More cool female action figures

Posted on December 29, 2012 by margotmagowan

I tore these cool women away from my kids long enough to get them photographed. My husband took the pictures.

So here we have soccer players (they come with a ball they can kick), Catwoman with her whip and motorcycle, Batgirl, Wonder Woman with her plane, Hawkgirl, and Princess Leia.

Next we have Coraline (who you’ve seen in an earlier post) Katniss and Merida (who were not Christmas presents but wanted to join the party) and Rue from the Hunger Games.

Catwoman, Serafina Pekkala, Lyra Silvertongue, Black Widow, Wonder Woman (already missing her laso) and another Batgirl

All figures except for Merida and Katniss were found on A Mighty Girl or Toward the Stars. That little Wonder Woman on A Mighty Girl’s promo was the one who started me on my shopping spree.

Reel Girl game of the week: Bella’s Mystery Deck

Posted on December 29, 2012 by margotmagowan

My nine year old daughter found Bella’s Mystery Deck in her Christmas stocking.

Today, we broke it out and played all morning. The deck consists of 52 cards, each with a story that describes a mystery to solve. The game revolves around Bella, a 13 year old Mexican-American girl who lives in Tucson with her family and black lab, Noche. If you follow Reel Girl, you know I love games that center on a female protagonist who is smart and brave. Bella is all that.

Besides Bella, the stories are full of colorful characters in Bella’s community. My six year old and three year old, while too young to solve the mysteries, were entertained just by listening to the nine year old read these entertaining narratives out loud. To check your answer, or find it if you’re stumped, the package comes with a mirror to decipher the backwards writing at the bottom of each card. All of my kids loved that.

We had at least an hour of utopia playtime for everyone in the family with this game, no tears, no board upsets.

Reel Girl rates Bella’s Mystery Deck ***HHH***

Can’t remember the last time I blogged about kids and food

Posted on December 28, 2012 by margotmagowan

I used to blog regularly about kids and food, but, now, hardly at all and that’s a good thing. Knock on wood, but food is pretty much a conflict free issue at my house.

I realized my food blogs had stopped when I wandered downstairs during movie time and saw this:

My kids got that candy for Christmas. Before you call CPS on me, I want you to know that when my older daughter saw me standing in the doorway, she asked for chicken soup. My three year old shouted, “Me too!” That bowl of candy doesn’t have a dent in it.

(Lucy is watching “Ratatouille” and hopefully smirking about the lack of female chefs. Rose is watching “My Little Pony” which commenters keep telling me I should watch but I can’t bring myself to do it.)

All of my blogs on Reel Girl about kids and food basically centered on this: I let my kids eat whatever they want, whenever they want. I have raised them based on the principles from the excellent book Preventing Childhood Eating Problems. I read this book because the same authors wrote a book that helped me to get over a tenacious eating disorder. I hope to train my kids (as I eventually trained myself) to listen to and trust their own bodies instead of any authority figure, “expert,” or fad about what to eat.

Every Christmas, Santa leaves a candy trail for the kids their bedroom to their presents, and they all say finding the candy is their favorite part of Christmas. Note that it’s not eating the candy that they love, but opening the door, seeing the sparkly silver kisses, and following them to their presents.

As I keep writing in these blogs about kids and food, I have no idea what will happen when my kids grow into teenagers, but I am hopeful. Right now, my kids are not only adventurous eaters who try new foods all the time, but also, they are what any parent would call “healthy” eaters.

Once they were old enough to feed themselves, we have regular meal times and I make healthy food always available but hardly ever controlled their eating as far telling them what, when or how much to eat. I write “hardly ever” because my middle daughter is allergic to eggs. I was terrified of the allergy when she was a baby, after she had a skin rash when she ate a hard boiled egg. For probably a year after that, I made a big deal about telling everyone she was allergic to eggs and making sure she never had anything with eggs in it. Then I saw her getting tentative about trying food, always looking up at me nervously before taking a bite of something. Clearly, she was picking up on my anxiety.

