Why is Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes magical store as sexist as Target? #NotBuyingIt

Posted on June 1, 2013 by margotmagowan

In Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, Ron’s twin brothers, Fred and George Weasley, open a magic store.

I’ve been waiting to get in this store for five books. Its creation is the life dream of the Weasley twins, and Harry even gave them his galleon winnings from the TriWizard Tournament so Fred and George would have the funds to open it. I was so excited to finally enter Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes at the beginning of Book #6 along with Harry, Ginny, Hermione, and Ron. What a major disappointment. I was so bummed. Let’s just say this is not the store Margot Weasley would’ve come up with. Here’s the passage.

“Haven’t you girls found our special WonderWitch products yet,” asked Fred. “Follow me, ladies….”

Near the window was an array of violently pink products around which a cluster of excited girls was giggling enthusiastically. Hermione and Ginny both hung back, looking wary.

“There you go, said Fred proudly, “Best range of love potions you’ll find anywhere.

Ginny raised an eyebrow skeptically: “Do they work?” she asked.

“Certainly they work, for up to twenty-four hours at a time depending on the weight of the boy in question–”

“–and the attractiveness of the girl,” said George, reappearing suddenly at their side. “But we’re not selling them to our sister,” he added, becoming suddenly stern, “not when she’s already got about five boys on the go from what we’ve–”

“Whatever you heard from Ron is a big, fat lie,” said Ginny calmly, leaning forward to take a small pink pot of the shelf. “What’s this?”

“Guaranteed ten second pimple vanisher,” said Fred….

“What are those?”

She was pointing at a number of round balls of fluff in shades of pink and purple, all rolling around at the bottom of the cage and emitting high pitched squeaks…

“They’re really cute!”

“They’re fairly cuddly, yes.”

Pink, love potions, pimple cream, cute, and cuddly stuff for girls? Why is the girl section segregated out at all? Pink wasn’t even a “girl” color a hundred years ago, so why does it dominate marketing strategy in Diagon Alley? Why, in the magical world, for goodness sake, is a store selling products to kids as gender segregated as a Target in California? Don’t wizards get pimples? Is the point that guys just won’t care if they have a break out? They don’t need to be “attractive,” the efficacy of their love potion doesn’t depend on that?

At least Hermione and Ginny seem skeptical, right? They hang back, the products are “violently” pink. But why do the cool girls have to be the exception, different from the rest of their pathetic gender? The other females are shown in “excited” cluster, “giggling enthusiastically.” Ginny ends up joining the crowd, anyway, seduced by a cute, fluffy thing.

Why do my kids have to read gender cliches in a series as imaginative as Harry Potter? In the imaginary world, anything is possible: animals talk, kids fly, unicorns prance around. Can’t we show children a magical land where girls and boys are treated equally? Is that so hard? Why do we have to bring stereotypes to fantasy land?

I’m on Book 7 now, and I’ve got to write: If Harry Potter, a series with a male protagonist, titled for that male, where the author was told by her publisher to use initials to hide her gender, is considered feminist because a third of the characters in power positions are female, we have a long way to go before achieving gender equality in the fantasy world.

Good job on race, Cheerios, but what’s with the gender stereotypes?

Posted on May 31, 2013 by margotmagowan

A new Cheerios ad featuring an interracial family is receiving such a hateful reaction that the comment section on YouTube had to be closed. Here’s the ad.

Once again, the internet shows us that hate is alive and well in 2013.

While I applaud Cheerios for showing a diverse family, what’s with the gender stereotypes? Just imagine this: the mom is lying on the couch while the dad is talking to the kid about health. Think that’s nitpicking? Since creating Reel Girl, I’ve become quite the connoisseur of cereal and gender roles and females rarely appear in marketing unless they’re promoting health. (Also, I own an entire book about that dad stereotype called Bastard on the Couch.)

Here’s a typical example from Cocoa Pebbles. There’s Fred, the star, in close-up, right on the front of the box. Above, Fred and Barney drive cars, beckoning kids to play a game.

The game on the back shows Fred and Barney driving, racing, and having fun together. Boys will be boys.

Is there a female anywhere on the box? My kids and I actually came up with a game called Find the Female on the Cereal Box. Children are obsessed with cereal boxes, and this activity seemed like a viable way to help my three daughters defy the incessant training to always focus on the males. So, we found Wilma, literally marginalized, tiny and on the side of the box, concerned that kids aren’t getting enough Vitamin D.

Notice any similarity with the Cheerios ad? Exact same gender roles. Male shown having fun, female shown talking about cholesterol.

