Early this morning while I was meditating, a mouse ran up my stairs. I know Buddha had to deal with worse but it wasn’t cool. Alice (age 5) wrote a poem about it:
Mouse in the House
Mouses like crumbs,
But they are so tiny,
And mouses are bigger than crumbs.
Then Lucy made us a special breakfast. Alice doesn’t like butter right now so Lucy used a substitution. Here’s her recipe:
Chocolate cinnamon toast
cinnamon
sugar
chocolate sauce
sliced bread
Mix up the cinnamon and sugar sweet as you like it. Toast the bread. Spread the chocolate sauce on the bread. Sprinkle on the cinnamon sugar.
A 6os period show, “The Playboy Club” attempted capitalize on the popularity of the swanky “Mad Men” series. But as former undercover bunny Gloria Steinem has said repeatedly: “Playboy clubs were not glamorous. They were tacky.”
Guess she’s not the only one who thinks so. Meanwhile, Women and Hollywood names “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm Hollywood Feminist of the Day for his astute comments on rape made at a benefit for a rape treatment center in LA.
I’m writing a Middle Grade book, publishing industry-speak for a chapter book for 8 – 12 year olds (though I’m thinking age 6 – infinity). I’m a voracious reader, but mostly I spend my precious few moments of reading time with contemporary adult novels or books about politics and culture. Obviously, I read chapter books with the kids, but they read ahead on their own and when it’s my turn again, I can’t follow a thing. So I’m not counting those books as real reading time.
I’m reading The Lighting Thief on my own now and love it. I’ve always been a fan of Greek mythology, and it’s cool to read about it in a contemporary setting. It’s male dominated of course (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades “the big three” divide up the world as in the original; Percy, our hero, has adventures; females come in and out to aid his quest) but I’m not focusing on female characters right now (or trying not to, ha!) I’m mainly looking for great writing. My favorite kids’ author ever may be Roald Dahl.
I’m writing a fantasy book so that’s probably the genre I should stick to. I’m looking for good contemporary series and classics.
T shirt-gate has a positive side. After JCPenney’s “I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother had to do it for me,” shirt for girls incited a protest that went viral, more parents are catching on to how damaging kidworld’s sexist marketing has become.
Pigtail Pals, a site that creates clothing empowering to girls, is getting thousands of new customers and repeatedly selling out of its shirt created in response to Penney’s that reads, “Pretty’s got nothing to do with it.”
It’s great that parents are choosing more carefully when and how to spend their dollars because now as never before TV series, movies, toys, products, apps, video games are all linked, figuratively and literally by phones, computers, tablets on and on creating a super-monochromatic world to easily push products.
Splitting kids and adults, or for that matter, penguins, into ever tinier categories has proved a surefire way to boost profits. So where there was once a big group called kids we now have toddlers, pre-schoolers, tweens, young-adolescents and older adolescents, each with their own developmental and marketing profile…One of the easiest ways to segment the market is to magnify gender differences or invent them where they did not previously exist.
Just think about face creams. As any woman who has walked through a department store knows, you are not advised to buy one bottle of moisturizer but a day cream, night cream, eye cream, neck or decolletage, and then an SPF for face and another for body because, you”ll be warned: “You can get an SPF in your daily moisturizer, but you shouldn’t really ask one cream to do two jobs.”
Why sell a brown bat when you can get parents to buy one that’s pink and one that’s blue?
Adweek reports on new mom, Jenny Gill, who gave birth at New York’s Cornell Weill hospital and had her picture snapped the way you do when taking your kid to the zoo or the Academy of Sciences, and then was offered a Disney onesie, free.
Gill says:
“In the middle of taking the pictures, she pulls out this cutely wrapped onesie and says, ‘Oh, here’s a free Disney onesie. We’ll just need your email address,’” Gill recalls. “It weirded me out. I just gave birth, please lay off with the Disney already!”
Disney is unlikely to lay off anytime soon, and neither are the countless other brands in need of dollars. They’re part of a trend—fueled in part by the growth of digital devices—toward aggressively targeting a demographic that didn’t exist, in marketers’ eyes, until recently: infants to 3-year-olds. By getting their logos and iconic characters in front of babies—even those with still-blurry eyesight—they hope to establish brand-name preference before she or he has uttered a word…
Dan Acuff, a former marketing consultant to Hasbro, Mattel, Nestlé, and others. “Babies don’t distinguish between reality and fantasy, so they think, ‘Let’s get them while they’re susceptible.’”
