I am so mad at this idiotic government. What are we supposed to tell our kids about conflict-resolution? Seriously. What a load of hypocrites grown-ups are.
Last week, my Fifth grade daughter’s overnight trip on the Balclutha ship, that she’s been looking forward to for years, was cancelled. Today, I found out the annual sandcastle event, where all the Fifth graders in San Francisco get together on the beach for a massive sand-castle building competition, has been cancelled. That’s two landmark events of Fifth grade, not happening. My daughter’s experience of this year is dramatically altered because of this shutdown. And of course, what’s happening to her is echoed all around the country in ways much more serious and horrible.
It is amazing to me that people can be so selfish and hurt this country and its citizens in a multitude of ways all to disobey a law that is already in place. I’m speechless.
When I saw this quote circulating around Tumblr last night I assumed it was made up. Did Lino DiSalvo, Frozen‘s head of animation, really say that animating female characters is difficult because they’re so “sensitive” and “you have to keep them pretty”? Unlike male characters, who are far, far more stoic than we emotional womenfolk, amirite? But no. It appears that this is a legit thing that he actually said.
Here’s the quote:
Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very — you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna (Kristen Bell) being angry.
I’m going to throw up. There you have it, the whole reason for the Minority Feisty. There’s basically one type of girl. What can you possibly do with 2, or 3, or 4, or more in a story? How can they all be different? A girl is a girl is a girl, right?
When storytellers challenge the dominance of the Minority Feisty, they will be forced to challenge the sexism and stereotypes that support allowing just one female character– or a tiny minority of them– in a story as well i.e. “Don’t all angry females look the same?” This is why, obviously, the Minority Feisty trope is so pernicious and has stuck around for so long. Change her, change everything.
It’s disturbing that DiSalvo’s sexist mindset is typical of those who have the massive power to create and distribute stories to a new generation of children. A mindset, by the way, that has been dictating stories, and who and what heroes are, through history, art, religion, and politics, for thousands of years.
All I’d heard about acclaimed director Alfonso Cuaron’s new movie “Gravity” were glowing reviews until someone posted Beyond the Trailer’s review on Reel Girl’s Facebook page. Disgusted with Sandra Bullock’s screaming, hysterical, and annoying character, Beyond the Trailer refers to a recent interview where Cuaron says he chose a female lead for the movie in order to “strip it from heroists.” Beyond the Trailer says:
Are Caron and his son saying women can’t be seen as heroes? Tell that to the women who helped forge our clandestine services as spies during World War 1 and World War 2 or the Air Force’s current 60 female fighter pilots. Or how about Victoria Lee Soto and Anne Marie Murphy, teachers who used themselves as human shields between Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza and their students and were fatally shot.
Of course, that list doesn’t even begin to cover all the female heroes. While Beyond the Trailer says “heroist” means “people who admire heroes,” I’d never heard the word, so I looked it up. I can’t find a definition. The interview where Cuaron uses the word also refers to his native Spanish and thick accent. Did he make the word up? Is it a Spanish word? Was it misheard? Do you know the word? Though I can’t find a definition, from the context, I can’t see what else Cuaron would mean besides, as Beyond the Trailer says, that he made a movie with a female lead because he wanted to make a movie without a hero. I, too, feel disgusted and appalled.
Here’s Beyond the Trailer’s review:
Update: After I blogged, I Tweeted Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood, which is one of my favorite blogs, to get her thoughts. She Tweeted back:
maybe he meant that he wanted to make it different from the typical conversations of heroes and throw a wrench in it…I respectfully disagree and feel she was a huge hero.
Gravity is important because it is a movie that will be a part of the Oscar conversation for the duration and that means we will be talking about a female astronaut who has to basically overcome every adversity you could imagine to survive… Even the films about men that are not even a part of the Oscar conversations are about male heroes — albeit superheroes — but this film takes a woman, a scientist, an incredibly smart woman who needs to figure out how to save herself. Not a typical Hollywood movie to say the least. It’s a film about competence, about training, about science and resiliency and, yes, Sandra Bullock is a hero, and she’s a hero who actually flies in space.
1. One who worships heroes and wants to become one
2. Someone that creates or nurtures heroes Alfred Pennyworth was a heroist to Batman
From this definition, heroist doesn’t sound negative, as in someone obsessed with conventional ideas of a what a hero is. Alfred Pennyworth is a noble character. So, I still don’t get it. As far as the comments who describe the screaming reaction fits in with the story, I agree with Cat who comments here:
It isn’t gender neutral for the female character to be hysterical and incompetent while the male character is calmly trying to keep her focused and give her instructions…The issue isn’t that this film depicts one hysterical female character. The issue is that it reinforces a negative pattern and though they could have reversed the genders, they didn’t.
