These career Barbies are so stupid. The last thing you notice from the picture is what profession they are supposedly involved in, especially if you’re an illiterate kid. What you do see is flowing blonde hair, blue eyes, and a skinny body. If you want to teach kids to DO something, give them a toy that does stuff. I recently listened to a panel of women architects talk about the newly released Architect Barbie. Those professionals didn’t like the doll, telling the audience that if they want their kids to grow up to be architects buy them blocks and Legos. So much for Legos which has recently soared to new heights with its sexist marketing, but blocks are still a good option.
What do you get if you’re a boy with your Happy Meal? Oh, Hot Wheels.
“Get ready for the release of January’s McDonald’sHappy Meal toys sets one geared to little boys and one for little girls. Team Hot Wheels set has 8 different types of vehicles from mini monster wheels to race cars.”
This makes me so sad about my two-year old daughter who loves cars right now. But I know, very soon, with all this marketing, she’ll start to go for the Barbies if I’m not super counteractive with this relentless gender marketing. UGH. One more reason not to go to McDonalds. Wow, so much money money and effort by huge companies doing their best to stereotype little kids.
OMG there look like many, many problems for girl characters in the new animated film FOR KIDS “Pirates! Band of Misfits” including jokes about a female parrot called fat (“No, she’s just big-boned!” ha ha ha) and slutty, belly-button baring pirate girl, one of the few females in this movie and she’s hardly in the preview. I can hardly find any Google images of Cutlass Liz played by Salma Hayek. Is this one for real? With the phallic canon? Seriously???
But I guess I’ll reserve judgement about the whole movie until I see it. For now, I’m just blogging about ANOTHER sexist joke in a preview for an animated kids film. KIDS film. Laughing at girls. Hilarious. Remember The Lorax’s preview laugh about the ugly woman? Madgascar 3 where the all male penguins are chided for pillow fighting “like a bunch of girls” and now, in Pirates, another ALL MALE GROUP presents itself with this hilarious intro: “Nobody here but us girl scouts.”
By the way, when I saw The Lorax preview with the ugly woman joke (Before “The Secret World of Arrietty started” I called out “Sexist! Not funny!” My five-year-old daughter though that was pretty hilarious. Try it when you go to the movies, it’s kind of fun and empowering.
“The Secret World of Arrietty,” which opened Friday, is the latest effort from Studio Ghibli, the same animation studio that created Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke. Unlike American animation, many of Ghibli’s films star powerful female protagonists and feature multiple strong female characters. Ghibli doesn’t disappoint with its new movie. Arrietty is smart, resourceful, brave, and beautiful. She is just three inches tall.
The animation style shows what it’s like to be tiny and vulnerable in a world of intimidating giants in countless original and creative ways. Arrietty leaps across a row of nails aligned like a rickety bridge over a chasm. She uses a pin like a sword, shoving it into her dress for easy access. My five-year-old is obsessed with bugs, and those are particularly well done in this movie. We see crickets, roaches, ladybugs, and my daughter’s absolute favorite: roly-polies. Arrietty’s home is so beautiful, colorful, and cozy, we wanted to move in.
Arrietty seems bigger because her courage, along with her fluid form and softly dappled world, come by way of the famed Japanese company Studio Ghibli, where little girls rule, if not necessarily as princesses.
That kind of screen equality is rare in American animation (this year Pixar releases its first movie with a female lead), but it’s never been an issue at Ghibli, where girls have long reigned, without the usual frou-frou, in films like “Spirited Away” and “Ponyo.” In keeping with that tradition, a tiara and pink tulle don’t make Arrietty special: her size and especially her bravery do, as evident when, early on, she sprints across a yard with a few leaves and a sprig of flowers while being chased by a cat that looks like a furry blowfish.
I do have a couple questions about the marketing of this film. Have you heard of it? Seen a poster around town on a bus? A TV commercial? I found the poster weeks ago on the internet while I was briefly researching kids movies coming out in 2012.
From the poster, I could not tell that the female was the star. I thought the boy was. I also couldn’t tell from the poster that the girl pictured was “Arrietty.” I thought the title referred to the name of another world. One more thing: If Arrietty were male, do you think he would be shown walking in front of jar giving the impression he could be easily trapped inside of it, with a giant girl’s face looming over him? Do you think he would share the poster with a human girl at all?
In contrast, the ubiquitous Lorax, all over TV and buses, claims his spot with no doubt about who he is, clearly defining the made up word with his picture.