If these images were a couple of varied gender roles, it wouldn’t matter, but cereal marketing, for the most part, turns out to be incredibly sexist. All of the mascots on children’s cereal boxes are male. Check out this gallery. Girls are half of the kid population and half of cereal eaters, so why do females go missing on cereal boxes for kids?

Give Cheerios a break, you say. The TV ad features a girl. The mom appears to be working, not grinning madly or having multiple orgasms over vitamin content. And anyway, regular, old Cheerios doesn’t even have its own mascot, so what’s my problem? Perhaps, I would’ve given Cheerios a break today if I hadn’t just blogged about how sexist the Cheerios box is. Cheerios doesn’t have its own male mascot, it’s true, so what does it do? Borrow all the male characters from the movies and then give kids a sexist game to play with them.

Here’s the Cheerios box that my husband just brought home for our kids.

On the front: Shrek, Puss In Boots, and Donkey, 3 male characters from “Shrek.” A movie starring a male, titled for the male, and spawning not only two sequels but also, a spin off. A spin off featuring Princess Fiona? Nope, it was Puss In Boots who got his own eponymous spin off movie, a buddy movie costarring his BFF Humpty Dumpty. Kitty Softpaws is a cool female character in that movie, a Minority Feisty who I loved, but where is her own movie, titled for her? Where is she on a cereal box? Have you even heard of Kitty Softpaws? Do your kids know who she is?

Here’s my 4 year old daughter after playing “Find the Female,” showing the back of the Cheerios box.

Here’s the answer key to Find the Female: “How to Train Your Dragon,” the first DVD, pictures a boy and his male dragon, the two stars of that movie, but you do see a girl behind the boy, “riding bitch” a repeated, sexist motif in kids’ media. The rest of the DVDs feature no females and 6 male characters, with”Madagascar” leaving out the Minority Feisty played by Jada Pinkett Smith. Smith’s hippo does show up in the “fame game,” 1 female to 7 males. The goal of that game is “match each character to what they are famous for.” (And here again, the problem of Kitty Softpaws vanishing into obscurity.) Characters in Cheerio’s game are known for “Training the Furious Five” or “Being the Dragon Warrior.” Hippo’s claim to fame? “Loving a Giraffe.”

Cheerios is teaching my kids sexism with this box, showing them that males are the important ones, the stars who get to have fun, while girls are in the minority, limited to supporting roles, stuck on the sidelines. So, Cheerios, good job with being a trailblazer on race, but please put some daring female characters on your box, front and center; take sexism out of your games, and while you’re at it, show us a mom on a couch.

Hey Fox News, here’s some ‘anti-science’ feminism for you

Posted on May 30, 2013 by margotmagowan

Right after director/ rapist Roman Polanski publicly blames the pill for masculinizing women, the guys at Fox News express related terror about the future of America. A new Pew study reveals that women are now breadwinners in 40% of households.

Jezebel reports:

Fox News contributor Erick Erickson, not one to be outdone, explained that women are naturally submissive because of “biology”:

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science…When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.

I cracked up when I watched the video because I was just about to post on Reel Girl this title: “Scientific” studies on gender turn out to be biased, who knew? More on that soon.

If there’s one thing that drives me crazy, it’s trendy evolutionary psychologists and social Darwinists going off incessantly for the last twenty-five years about how everything is the way it is– sexism, racism, white privilege, standards of beauty and on and on– because our biology makes it so.

Bullshit. You can call me anti-science, Fox News Dudes, but evolutionary psychologists went way too far in pinkwashing childhood, inadvertently exposing the roots of ridiculousness buried deep in biogender theory. A few months ago, Elizabeth Sweet wrote a great piece in the New York Times summarizing:

Moreover, expert opinion — including research by developmental and evolutionary psychologists — has fueled the development and marketing of gender-based toys. Over the past 20 years, there has been a growth of “brain science” research, which uses neuroimaging technology to try to explain how biological sex differences cause social phenomena like gendered toy preference.

That’s ridiculous, of course: it’s impossible to neatly disentangle the biological from the social, given that children are born into a culture laden with gender messages. But that hasn’t deterred marketers from embracing such research and even mimicking it with their own well-funded studies.

Sweet goes on to describe the aggressive gender-marketing aimed at children, marketing which starts, by the way, before the baby even exits the womb. When people speak to boy babies in strong voices and female babies in lilting voices, when so much of what we we do and how we act– including parents, teachers, and doctors— is based on cultural expectations of how girls and boys are supposed to be, how can we pretend to be beyond bias?