Today, I had a field trip to the Balclutha, but sadly the park was closed because of the government shutdown. My teachers scheduled the trip a year ago, and it is a very popular trip, so we’re probably not going to be able to reschedule. I feel disappointed because my whole class was really looking forward to it. We were going to get to cook food on the boat and stay overnight. We were all going to have jobs on the ship and get to go out in boat which would have been really fun, so I hope we can reschedule. Do you think there’s a way we can make that happen? We all feel so sad we couldn’t go, because today just happened to be a bad day.
The Democrats think everyone should have health care which is good. But the Republicans also have a point. We don’t want to lose all of our money. But I don’t think we would. If Americans are healthy, that is good for the country.
So many people who are hired by the government have lost their jobs today. I hope that the Republicans and Democrats and all the other people in the government come to a compromise soon so people can ask get their jobs back and everything can go back to normal. I hope we can go on our field trip to the Balclutha.
Here are some more stories from parents of little kids to Reel Girl about gender stereotyping and bullying.
From Isaac:
My 5 year old daughter and I were reading a comic book which had an ad for Avengers shoes. She excitedly pointed them out.
I asked her if she would want to wear Avengers shoes. She said yes, and then she paused for a second before adding that her friends would say that they were boy shoes. I asked her how she felt about that, and she said that she would tell them that clothes are for everyone.
It’s so messed up that she’s aware that wearing something she thinks is cool is… a political act. It doesn’t faze her but she knows it’s screwed up.
From soymilk:
We first ran into gender conformity when our 3 1/2 year old son went to kindy, and was told his purple hat was a girl’s hat. He was confused and we had a talk about it and he told the offending child the next day that it was his hat and he was a boy so it’s a boy’s hat.
In school he’s faced being called a girl for choosing to have a butterfly painted on his face on fair day (instead of a spider or something scary like the other boys). He’s recently (at the age of 8) started getting into painting his nails, so he had to deal with being told that he was a girl for doing it. But he stuck with it, with support from home and understanding teachers, and now everyone in his class enjoys seeing what colour his nails are this week, and he has boys telling him that they think it’s silly to say some things are for girls and not boys.
From Elizabeth:
My daughter had a similar experience with being teased for wearing “boys” shoes and even though she *gets* why it is happening, it still hurt and made her more wary of her choices. This stuff is so limiting, and I get beyond frustrated when people say it doesn’t matter. It matters a lot.
From Anne:
I’ve been reading Ramona the Pest to my 5yo and it sparked a great conversation about this the other night. Ramona gets very upset that she has to wear brown ” boy” rainboots instead of the red or white boots the girls wear. My son was very puzzled and troubled about why red boots were ” girl ” boots. We talked about how silly and arbitrary these distinctions are. He said he still didn’t wan t to wear pink to school, but he did say he liked pink.
From Maritsa:
A 10-year old son of my friend war wearing his fuchsia shorts all summer long and loved it. But, in September, he refused to wear it at school arguing the other boys would laugh at him…
This is so sad and the thing is, my 4 yr old daughter is not a huge Star Wars fan. She could go either way with her shoes, pink and princessy or ‘boy’ shoes. It’s not like she is passionate about her choice and totally committed. And that’s why this is so frustrating, or part of the reason why. Our children’s “choices” are so limited and shaping who they are and who they become.
Please keep telling your stories to Reel Girl. No videos yet, but I’d love to see them! Watch my daughter talking about getting bullied for ‘boy’ shoes here.
There is so much to love about this interview with Elizabeth Gilbert in Slate, you’ve got to read the whole thing. Gilbert explains that she feels, in her life, she was saved by her work. Not once, but many times. She didn’t see that story in literature so she decided to write it.
I really did set out to try to write a 19th century novel with a more complete female experience. The only two endings that women ever got in those books—which are stupendous books with fantastic characters and extraordinary women—but at the end you either married Mr. Darcy or you were under the wheels of a train. I really wanted to write a book about a woman whose life is saved by her work, which I feel is not a story we see often, but as somebody whose life has been saved many, many times by my own work, it’s a really important story to me.
Do you relate? I sure do.
Gilbert talks about what happened to her when she wrote a man’s story and when she wrote a woman’s story.
