, bare-breasted Madonnas gazing lovingly at their chubby, man-faced babies; or any bare-breasted women gazing at any baby; or seen one too many portraits of important looking old men with bald heads and big noses, the Cindy Sherman show at the SF Moma is for you. When I walked into the room of her Old Master parodies, featuring stiff poses, prosthetic breasts, giant noses, and garish bald caps, Sherman in all of them, I felt like getting on my knees and giving thanks. It was like she was saying, “Fuck you, Old Masters. You’re all the same. How do you think women feel when they’re stuck in gallery after gallery of the same old thing? You know what it looks like to us? Check this out.”

Sherman doesn’t only mock Old Masters. If you’ve ever been grossed out looking at a portrait of a possy of TV housewives in Us Weekly, if you’ve ever thought those women looked more alien than human, you will love Sherman’s art. With garish make-up and enormously scaled photographs, Sherman shows the grotesque in images we find normal, or are supposed to find normal. Or fun. Or cute. Or titillating. The way the show text describes the themes is that Sherman uses “images embedded in our imagination.” I love that description because that is also what Reel Girl is all about. A lot of what I find seriously creepy, Sherman does as well, and it’s all in this show: clowns, society women, hardcore porn, fairy tales and aging movie stars. (Now, if I could just get her take on My Little Pony and Polly Pocket.)

What is so great about this exhibition is that Sherman is in all of her own photos. She is subject and object. By taking on both of these roles, she shows how fucked up it is that women exist in a world that is so male dominated that we actually experience ourselves through male eyes and male narratives. As John Berger wrote: Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched. I’ve read about that idea, thought about that idea, written about it, but I’ve never seen it presented so brilliantly as in this show.

One thing that is kind of a bummer: everything is grotesque and ugly. By the time I was through the rooms, I was desperate for some beauty. I started to wonder what Sherman found beautiful, if anything. Of course, she must see beauty. This show was not the place where she wanted to present that particular aspect of existence. Maybe her art isn’t focused on showing beauty at all. Which is fine, of course, she’s the artist, but I found myself hopeful to see a show where she was doing more acting and less reacting.

Reel Girl rates Cindy Sherman retrospective ***HHH***

Eating like crazy, rich, white people

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blue milk posted this intro:

Oh my god, Ta-Nehisi Coates knows how to write an Opinion piece. Here he is in The New York Times talking about the relationship between intuitive eating and historical affluence and how this all relates to culture and politics. It is an exceptionally clever way of framing the discussion.

Here’s the excerpt:

I left the first of these dinners in bemused dudgeon. “Crazy rich white people,”  I would scoff. “Who goes to a nice dinner and leaves hungry?” In fact, they were not hungry at all. I discovered this a few dinners later, when I found myself embroiled in this ritual of half-dining. It was as though some invisible force was slowing my fork, forcing me into pauses, until I found myself nibbling and sampling my way through the meal. And when I rose both caffeinated and buzzed, I was, to my shock, completely satiated.

Like many Americans, I was from a world where “finish your plate” was gospel. The older people there held hunger in their recent memory. For generations they had worked with their arms, backs and hands. With scarcity a constant, and manual labor the norm, “finish your plate” fit the screws of their lives. I did not worry for food. I sat at my desk staring at a computer screen for much of the day. But still I ate like a stevedore. In the old world, this culture of eating kept my forebears alive. In this new one it was slowly killing me…

..Using the wrong tool for the job is a problem that extends beyond the dining room. The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll, and these are not the same as the set of practices required to write the great American novel. The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language. It is to teach him a new one.

Thank you Ta-Nehisi Coates for writing this! And to the feminist motherhood blog blue milk for picking it up.

Every time I blog about the way I eat or how I feed my family– intuitive eating, letting my kids eat whatever and whenever they want, and that they never get in trouble for “wasting” food— I get comments about how wasteful and unhealthy I am, along with what a terrible mother I am.

Intuitive eating is about so much more than eating. It’s about learning how to listen to your body and listen to yourself. It’s about self respect and independence and health and not giving a shit what other people think or say about you.

If you don’t know how to listen to your  body, learn. Buy the books When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies or Preventing Childhood Eating Problems. Raise your kids to be intuitive eaters. That is, honestly, the best way to stop “wasting food.” And it sure makes meal times more pleasant.

Reel Girl’s game of the week: Hedbanz

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I’ve blogged about games before: Sexist apps for little kids and the card games Slamwich and Sleeping Queens. But now Reel Girl has a whole new category. My family has started a weekend ritual of evening board games during quiet time instead of reading, so I’m looking at lots of games.  The switch in routine is a struggle for me, because I love reading and kind of dislike board games. It’s not that I hate them, I just didn’t get the point. I’d rather be reading. But according to my kids’ teachers, there is a point: math and verbal skills, art skills, rule following, winning and losing, and together time. The teachers are also right that my kids are at such different reading levels, that it is fun (when they’re not cheating or fighting) to do something together.

My first rec is Hedbanz. This game is super fun. All my kids, ages 3 – 9, can play this game and feel challenged at different levels. One kid holds a card with a picture up to her forehead (actually, most people place them there in headbands, thus the name of the game, but we lost our bands.) She asks yes or no questions (Am I alive, am I an animal etc) Because of the simple pictures, it’s easy for the three year old to feel like she’s a part of it. The older kids, obviously, like to guess the answer faster.

Needless to say, I love that the box that features two girls and one boy playing together and no sexist pictures.

Please send me your game recs!
Reel Girl rates Hedbanz ***HHH***