So I’ll do my best to promote this incredible film right now: it came Friday and daughter has already seen it twice– how good a rec is that? Reel Girl rates ‘The Secret World of Arrietty” ***GGG*** Take your sons and daughters!
One of my first blogs for Reel Girl was about sexism in Dr. Seuss. Here’s a kidlit author with such a fecund imagination, an incredible gift for words, yet when it comes to female characters in his fantasy worlds, he falls flat.
Dr. Seuss’s sexism (just as Herge’s, the creator of Tintin) is loyally and meticulously maintained by contemporary Hollywood. Right now, The Lorax’s mustachioed face all is in ads all over San Francisco as he prepares to make his debut on the big screen. Meanwhile, the “love interest” in the movie, Taylor Swift’s character is nowhere to be seen on the posters plastered all over our city’s buses. As far as marketing, I have seen Swift’s character only in TV commercials. (The one I saw was during the Grammys broadcast.)
So when I discovered the wonderful book, Fearless Girls, Wise Women and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales From Around the World, I was not surprised that the anthologist, Kathleen Ragan, was driven to seek out female protagonists because of her frustration with the sexism in Dr. Seuss. While reading his many, many books to her young daughter, Kagan became annoyed and then enraged. Here’s what she wrote in her introduction:
We read One fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish. My daughter loved the rhythm and rhymes, just as I did when I was a little girl. She memorized whole pages on the couch pretending to read “I am Sam/ Sam I am.”
The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became. I found myself changing the pronouns from male to female when I read stories to her. …
One night we read If I Ran the Zoo as bedtime story. A part of the story described hens roosting in each others’ topknots. When it said, “Another one roosts in the the topknot of his/ And another in his, and another in HIS, I got angry. Since when is a hen masculine?”
Ragan’s shock at how far adults will go to maintain male privilege in the imaginary world reminds me of my reaction when I saw the animated film “Barnyard.” The protagonist, Otis, played by Kevin James, is a cow. A cow with an udder. I kid you not. So not only do our kids go to the movies to learn that girls aren’t nearly as important as boys, but they’re getting distorted lessons about basic anatomy.
After the male hen experience, Ragan began counting characters:
As soon as my daughter went to sleep that night, I picked up And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I looked for female characters. There were none. In fact, the only mention of a woman occurred in the lines “Why Jack or Fred or Nat/ Say even Jane could think of that.” I picked up the 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Even the crowd scenes were male…I did a more thorough survey, hoping to find Dr. Seuss books with positive, exciting female characters. I found that over 90% of the characters were male. …
I continued to count. I counted books in my local library which prides itself on being gender conscious yet there were at least twice as many male protagonists as female protagonists in the children’s fiction section. In the scarcity and poor quality of heroines, my daughter was constantly being told ‘you don’t exist, you’re not important.
Ragan started to research to folktales. In published anthologies of world folktales, she found a low percentage of female characters: 4% female protagonists (not necessarily heroines) in a book of 220 folktales and 2% female protagonists in a book of 107 folktales were standard ratios. When searching through fairytales Ragan found 10% female active protagonists to 90% male. In the first edition of Grimm’s, supposedly more feminist than later adaptations and Disney movies, out of 210 stories, just 40 featured female main characters.
So Ragan decided to create her own anthology. She reviewed over 30,000 folktales from around the world and came up with her fabulous book featuring 103 tales complete with inspiring heroines.
Thrilled to have discovered Ragan’s book and read about a mom’s experiences of frustration with kidlit so like my own, I thumbed to the copyright to see when Fearless Girls was published. I was hoping that this anthology had just come out and was about to inspire Hollywood to make a new slew of movies with female heroines, LEGO to make sets with female adventurers, derivative video games and apps to follow. A new trend of gender equality in kids media was about to begin.
But, no.
Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters came out in 1998, 14 years ago. Before Ratatouille, Cars, and Wall-E. Before the Happy Feet 1 and 2 and Tintin. Before Disney announced it will make no more princess movies i.e. the only genre, albeit totally sexist, that allowed in a very limited way for females to be to be front and center, to star, to actually get a movie titled in honor of them.
In 15 years from now, is some other mom with little kids going to come across my blog and think: wow, someone was writing about this years ago and things have only gotten worse?
How can we as parents continue to allow fewer and fewer female characters? There is no reason for fantasy world to be sexist. It’s an imaginary world, equality for our kids should at least be possible there.
And if this phenomenon of missing girls continues to go on at the rate it is now, how does that affect our kids’ imaginations and aspirations? Who they are and the adults they’ll become?