It has not escaped my attention that when I wrote about a man’s emotional journey they gave me the National Book Award nomination, but when I wrote about a woman’s emotional journey, they shunted me into the “chick lit” dungeon.
And here’s some inspiring advice.
If we’ve somehow internalized this idea that it’s disgraceful or lacking in seriousness to discuss our feelings, our dreams, the ways in which we want to become better human beings—either that somehow those are trivial topics, and of course they are not at all; they’re the big topics, the only topics—if we’ve somehow decided that that’s going to subject us to ridicule or dismissal then that’s kind of our own fault, I think. Just refuse it! I don’t know any other way. Just refuse it, and push through, and eventually, everybody else will catch up…I think the only thing you can do is to battle with your acts. Your acts are your axe. You put your work forward and you don’t back down. I think that’s all you can do. You can get mad, but don’t live there, because that becomes its own paralysis. Just get to work!
Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book is called The Signature of All Things. And now, I’m getting off line to finish mine.
Here are my daughter’s bags, all packed up to for an overnight trip on the Balclutha boat with her Fifth grade class, a trip they’ve been looking forward to for years. Last night, just after 9PM, we got an email that the trip was cancelled.
I just went to the Balclutha site to get the link and look what came up.
Because of the federal government shutdown, all national parks are closed and National Park Service webpages are not operating.
I am so disgusted with our so-called government right now. Great lesson for children on how to resolve conflicts. If you don’t like a law– or a rule– throw a tantrum! Jon Stewart explains the situation:
Did you see the Giants game on Sunday? Okay, they lost 31-7. And you know what the Giants didn’t say after that game? ‘If you don’t give us 25 more points by midnight on Monday, we will shut down the [bleep] NFL.
I guess I’ll be showing my daughter this video tonight. It’s clearer on the cause of this shutdown than anything else I’ve seen.
Yesterday, I posted this video of my 4 year old daughter talking about getting bullied at preschool for wearing ‘boy’ shoes.
I’ve gotten so many comments on Reel Girl’s Facebook page about kids being bullied by their peers when they step out of these gender norms that surround them like shrink rap, I’ve started asking parents if they would video their children telling their stories. Meanwhile, I Googled ‘bullied for wearing boy shoes’ and found some stuff that is making me cringe and want to scream, so I’m going to blog about it instead.
Yesterday my 4 year old wore her waterproof slip-on shoes for boy or girl to school (they are black Timberland moccasins) and she told me this morning, “The girls would not play with me yesterdays because they said I was wearing boys shoes, can you please put sparkly shoes on me ???”
I was in shock. Are you serious? Is this something I should address with the school??? BULLYING starting THIS YOUNG??? I don’t know what to think– my daughter loves those shoes and her sparkly shoes are not comfortable or for winter weather but she wants to wear them to appease the bullies in her classroom.
What would you do?????
Here’s some advice she got from 8 different fans of hers, without irony, each confirmed with multiple likes:
Cover them in glitter. Change the shoelaces to a girlie style.
Bedazzle her moccasins
Add something to moccasins to make it more “girly”
This is so sad – I’d talk to the teacher for sure. I also like the ideas of “girling up” her boots with shoe laces, etc. Good luck CouponClipinista
put sparkles on the shoes…that should do it.
Yep. I would bedazzel the crap out of em. I can tell you from experience, the school wont do anything!!
I agree. Bedazzle them. glue on a few rhinestones or a bow.
Bedazzle her shoes :o)
Note to parents: Gender stereotyping CAUSES bullying. Bedazzling shoes? Not a solution here. What is that teaching your kid? To do whatever the bullies say to do. And what is it teaching the other kids? Keep bullying. Is that the lesson we want to be teaching here? I honestly don’t even think these 4 year olds know they are bullying, because not enough parents and teachers are telling them that. I think these kids believe that they are stating a fact.
At 4 my daughter LOVED Spiderman. There was no talking her out of getting the Spiderman tennis shoes. She wore them to school and was told they were “boy shoes” (They were.) When she came home telling me about it, I told her, “do you like them?” “yes.” I told her to tell the kids when they said that again that anyone can wear Spiderman shoes. She had the same situation about the same age about wearing the color blue (still her favorite color 6 years later.) Her PreK4 classmates told her blue was for boys. We talked again and I told her that she can wear ant color she wants. And if the other kids don’t like it, too bad for them…they are going to miss out on wearing lots of cool colors. She went to school confidently and told them you can wear whatever color if you are a boy or a girl. I liked the idea of teaching her to be confident about her ideas even if they were not always “girly”
Another mom/ teacher:
As a teacher, sad to say, yes, bullying starts this young. My son, at 4 loved his pink t-shirt. Wore it to preschool once, and will not wear it out of the house (so sad) due to peer’s comments – at 4!!!! Yes, speak to the teacher, so he/she knows what is going on in their classroom and can address it. Then talk to you daughter. Don’t let her give in to peers. Point out how to be an individual and to take pride in that. When all is said and done, I woud let her wear the shoes of her choice. Unfortunately, it will be the choice peers, unless she is strong and willing to be her own person.