So I shifted tactics. I subtly told adults she was allergic when it was necessary to tell them. I didn’t make her allergy a conversation topic that she could overhear. I rarely had eggs in my house, again without making a big deal about it. She calmed down and also, luckily, her allergy lessened as she grew older. Now if she eats something with egg, sometimes her tongue will itch. But that she is still the pickiest eater of the three, though none are picky, further indicates to me that the more relaxed parents are about food, the more relaxed their children will be.

Now here’s the problem: How many women do you know who are relaxed about their food intake?

Before you ask, so far, no cavities.

Here are some (not all) links to previous blogs on Reel Girl about kids and food that go into more detail about books, practices, experience, philosophies, etc.

Girls and food

Geena Davis, real life superhero, brings education on gender bias into schools

Posted on December 28, 2012 by margotmagowan

Anyone who has ever written a book will tell you, heroes act. They make choices. They take risks. Heroes are not passive.

Geena Davis saw a problem and instead of safely sitting around griping about it, she took a risk and took action. She started a non-profit, raised some money, and now she’s changing the world with the Geena Davis Institute.

I just got this email from the Institute about a new program they’ve developed for schools that includes an “eight-lesson curriculum introduces topics like media and bullying in the context of gender equality.”

Courses include: Do TV Shows and Movies Influence Careers Held by Women and Men? Do TV Shows and Movies Make Sexual Harassment a “Normal” Part of the School Experience? and Who is Your Hero?

Please go to this link to see all the curriculum and consider talking to teachers and administrators about bringing it into your children’s schools.

Why do parents buy into gender segregated toys?

Posted on December 28, 2012 by margotmagowan

The New York Times reports on the gender Jim Crow that dominated Christmas shopping for children:

IMAGINE walking into the toy department and noticing several distinct aisles. In one, you find toys packaged in dark brown and black, which include the “Inner-City Street Corner” building set and a “Little Rapper” dress-up kit. In the next aisle, the toys are all in shades of brown and include farm-worker-themed play sets and a “Hotel Housekeeper” dress.

If toys were marketed solely according to racial and ethnic stereotypes, customers would be outraged, and rightfully so. Yet every day, people encounter toy departments that are rigidly segregated — not by race, but by gender. There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to building, action and aggression.

When I write or speak about this stereotyping as gender Jim Crow, it is not uncommon for a white, educated dad to tell me that I’m trivializing segregation.

About this article, Melissa Wardy, founder on Pigtail Pals comments on her Facebook page:

I still am unable to understand why this generation of parents – the most educated, most informed, most well-traveled, most well-rounded generation of parents to ever raise children accept the gender divide in the marketplace and believe it to be biological truth.

I have no doubt that humans in the future are going to look back on the radical gender segregation of children, babies, fetuses, accepted and ubiquitous, and wonder how loving parents became so brainwashed.

When CNN interviewed me yesterday about stereotyping gender in media for children, I was asked: “Isn’t it getting better?”

It’s getting worse. It really freaks me out how accepted it is. From the NYT:

What’s surprising is that over the last generation, the gender segregation and stereotyping of toys have grown to unprecedented levels. We’ve made great strides toward gender equity over the past 50 years, but the world of toys looks a lot more like 1952 than 2012…But by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for example) by gender has become incredibly difficult.

Read the NYT post for details of the research.

Why is this happening? Reporter, Elizabeth Sweet, writes:

On a practical level, toy makers know that by segmenting the market into narrow demographic groups, they can sell more versions of the same toy. And nostalgia often drives parents and grandparents to give toys they remember from their own childhood.

In her book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein delves into great research about how segmenting any market drives sales. When I read her book, I thought about face cream, how instead of buying one jar, you’re supposed to get 5– night cream, day cream, eye cream, serum, and sunscreen.