And then, of course, children grow up. Last week, the New York Times published a lengthy magazine article on female desire which argues previous “scientific” studies on sex drive show a cultural bias. Turns out women may not be “naturally” monogamous.

A meta-analysis done by the psychologists Janet Hyde and Jennifer L. Petersen at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, incorporates more than 800 studies conducted between 1993 and 2007. It suggests that the very statistics evolutionary psychologists use to prove innate difference — like number of sexual partners or rates of masturbation — are heavily influenced by culture.

Does new science debunk old science? Looks like evidence is showing evolutionary psychologists weren’t so scientific after all.

Can we at least agree on this: we live in a culture that, for thousands of years, has punished women for expressing sexuality while rewarding men. How can we possibly, objectively measure sex drive?

Hypothetically, say men ruled the world, and say that men were also incapable of giving birth. Would it be so surprising for the group in charge to come up with this theory: Every time women have sex with us, they fall in desperately in love. They want to marry us, be with us forever and ever. In fact, getting married is the happiest day of a woman’s life. Naturally monogamous, women will never stray.

Sounds like a pipe dream to me.

Facebook helps debunk myth of America’s ‘post-feminism’

Posted on May 30, 2013 by margotmagowan

YAY! Facebook FINALLY recognizes: misogyny exists. It’s real, FB says, and that’s a giant social media step in the right direction. In 2013, gender-based hate and violence is epidemic and still, for the most part, accepted as normal.

I’m 44 years old, a member of the notoriously apathetic Generation X. Since I started speaking out about feminist issues, back in my twenties (not lazy or apolitical, by the way, didn’t really know anyone who was) I’ve been told sexism doesn’t exist. We live in a post-feminist world. What could American women, not to mention white, educated, privileged ones, possibly be whining about? We weren’t under Taliban rule for goodness sake. Not that college kids, all of us so well versed in South Africa’s racist history, had any clue about the gender apartheid of the Taliban. And if we had known of it? Gender bias, while kind of a shame, was just a cultural difference, not a political issue. “Relative ethics” was the term my sociology professor taught us for female genital mutilation: Who were we, in all our privilege to judge?

So for years, Facebook has been receiving reports on posts depicting gender based violence. While the company actively bans religious or racist hate speech, here’s just one example of its past response to misogyny.

(via Amazing Women Rock . If you go to the link, and you have a strong stomach, you can see many more.)

So why did Facebook change its tune, pledging to take misogyny seriously? Obviously, in no small part, because of a well-run, well organized campaign by Women, Action, and Media. THANK YOU WAM and thank you to all of you who responded. In days, 5,000 emails and 60,000 Tweets went to Facebook’s advertisers who started to take their ads off the site. Facebook, if anyone could, saw where all this viral action was headed. Women have been using social media to change the world for some time now.

In the Nation, Jessica Valenti writes :

Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of WAM… points to the outrage over the social media-documented rape in Steubenville, gang rapes in India and the suicides of several young rape victims as indications that Americans may have had enough of the consequences of rape culture. While she’s still unsure that the country is ready for widespread change, she believes “there’s a critical mass right now; it could be a tipping point moment”…

But this glaring, in-your-face misogyny may be the spark that pushes culture forward—there’s no arguing with these images, these court cases, these stories. Maybe it needed to get a lot worse—or more visible—for it to get better. For years, the most common anti-feminist talking point has been that American women don’t have it all that bad. That we should stop complaining and focus on women in other countries who are “really” oppressed.

But today, telling women that sexism doesn’t exist anymore is a really hard sell. Thanks to the Internet and the speed at which stories move—not to mention the vile sexism in most online spaces—any American woman who spends more than five minutes onlines hears about or experiences misogyny every day.

I started this blog, Reel Girl, because I have 3 daughters, and I was so horrified by the gender stereotyping marketed to kids like it’s okay, like it’s normal, and then how everyone participates in it. It’s so sad that sexism, packaged and sold to kids, is so ubiquitous that, paradoxically, it’s become invisible. I feel like 90% of my work is just pointing out that sexism exists. I’ve posted this a couple times, but here it is again:

Violence against women is epidemic. A first step to abuse is always dehumanizing the victim. Propaganda, in the form of images and narratives, effectively dehumanizes on a mass scale. Here’s some propaganda marketed to kids:

Images/ narratives of Jews circa 1938

Africans circa 1931

Females circa 2013

It’s easy to look back on history and wonder: How did people ever put up with that? I’d never buy into it. But what are you participating in right now that is completely accepted, not to mention celebrated, by our culture?