This radical and perpetual gender disparity of choicemaker-hero-male versus passive-sidekick-female (if she’s allowed to exist at all) might continue to replicate in the adult world, as if it’s expected, as if its normal. Here’s an illustration of today’s congressional hearing on contraception that could be right out of a Dr. Seuss book. Not a uterus present but lots of facial hair. Minus a few trees, The Lorax would feel right at home in Washington DC.
When my daughter was seven years old, she turned me on to Taylor Swift. Every time the car radio scanned to a Swift song, she’d call out from the back seat, “I like this!” So last night when Swift sang “Mean” at the Grammys, I got chills. Swift’s original lyrics and radiant performances make her a great role model for girls. She shows kids that, with some creativity and perseverance, you can write your way from victim to hero.
In “Mean” Swift sings:
I bet you got pushed around
Somebody made you cold
But the cycle ends right now
Cause you can’t lead me down that road
And you don’t know, what you don’t know…
Swift’s “Mean” has become a beloved anthem for girls around the world. I think the lyrics resonate with kids in part because the song takes on the false belief that permeates so much of kidworld. Especially for girls, being mean is too often seen as cool or powerful. As you get older, in college, cruelty can continue to be equated with being smart, masquerading as a cynical or skeptical brand of superior intelligence. Whereas being kind can be seen as weak, uncool, or even dumb. Too many grown-ups go on to maintain this warped view.
In contrast, Swift directly challenges the mean-cool dogma with her sweetness, her songs about how she loves her mom, and the devoted way she treats her fans. Swift is also a brilliant lyricist who writes openly about her humiliations and, again and again, turns them into triumphs.
What humiliations? Many involve love and relationships, but some are less personal, more public, and have everything to do with her career.
At the 2009 MTV music awards, after the 19-year-old Swift won Best Female Video for “You Belong to Me,” rapper Kanye West stormed the stage, claiming the award should’ve gone to Beyonce. Both Swift and her mother were reportedly crying backstage. Later that night, when Beyonce won her own MTV award for Video of the Year, she asked Swift to take that time speak (which was cool of Beyonce and a good moment for females supporting each other publicly.)
Swift wrote a song about Kanye West and forgiveness called “Innocent.”
A year later, at the 2010 Grammys, Swift performed a duet with her idol, Stevie Nicks. She sang off key. A well known critic tore her apart, saying that Swift should reconsider her career as a singer.
It was about that experience that Swift wrote “Mean:”
You have pointed out my flaws again
As if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down
Trying to block you out ’cause I’ll never impress you
I just wanna feel okay again…
And I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody’s listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things
Drunk and grumbling on about how I can’t sing…
The chorus goes likes this:
Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?
Here’s my eight-year-old daughter dressed as Swift for Halloween:
Here are all the lyrics to “Mean.”
You, with your words like knives
And swords and weapons that you use against me
You have knocked me off my feet again
Got me feeling like I’m nothing
You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard
Calling me out when I’m wounded
You picking on the weaker man
Well you can take me down with just one single blow
But you don’t know, what you don’t know…
Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?
You, with your switching sides
And your wildfire lies and your humiliation
You have pointed out my flaws again
As if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down
Trying to block you out ’cause I’ll never impress you
I just wanna feel okay again
I bet you got pushed around
Somebody made you cold
But the cycle ends right now
Cause you can’t lead me down that road
And you don’t know, what you don’t know…
Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?
And I can see you years from now in a bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody’s listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things
Drunk and grumbling on about how I can’t sing
But all you are is mean
All you are is mean
And a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life
And mean, and mean, and mean, and mean
But someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean, yeah
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so?..
Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city (Why you gotta be so?..)
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean, yeah (Why you gotta be so?..)
Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me (Why you gotta be so?..)
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?
At that time, about 15% of opinion pieces were written by women, though the imbalance was largely under the radar. The opinion page became a particularly contentious space for an outpouring of women’s voices in this overdue conversation.
Nationally syndicated columnist Susan Estrich called The Los Angeles Times’ leadership out for sexism on its opinion pages. Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post argued with Estrich and said she resented being called a “female” journalist. And Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, echoing one of the most commonly held beliefs about why women don’t have parity, wrote that women weren’t fairly represented because they are afraid of being attacked and care too much about what others think. They lack confidence…
To assume that a lack of confidence is the reason so few women are intellectual leaders is too simplistic. When a woman doesn’t go for a big corporate job like Sandberg’s or says no when television producers call, saying she doesn’t have any confidence implies it’s an individual choice made in some sort of sociocultural vacuum.