Yesterday my mom posted a picture on Facebook of my 5-year-old brother … wearing a pair of shoes he picked out for his first day of preschool. She explained to him in the store that they were really made for girls. [The boy] then told her that he didn’t care and that ‘ninjas can wear pink shoes too.’
However, my mom received about 20 comments on the photo from various family members saying how ‘wrong’ it is and how ‘things like this will affect him socially’ and, put most eloquently by my great aunt, ‘that sh*t will turn him gay.’
From that story come links about “gender non-conforming camp.” Seriously? We’re talking about shoes here. Shoes. Preschoolers. Bullying epidemic. The solution is not sending the kids off to some camp. The solution is to stop buying into the gender segregated marketing that is so aggressively targeted at kids and parents from multinational companies.
My daughter, fresh from day one of a much-loved and progressive preschool, announces her sporty blue Toy Story sneakers — once adored — are for boys
and no one at her school likes girls who wear boys’ shoes.
I heard from your mom that someone at school said your shoes were for boys. Maybe because they were blue or maybe because Buzz Lightyear was on them. At our house, we say, “Colors are for everyone.” Sometimes people get mixed up about that because they don’t think about it very hard. That makes me feel frustrated. All you have to do is look around the world and know that colors are for everyone.
But Bella, isn’t that silly! How could your blue Buzz Lightyear shoes be for boys if colors are for everyone and Buzz Lightyear is from a movie made for all kids and you are a girl standing in those shoes! I think people get confused about that, because they think something is only for boys because they never took the time to consider girls. I think people should consider girls.
Since you are four years old, you know a lot of stuff, and you know that girls can like or do anything boys can. And boys can like or do anything girls can. Things are kind of silly right now because grown ups keep getting in the way of kids, and some grown ups who are in charge of the companies that make stuff for kids like toys and clothes, they don’t have good imaginations like you and I do. These grown ups try to fit kids into little boxes that are labeled “Boy” or “Girl”, and then they only let certain colors or ideas into each box. They do that because it makes it easier for them to sell their stuff. Since boys and girls don’t grow in boxes, you can see how really goofy this is. But I have to be honest with you, there are a lot of grown ups who don’t question these pink and blue boxes, and then they teach that thinking to their kids, and then their kids lose their imaginations.
I couldn’t agree more. Here’s an ad I saw in a window of a Stride Rite in the neighborhood where my kids go to school. I also speak about one of the times my daughter was teased for her shoes.
Here’s me on Fox and Friends talking about the gender stereotyping in this ad and what kinds of damaging messages that’s sending to kids. I also speak about one of the times my daughter was teased.
The retailer today confirmed that they would draw up a set of principles for in-store signage meaning that, in the long-term, explicit references to gender will be removed and images will show boys and girls enjoying the same toys. They promised to start by looking at the way toys are represented in their upcoming Christmas catalogue.
But what are we doing in America? Been to a Toys R Us lately? Or a Target? Or a Stride Rite?
If your kids have stories about being bullied for not conforming to these caricature gender stereotypes, please share them. I’d love to see the videos of your kids telling their stories if you would like to post them here.
Here’s my 4 year old daughter talking about how kids at preschool teased her for wearing “boy” shoes. A group of them wouldn’t let her enter the “train hole,” a play structure shaped like a train, because she was wearing her Star Wars shoes.
After my daughter told me about the teasing, which happened more than once, I spoke to her teacher who then talked with the kids about how anyone can wear any kind of shoe they like.
The bullying that happened to my daughter occurs in schools every day, and we all need to be doing more to stop it. Instead, we’re exacerbating it by buying into gender marketing sold to us by multi-national media companies and chain stores.