Since my post, I’ve gotten comments asking how dare I compare sexism to racism and antisemitism. I’ve been rebuked for taking sexism seriously for a long time. When I was a senior in high school, I was talking to a good friend of mine about sexism, and he said to me, indignantly, “A woman has never been lynched for being a woman!” Maybe, maybe not, but women have been murdered throughout history for being women. Does getting raped or sexually assaulted qualify as pretty bad treatment?

Here’s a classic comment from Chinwe:

What I find embarrassing, shameful, and flat out appalling is you comparing the current state of girls in 2013 to the days that Blacks and Jews were stereotyped, discriminated, and killed in the early 20th century. Girls and women have gained so many rights in the last 40+ years and you compared its ”oppression” to Blacks and Jews in the 1930s.

Really?

That’s absolutely and utterly lazy comparison and analysis.

Years ago, the Wall Street Journal used to have a Bad Writing Contest where readers can submit writing that’s truly awful. Too bad they don’t have this contest because I would personally submit this post–and your blog–to judges of the Bad Writing Contest and you would win hands down.

Honestly, you need a new hobby because you come across really immature, out-of-touch and bitter towards the world. Once again, do yourself a favor and enroll in an English 101 class at your local community college and learn how to write. Everytime I see a new post, 1) you are embarrassing yourself and 2) you put yourself further down the cultural rabbit hole by making piss poor arguments.

*waiting for your condescending reply*

You are pretty predictable, ya know

Huh, think Chinwe heard about the three women sexually assaulted for 10 years in Cleveland? How their captor, Ariel Castro, got out of domestic abuse charges years earlier because his ex-wife’s lawyer didn’t even show up to prosecute? Or perhaps Chinwe knows that in America, 3 women are murdered by a domestic partner every day? And still, our congress fought over passing the Violence Against Women Act?

I guess that’s my sarcastic, predictable, and, of course, poorly written reply.

We don’t live in a post-feminist world. We never have. According to the Geena Davis Institute, at the rate we’re going, will might in about 700 years. Don’t you think that’s too long for your children to wait?

‘Epic’ features cool heroine, celebrates matriarchy

Posted on May 27, 2013 by margotmagowan

My three daughters and I loved “Epic.” The central heroine, M.K. is smart, brave, funny, compassionate, and independent. I loved her look, too. She’s dressed in a hoodie with a messy ponytail. She doesn’t have a Barbie face, I’d recognize this girl in a crowd.

M.K. narrates the movie. YAY. Do you know how rare it is to get a female narrator in an animated movie for children?

There’s more good news. Queen Tara is another brave, powerful female in this movie who is central to the narrative. Please note QUEEN, not princess. Not only that, GOOD queen, not evil. And…she’s not white. This may be a first, but let me know if there is another animated film with a good queen of color.

Queen Tara is played by Beyonce, and the movie concludes with an awesome song about the matriarchy. The matriarchy, people! It’s so fitting and perfect because the whole movie is about protecting the heir. I was super worried that the next ruler would be male, especially because the evil character, Mandrake, keeps referring to said heir as his “dark prince.” Luckily, the evil dude is wrong, and just after you find that out, the matriarchy song comes on. I laughed when I heard it because I felt like Beyonce was saying to me, “Don’t worry, Margot, I got the girls covered.”

I do have some complaints. I wish M.K. was in the movie more. Much more. You cannot deny she is the protagonist– she is the narrator, she has the quest, and she goes through the transition. M.K. acts, takes risks, and makes choices. She is such a great character, but based on lines and screen time, “Epic” is pretty much an ensemble movie. Most of the other characters are male. The Queen dies early. M.K.’s mother is also dead. The central relationship in the movie is with M.K. and her father.

The evil character is male and he has an evil son. M.K. pals around with two male heroes, so in most of the action scenes, the same old Minority Feisty gender ratio is in your face. Speaking of, M.K. is riding bitch most of the time. Her position “makes sense” in the story because she’s the visitor to the tiny world, but still, writers can make anything happen. I am sick of sexism making sense in plots, and I had hope for M.K. taking the lead here. At one point, she gamely hops on a bird and says, “Come on, let’s go!” Nod, the young male hero, hops on behind her, but in the following scenes, Nod is the one in the driver’s seat again. Argh.