I like how Sweet brings up “nostalgia” of parents because this is an important factor. Not only with toys but with stories. We remember and love the stories we read in childhood and want to share them with our kids, often ignoring the stereotyped gender roles the narratives promote. The result is, as Orenstein writes in her book, children are saturated with gender stereotypes as their brains are growing and developing. At the very least, parents are priming the next generation to be “nostalgic” about sexism.

If the brain development issue is hard for you to buy, think about this:

But if parents are susceptible to the marketers’ message, their children are even more so.

So true. If you, a grown-up, are influenced by all of this, how do you think it affects your little kid?

Here is my favorite part of the article:

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.

I am so happy she wrote this! It is so amazing to me when biased “experts” create biased studies on biased children and then call it objective science.

I better stop pasting or the NYT will come after me, but you should read it. It’s a great piece.

Update Elizabeth Sweet comments on Reel Girl’s FB page:

Thank you, and thank you for the important work you do! I think the term you use, “gender Jim Crow” is so fitting. It’s de facto versus de jure (though that seems to be coming right back too in regards to women’s rights), but what troubles me the most is how untroubled so many are by it. And it’s happening on all fronts–media, products, science…

Check out these awesome female action figures

Posted on December 27, 2012 by margotmagowan

My daughter, Rose, with her new Christmas friends: Catwoman, Buffy, Serafina Pekkala, Hawkgirl, Lyra Silvertongue, and Coraline.

My favorite is Coraline. She belongs to Rose’s older sister, Alice, who loved the book.

These characters are so much better than the ones photographed above for Reel Girl’s header just after Christmas, three years ago, when I started this blog. I took that photo because, as the mother of three young daughters, I was so freaked out and disgusted by the grinning plastic strewn around our living room.

I’m going to post a photo of the whole new crew soon. There are about 15, and I think, seriously, if this group doesn’t comprise all of the non-sexualized female action figures out there, it’s most of them.

Thank you to A Mighty Girl and Toward the Stars. It is on these new sites that I found all of my daughters’s Christmas presents this year. Let’s just say the figures above are not aggressively marketed or found in my neighborhood Walgreens along side the Barbies, stacks of princess coloring books, or Monster High dolls. Cool, inspiring female figures do exist and can be found in targeted searches. But for the most part, they are not mainstream. Coraline costs $100.

We need more figures to be more accessible to more people. Before we can have more female action figures made or mass marketed– featured in games or embossed on clothing sold at Target– we need more movies, TV programs, and books with strong female protagonists. Since the beginning of time, stories have always been the best marketing tool.

When heroic females go missing from stories, they go missing everywhere.

Reel Girl on CNN.com today

Posted on December 27, 2012 by margotmagowan

CNN.com interviewed me for its post: 2012: The Highs and Lows of Women In Hollywood on the lack of female protagonists in movies made for children:

Not only will a record 20 women hold U.S. Senate seats next year, but women voters also greatly influenced the 2012 election, making an impact in swing states such as Ohio.

As founder of reelgirl.com Margot Magowan says, Hollywood needs to catch up.

The sheer increase of strong female characters isn’t enough, Magowan said, noting that role models such as “Wreck-It Ralph’s” Vanellope (voiced by Sarah Silverman) are often secondary characters.

“It’s important for the female to be the star of the movie,” the mom of three girls said. ” ‘Harry Potter’ has Hermione, but her role is to help Harry on his quest. … You can be the first lady, but you can’t be the president. … If you can’t imagine it, you can’t be it.”

My favorite quote is from Joss Whedon:

In 2006, while accepting an award from Equality Now (an organization promoting the human rights of women), Joss Whedon (“The Avengers,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) said he’s often asked why he creates such strong women characters.

His response: “Why aren’t you asking 100 other guys why they don’t write strong women characters?”

Read the whole post here.

Read Reel Girl’s review of “Wreck-It Ralph.”

Reel Girl’s KidLit Picks of the Week

Posted on December 24, 2012 by margotmagowan

It’s been three days of straight rain starting out Winter Break. These books are helping us get through:

Imogen: The Mother of Modernism and Three Boys

I think this book just came out. In any case, I saw it for the first time a couple days ago, and I love it.