Whenever I blog or speak about gender segregating kids, I get the argument that it’s just “natural,” and if your kid happens to be the rare exception, she can “choose” another toy or T shirt if she wants. (Here I am recently responding to those arguments on Fox News but they are all over this blog as well.) How many kids have the courage to be the “exception?” And why has straying from pink or princess become an exception? How long until my daughter starts “choosing” the shoes that she’s supposed to wear and like, shoes that she doesn’t get teased for wearing? I’m stating what should be obvious here: When one type of product is aggressively marketed to boys, and another type to girls kids don’t have a choice.
The retailer today confirmed that they would draw up a set of principles for in-store signage meaning that, in the long-term, explicit references to gender will be removed and images will show boys and girls enjoying the same toys. They promised to start by looking at the way toys are represented in their upcoming Christmas catalogue.
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…
I just posted on the excellent Graceling trilogy and added that I would not let my 10 year old read it because of the rape and incest. I suggested 15 might be a good age. Then I went back and edited, remembering the rape and incest, while central to Bitterblue, is only implied near the end of Graceling. It’s not in Fire. So then, I thought maybe 12 years old for the first two and 15 for Bitterblue? And then, it occurred to me that rape and incest happens to kids all the time. In that case, reading about it in this context would be helpful. How ironic to censor something in a book that describes what’s happening in a kid’s real life. So, then I concluded, it’s such an individual choice. With sex, I didn’t want my kids reading about it or seeing movies that referenced it, before I had “the talk.” I wanted them to learn about sex from me first, rather than from a kid at school or from a movie. I had the conversation with my daughter last Spring, when she was nine. It went really well, and since, she’s come to me with questions, and she seems comfortable talking about it. But rape and incest, I’d like to protect her from the knowledge of a little longer.
I did a Google search, remembering something I’d read on dark YA lit a while ago that was good. Here’s a quote from the post and the link.
The underlying assumptions behind Gurdon’s piece seem to be rooted in the idea that children read books with heavy content and ‘go bad,’ when in fact the opposite is true. Some children lead dark lives and they read books with intense themes to find protagonists they identify with in an often hostile world. Some young adults read about rape and bullying and violence, eating disorders and self harm and mental illness, because these are things they experience.
Alas, the belief that bad things do not happen to children and young adults is not limited to naïve Wall Street Journal columnists, and it does far more damage than mere dubiously-sourced articles that attract a storm of commentary. The belief that childhood is a happy place, where bad things don’t happen, where you don’t need rose-tinted spectacles because everything is already rose-tinted, has direct and harmful impacts on children and young adults in danger.
I don’t think my child would “go bad” from reading about this stuff. Nor do I think if a child is into these books, that means she’s leading a “dark” life. I think, and I could be wrong, if my ten year old daughter picked up Bitterblue, she’d read it cover to cover.
Also, for my kids, I do believe childhood is a pretty happy place for them and should be protected as such. Obviously, that doesn’t mean Disneyworld to me. I think Disneyworld is tremendously warped. But it does mean I want my kids to experience the belief in safety and also in magic. I believe that covering up “reality” to protect a child’s developing imagination is an important part of parenting and also, of being a kid. If your child has safe boundaries, she feels brave enough to take healthy risks. Psychologist Stephen Mitchell explains this well in his excellent book, Can Love Last: the Fate of Romance Over Time:
One of the things good parents provide for their children is a partially illusory, elaborately constructed atmosphere of safety, to allow for the establishment of “secure attachment.” Good-enough parents, to use D. W. Winnicott’s term, do not talk with young children about their own terrors, worries, and doubts. They construct a sense of buffered permanence, in which the child can discover and explore without any impinging vigilance, her own mind, her creativity, her joy in living. The terrible destructiveness of child abuse lies not just in trauma of what happens but also the tragic loss of what is not provided– protected space for psychological growth.
It is crucial that the child does not become aware of how labor intensive that protracted space is, of the enormous amount of parental activity going on behind the scenes.
What are your thoughts on all this?
Update: Heather comments that her 8 year old daughter learned about rape and incest when a classmate brought porn to school.
Based on the brief snippets of content she saw, I had to not only have “the talk”, but also explain a LOT of things I never thought I’d have to address at that age. Because of this, conversely, she is now very educated on both sex, misogyny, and rape/assault/child abuse. Therefore, I think these books that are written about very serious issues — but in the comprehension style of a young person who can find the characters identifiable — is a great source of information…I have not read these books to endorse them, but now I am interested and will be checking them out at the library. Thank you.
Heather’s comment make me think that if your child knows about rape or incest, these books are appropriate for her or him. (I really hope parents of sons will get their kids this trilogy.)