There’s an army of Leafmen, and from what I could tell, they are, in fact, men: 100% male. Comic relief is a male slug and his BFF, a male snail. That pair kind of reminded me of the male krills who steal the show in “Happy Feet 2” or the meerkat/ warthog duo in “Lion King” and countless other cartoon buddy boys. It would be so nice to see a couple of females being friends and being funny in an animated movie.

Finally, I wrote I love M.K.’s look and I do, but both she and Queen Tara are super skinny, and why not give her a blue hoodie, or brown, or red, or any goddam color in the entire universe but pinkpurple?

M.K. is prominently featured on many of the posters seen around San Francisco, another total rarity for children’s movies. Though I didn’t see this one, I want to order it for my kids.

Reel Girl rates “Epic” ***HH***

Calling it out: Backwards, sexist propaganda of 2013

Posted on May 21, 2013 by margotmagowan

Let Toys Be Toys for Girls and Boys posted this image on its Facebook page:

This product was seen at the John Lewis store in High Wycombe. Not familiar with this UK institution, I looked it up to find it has almost 650,00 likes.

I imagine the day this product is on display in a museum, an artifact. People will look at it, baffled, not even understanding. Students will study how backwards the world was in 2013, wondering how and why our culture allowed and accepted sexism as if it were okay or funny or normal. Can you imagine a game showing a Caucasian brain battling an African brain along with a bunch of stereotyped categories?

Today, Salon posts: “On Facebook, hating a religious or ethnic minority gets you banned, but hating half of humanity gets you Likes.” Women, Action, and Media wrote an open letter to Facebook detailing how pics of breastfeeding women get banned when images of rape don’t.

The latest global estimate from the United Nations Say No to Violence Campaign is that the percentage of women and girls who have experienced violence in their lifetimes is now up to an unbearable 70%. In a world in which this many girls and women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, allowing content about raping and beating women to be shared, boasted and joked about contributes to the normalisation of domestic and sexual violence, creates an atmosphere in which perpetrators are more likely to believe they will go unpunished, and communicates to victims that they will not be taken seriously if they report.

Here’s an ex-girlfriend shooting target seen at an NRA convention this Spring.

Violence against women is epidemic. A first step to abuse is always dehumanizing the victim. Propaganda, in the form of images and narratives, effectively dehumanizes on a mass scale. Here’s some propaganda marketed to kids:

Images/ narratives of Jews circa 1938

Africans circa 1931

Females circa 2013

It’s easy to look back on history and wonder: How did people ever put up with that? I’d never buy into it. But what are you participating in right now that is completely accepted, not to mention celebrated, by our culture?

Propaganda works in steps and stages. The product marketed may not be as extreme as a bloody, scantily clad woman, but it’s likely to be a sexualized female, one that is, remarkably, often advertised to kids.

So tell John Lewis to stop selling sexism or join Women, Action, and Media’s campaign and to get Facebook sponsors to stop promoting violence against women or post on Target’s site that you’re not buying its new doll. Please do something for your kids. Take action to end everyday sexism because it numbs all of us to the mass objectification of women.

New game to play with kids: Find the Girls on the Cereal Box!

Posted on May 18, 2013 by margotmagowan

I complain a lot on Reel Girl about how there are no– ZERO– female mascots on children’s cereal boxes. It’s an example of the radical gender inequality in the imaginary world, and how girls gone missing seems normal to kids and parents alike. This annihilation conditions us all to expect and accept a world where females go missing.

Today, my kids had Rice Krispies for breakfast. You all know about the famed three: Snap, Crackle, and Pop. If you’re my age, you know their theme song, too.

But check out the new material we found on the back of the box:

It’s an “IMAGINATION ADENTURE!” Isn’t that great? The directions are as follows:

Can you look at the pictures and tell a story? Make up a tale for each picture or string them together for a creative journey.

How cool, my kids are going to get to use images to make up stories. What could be better than that? Let’s see how Rice Krispies is going to help to inspire children to imagine. Here’s the first picture.

Rice Krispies provides children with 8 characters to work with on this imagination adventure: 6 males and 2 females. Girls are half of the kid population, half of the kids eating Rice Krispies, so why are they presented as a minority in this “creative” game? Am I nitpicking? The box is asking your kids to look at the details of these pictures and make up a story. Obviously, whoever created these pictures put thought into how to develop your kids’ imagination. But If your kids play this game as directed, it’s one more way they’re being trained to create, be familiar with, and pay attention to stories where males are the main characters and in the majority, while females fade into the background.