Which brings us back to movies. As I’ve written before, it’s no fun picking on loveable cartoon characters. Everyone, including me, adores Nemo and the Lion King and Ratatouille, all great films. But let’s face it: these movies are also the first step in a mass marketing machine. When girl characters are left out or given limited roles (see Reel Girl’s gallery of 2011 movies ) both genders learn repeatedly that boys are more important and can do many more things than girls can. And as marketer Dan Acuff implies above, fantasy creates reality.
My friend saw this at a thrift store. Thank you Abercombie & Fitch for yet another female denigrating fashion statement. Sadly, it may be time to create a Reel Girl gallery of all these stupid shirts.
Many Reddit readers were outraged. A user who calls herself PrincessJingles chimed in: “‘Allergic to algebra’…really? The last thing the young women of our world need is another reason to think being dumb is cool. This tee is an affront to learned women the world over who have the audacity to dream of a day when women will be respected equally by their male peers, not because of some feminist movement, but simply because we give no reason for our male counterparts to think otherwise. Shame on you.”
Forever 21, a Los Angeles-based retailer that’s popular with teens, is selling the tee for $12.80. This isn’t the retailer’s only shirt implying that girls are stupid and uninterested in school. The words “Skool sucks” are boldly written across one shirt and another reads “I love school” on the front and “Not…” on the back.
After furious parents protested JCPenney’s sexist T shirt that read “I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me,” the massive chain store pulled it. It’s is a huge victory for parents and kids, boys included, because when kids repeatedly get the message that girls are only supposed to be pretty, it’s bad for everyone.
Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals has created an awesome T-shirt that’s selling like hotcakes. The shirt reads: “Pretty has nothing to do with it.” You can buy the shirt here.
If you don’t know of Wardy or her site and blog, check it out. Here’s how she describes her products/site’s mission:
“Pigtail Pals was created by Melissa Wardy, a mom and entrepreneur who was fed up of the limitations and stereotypes found in children’s clothing. Melissa wanted role models for her daughter that exemplified courage, intelligence, and imagination.
She doesn’t want to confine her little girl to the pink and purple world being marketed to her. When Melissa couldn’t find what she wanted, Pigtail Pals was born. It is our intention to show girls that they may be bold, adventurous and heroic just like the boys!
A Pigtail Pal doesn’t wish upon a star and wait for her prince to show up. A Pigtail Pal gets into her rocket ship and finds that star all on her own!”
When I was a kid, people used to say “life begins at 40.” I thought that was just BS old people said to make themselves feel better. But it’s true. That is if you haven’t waited until 40 to start having children like many women these days. I work with a woman who’s five years older than me and has a 12 year old.
My children were raised and gone off to college by the time I was 45 . Empty nest? It’s pure heaven folks. I do what I want, when I want and if I want to. My time is my own, my life is my own, I did everything I signed up for and now I can be as selfish and self indulgent as I want. I watch what I want on tv and drink beer and walk my dogs and there’s an old guy living in the basement who loves his leather lazy-boy.
I don’t even miss the leering. I thought I would miss the power of youth and looks but I don’t. It’s a relief to be free of all the crap that goes along with being objectified. It’s very relaxing not to worry about looking at a man in the eyes more than two seconds and having them proceed to think I just lit up a billboard across my head that said “eff me.”
I look at young mothers in the grocery store with a couple of fussy children and I see that look and I remember, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.
I’m so excited about the new book Skary Childrin and the Carousel of Sorrow by Katy Towell that instead of blogging about it, I’m going to sneak off and finish reading it now that my kids are, finally and thankfully, off at school. More soon, but try to get your hands on this amazing book as soon as possible. And, please, Hollywood, make a movie! You can order the book here.
I know lots of parents do allowance but that hasn’t worked so well in our family. There was anxiety about lost money, skipped payments, fights over what the money should be used for. It didn’t seem like a great way to introduce financial life to my kids.
So I switched strategies and my new plan seems to be working well. I just try to talk to my kids about money without attaching emotion to the topic, without getting into any big issues of rich or poor, without even focusing much on values like saving or spending. I am basically teaching them about money the same way I teach them about new words or the solar system.