Imogen is the real life story of the great photographer, Imogen Cunningham. What I love most about this book is that it shows the challenge of being and artist and a mother and how that challenge was not only overcome but used to create art. Reading this book made me think of a post I wrote some time ago: Why aren’t there more women artists? The theory I wrote about– and that this book shows– is that in order to create, if you’re a mom as well, you need to be healthy as possible. The tortured, romanticized Marlboro Man, separated from the rest of life, doesn’t apply. This book shows all that beautifully.

Reel Girl rates Imogen: The Mother of Modernism and Three Boys ***HHH***

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything

My daughters adore this story about a woman who goes off by herself in the woods to gather herbs, spices, nuts, and seeds.

When she starts back home, she is followed by a pair of shoes. Not freaked out one bit by shoes without feet in them, the woman says: “Get out of my way you two big shoes! I’m not afraid of you!” A pair of pants is added, a shirt, and on and on, each with a different movement: the shoes go clomp, clomp; the pants go wiggle, wiggle, the shirt goes shake, shake. You get the idea.

So my confession here is that I have a hard time with repetition. It gets on my nerves. Goldilocks is an absolute nightmare for me. I get so bored reading the same thing over and over, knowing more of the same is to come. But repetition is in so many stories for kids because they love it; it helps them learn, too. My three daughters get so excited when they know what’s coming next. They call out all the sounds with huge grins on their faces. I love the old lady, so this book works for us.

Reel Girl rates The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything ***HHH***

Zita, the Spacegirl

This graphic novel features one of the few female superheroes. Zita is very cool.

This epic describes Zita’s journey from earth to another world, all to rescue her friend, Joseph. This story features monsters, magicians, and all kinds of scary space creatures. My only issue is that most (all?) of the other characters in this story appear to be male. Unfortunately, that gender division– when the female gets to be the protagonist, she is surrounded by males– is all too common in kids media. Still, I cannot wait to see the movie. I wish someone would make it.

Reel Girl rates Zita, the Spacegirl ***HH***

My letter in today’s New York Times Magazine

Posted on December 23, 2012 by margotmagowan

My letter to the New York Times about girls gone missing from movies for children in 2012 is printed in today’s Magazine.

I’m thrilled that my letter is in a national magazine with the reach and audience that the New York Times has. It’s a tiny step, obviously, but I’m hoping that more people, and parents especially, will start realizing and reacting to how sexist kidworld is. Almost every time children go to the movies, they learn that boys are more important than girls.

I wrote to The New York Times after reading the Magazine’s cover article by chief film critic A.O. Scott titled “Year of the Heroine Worship” which claimed that 2012 was “a pretty good year for female heroism” in the movies.” A couple days before that piece came out, I posted Reel Girl’s Gallery of Girl’s Gone Missing From Children’s Movies in 2012 on this blog.

Here’s my letter in today’s Magazine:

What about movies for children? I have three young daughters. Aside from the pink ghetto, kids’ media — whether PBS or Disney — put male characters front and center. Female characters are sidelined or not there at all — just look at the posters for children’s movies (with the exception of ‘‘Brave’’). There is no reason for the imaginary world to be sexist.

Margot Magowan, San Francisco, posted on nytimes.com

Here’s to hoping female characters in children’s movies fare better in 2013.

What does it take to get women on the covers of newsweeklies?

Posted on December 21, 2012 by margotmagowan

Why is this cover

less likely than this cover?

How would our world look if issues that affected women were taken seriously?

In 26 years, Time Magazine has not had a solo woman on its cover with the Person of the Year title.

Since the annual issue was created, only four solo women have ever been on that cover.

Until 1999, Time’s title for the honor was “Man of the Year.”

This week, Martha Nelson became Time’s first female Editor-in-Chief in the magazine’s 90 year history.

Here’s to hoping women leaders get recognized more regularly and publicly. “Women’s issues” should be the headlines of the world’s news. We are half of the population.