Looking at picture #1, I asked my four year old: “Can you find the girls? Can you count them?” She was so excited about that, it’s how we came up with the game: Find the Girls on the Cereal Box!

Moving on to picture #2. Who is the protagonist here? Hmmm…

Again, I asked: “Can you find any girls? What is the girl doing? Why?” At this point, my other two daughters, ages 6 and 9, joined in. They were into it, and I found myself hoping that maybe my kids are learning creative skills now, how to notice the female and more importantly, to make her the protagonist in the story. “Find the Girls!” continued…

Picture #3 is the closest a female gets to a starring role in this “imagination adventure,” and she is still, clearly, placed behind the boy. My kids noted she is riding a sea horse. Picture #4 makes up for that tiny step forward, with five males to one female. The girl is clearly in the background, but at least, the girl is in the driver’s seat, right? I asked my daughters what the girl was doing here, and my four year old said, “Watching the boy!”

And now, for the final pic.

When I asked my kids what the girl was doing? “Same as the last one! Watching the boy.”

“Can you make up a story about her?” I asked.

I try to censor the sexism I can, but so much of the time, it’s obviously impossible since gender stereotypes are everywhere. I think the most useful strategy, as parents, is to train our kids to respond with a critical and creative eye. If you try playing “Find the Girls on the Cereal Box,” let me know how it goes. For my family, it helped squeeze some real creativity out of the same old, same old.

You know what’s crazy? After stuff like this Rice Krispies box all over the place, Disney execs, marketers, media people, parents will say that girls go missing in kids’ media because girls will watch stories about boys but boys won’t watch stories bout girls. Huh. How do you think kids get to be that way, Hollywood? Girl aren’t born more generous, open-minded, or altruistic. Girls watch movies about boys because they are trained to.

More posts of girls gone missing from cereal boxes:

Raj of Big Bang Theory lists the sexist, all-male line up of cereal box characters

Good Job on race, Cheerios, but what’s with the gender stereotypes?

Why isn’t Pebbles on the Cocoa Pebbles?

Inoculate your daughter, teach her these basic mirror skills

Posted on May 18, 2013 by margotmagowan

Here’s a great tip to inoculate your daughter against internalizing the barrage of criticism about her appearance. If that critical voice gets trapped and trained in your kid’s head and wiring, it becomes a bad habit that, like any addiction, is difficult to break. I got this tip from Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals, and so far, it works really well. I can see my kids using it.

Tell your daughter that you use a mirror to see if you have food on your face or something like that. You don’t look in the mirror to see if you are beautiful. Beauty is a feeling that comes from within you, and a mirror can’t give you that. Let your daughter see you use a mirror this way as well.

Repeat this lesson as often as necessary. It’s basic but effective.

Extra tip: If your daughter protests or seems confused, which she may not, explain that the correct way to use a mirror is the exact opposite of how the wicked queen relied on it in “Snow White,” asking “Who is the fairest of all?” Explain how the Queen’s misuse of the mirror, her dependence on its voice instead of her own, sapped her power and helped to cause her downfall.

New toy release shows “Monsters University” practically single sex

Posted on May 14, 2013 by margotmagowan

Just received an email promo from LeapFrog which sells “educational” toys for kids. This one features characters from Disney/ Pixar’s upcoming Monsters University. Looks like while your kids get skills on “reading comprehension” and “problem solving,” they’ll be learning females stay in the background, it’s all Mike and Sully. And they say girls are the ones who care about “friendship”…

Cat’s comment below: “Please tell me [Disney] remembered to add [females] in a movie about a UNIVERSITY!”

Thank you Angelina Jolie and Peggy Orenstein for speaking out

Posted on May 14, 2013 by margotmagowan

Today, actress and director Angelina Jolie wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about her decision to undergo a double mastectomy. She made that choice after discovering she carried a dangerous gene and also because her mom died of cancer.

Last week, Peggy Orenstein, an author and breast cancer survivor, wrote an in depth piece on cancer for the New York Times, that included why she she made a different decision.

I am so grateful that both of these women have the courage and access to tell the truth about their lives publicly. When women can speak out and tell their own stories, that helps all women. Both of you are making sure that a “woman’s issue” gets on the front pages and into the forefront of national discussion. Hopefully, we’ll come out of this more educated than we were. THANK YOU.

Update: Here goes the nat’l public discussion: Did u know corporations can own genes? Tweet from Peggy, check out the link:

Myriad genetics OWNS BRCA gene. OWNS it. That’s a block to research & better options for someone like Angelina Jolie http://ow.ly/l1XTX