My oldest kid is eight and I’ve taught her about our mortgage. She can read the monthly statement. She knows how much we owe on the house, how much we pay every month, how much of that goes to the down payment and how much goes to the bank, though she doesn’t understand what interest is. She loves to open up the statement and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t equate the house or the money we owe with anxiety or status or anything much at all.
My hope for my daughters is that they grow up financially literate and comfortable talking about money, that its natural for them to do so and not scary, that they are able to talk about money with bosses, business partners, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands or whomever.
Maybe in a year or so, I’ll attempt allowance again.
On my birthday this year, I posted about how great it felt to be 42. With all that I’d heard and read about women on the other side of forty– who knew? I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Fascinated by my state of mind, I read several books about women and aging, trying to figure out if other people, especially women, felt like I did.
One of my favorites is called Between a Rock and a Hot Place: Why Fifty is Not the New Thirty by Tracey Jackson. Jackson is hilarious. I was laughing out loud for the whole read. Jackson and I are different in many ways, our attitudes about plastic surgery being just one, but she writes totally honestly, it seems, about what getting older is like for her. Her basic thesis is that if you accept change, go with the flow, don’t try to be thirty, life is different but good.
As I read, I started to wonder if perhaps menopause isn’t about “drying up” and nature having no use for you anymore, as I’d heard in the past. Maybe menopause includes focusing your body’s energy away from reproduction, using precious resources elsewhere. Curious, I read The Wisdom of Menopause by Christiane Northrup, an ob/ gyn. She goes into a multitude of ways that she believes menopause jump starts the brain into a mind body revolution. Again, Northrup is not saying fifty is thirty. She’s basically saying life is a mysterious adventure.
Another book I absolutely love is Prime Time by Jane Fonda. This book is so brave. Like Jackson’s, it’s another honest account about growing older. It may not be your story, but it’s Fonda’s and she tells it well. Though the book jacket and PR material promotes the book as “making the most of all of your life” this book is really about the “Third Act” as Fonda calls it. I guess the publishers thought billing it that way wouldn’t sell. Thank God Jane Fonda is Jane Fonda and can write about whatever she wants and get it published.
There seems to be no subject this writer is afraid of tackling from death to money to sex. Fonda has one chapter I love about how society as a whole benefits from older people. This perspective is such a different take than what you generally hear from the media about the older generation being a huge, economic drain on everyone else. Fonda writes about “generativity” an idea crucial to healthy aging where your focus moves from yourself to “a broader social radius, giving to the community and larger world.” She also writes about the “silver market:”
Economists argue that there is an important dividend that comes from the increasing number of older people who are relatively well off and who now make up the greater proportion of the market share. Many retirees have accumulated wealth and other significant spending power, which stimulates jobs and financial growth. Older individuals make invaluable investments in real estate, continuing education, technologies for independent living, travel, tourism, health services, and the like…
A study by the MetLife Mature Market Institute reported that the estimated spending power of baby boomers will soon exceed $2 trillion dollars annually…however, the degree to which the silver market thrives is highly policy dependent. In countries where sound retirement plans are provided, older individuals feel secure to spend their wealth rater than save it…
Older individuals donate more to universities, charities, and civil organizations than at any other age…
Older citizens are active citizens; their efforts to volunteer help hold up communities. They organize and participate in civic organizations, run elections, mentor young people, support their peers in long term car and hospice, lead recreation groups, and assist visitors and hospital, libraries, schools and museums.”
Another book I read is called Fortytude by Sarah Brokaw who is a therapist and noticed many of her clients became happier after 40. Though I understand her curiousity leading her to write the book when so few have been written on this, Brokaw is my age and I found those written by people who had actually experienced more aging more interesting.
I also read The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife by Marianne Wiliamson and though it had some good parts, it seemed to mostly be the same material covered in her previous, better books, just repackaged.
I do have a question that I can’t seem to find an answer to. After reading all these books, I want to know: do emotions age? There’s quite a bit written about the brain aging, and of course, the rest of the body aging. But it seems, at least from what I’ve read and lived, older adults experience emotions just as intensely as babies. And if emotions don’t wither, perhaps, as we grow older, do we potentially become more skilled in handling them? Could this be why I’m happier?