As women, in many cases, the impulse to do something out of the norm of our peer group, like write an opinion piece or ask for a promotion, has simply never occurred to us. If it does, we don’t act on it. Our girlfriends aren’t doing it. Our female colleagues aren’t doing it. Why should we?
At The OpEd Project, we cultivate new voices, training minorities and women to inhabit their place as narrators of the world.
After thinking about these feminist fairytales that I love so, I am going to add another letter to Reel Girl’s rating system. And the letter is…T, for Traditional. If Reel Girl assigns a book, movie, or product a T, it means that the subject in question confronts a traditional theme of girls or women in fantasy world (beauty, marriage, passivity etc) in an original, insightful way. I think the T is important because we live in the society we do with thousands of years of cultural mythology to wade through. Though I personally adore when writers and movie makers say fuck it, I’m just going to create a world where genders are equal, I want to give a shout out to those who consciously twist conventions in order to show the heroine triumph.
I think of a T as sort of similar to PG meaning parental guidance suggested. If your child is reading a book, watching a show, or playing with a toy that has a T, your kid may get the most out of the experience if you ask her some questions or dialogue with her about the traditional themes presented here.
Reel Girl will continue to assign the dreaded S, Double S, and Triple S.
All three recs this week are feminist takes on fairytales. Reel Girl is debuting a new rating letter, T for Traditional. Read about it here.
My five year old is absolutely obsessed with The Red Wolf. The illustrations in this book are extraordinary and what is especially cool about them is– see that red wolf– she’s a girl!
No bow! No curly eyelashes! How often do you see a female, magical furry creature like this not in drag in kidworld? And look how happy she is leaping over the forest. It’s impossible to read this book and not smile.
The Red Wolf is a version of the Rapunzel story that rubbed me the wrong way at first. I don’t like to see girls locked up in towers. The princess in this story does free herself, though I worry her liberation is temporary. But I decided that maybe her struggle– the child trying to break free of the overprotective parent who tries to keep her kid safe by teaching her to be fearful of the world– is a universal struggle. Didn’t the father of the Buddha try to isolate his kid from all pain and death? And it was Buddha’s first encounter with an old man that led to his enlightenment, right? With this in mind, and knowing I’m hyper-sensitive to these things, Reel Girl rates The Red Wolf ***GGG/T*** I seriously adore this book.
Next feminist fairytale is Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Brave.
What is special about this story is it features the rare female friendship and also– are you ready? A positive mother-daughter relationship. OK, the mom is dead, but still. Vasilisa, the protagonist, has a magical doll who helps her. But this story is also clearly a traditional fairytale as well with sentences like: “Whereas the other girls were cruel and ugly, Vasilisa was kindness itself and beautiful beyond measure.” Ugh. I think this equation of beauty-kindness and ugliness-cruelty probably started out right: if you love someone, they appear beautiful. But somehow, the correlation got switched so an “ugly” person implies a “wicked” person. When I come across this correlation in stories, I ask my kids about it and we talk about what it means. The story doesn’t dwell on the beauty issue and Vasilisa is resourceful. Reel Girl rates Vasilisa the Brave ***GGG/T***
Now for my favorite feminist fairytale yet: The Rough-Face Girl. This story also features the rare female friendship. Marriage is the central conflict but its handled in such a beautiful and original way. This is a love story in the best way. Reel Girl rates The Rough Face Girl ***GGG/T***
Another social media victory! Thank you to all who spoke out and signed the petition. Here’s to hoping LEGO becomes a leader in inspiring both genders to dream big.
From Change.org:
After a month and more than 50,000 petition signatures, an open letter, numerous radio shows, TV segments, blog posts, articles, and even YouTube videos about the company, LEGO has decided to listen to girls! On Sunday, February 5, Michael McNally, Brand Relations Director, sent an email to SPARK Movement. SPARK, a girl-fueled movement to end the sexualization of girls, is a coalition of more than 70 organizations and reaches tens of thousands of girls and those who support their healthy development. LEGO has accepted SPARK’s request for a meeting to discuss how they can go back to offering all LEGO toys to both boys and girls and to respect girls’ hunger and desire to play with toys that challenge them creatively and intellectually.
From the recent turn around of the Komen Foundation to not buying LEGOs to leaving Go Daddy, I’m realizing more than ever how important it is to support causes we believe in by writing checks.
Of those I just listed, only Komen is a non-profit, but I want to make a plea for women to give money away. I don’t think enough women do. I was in the non-profit world for years and I was blown away by so many women’s negative and complicated relationship to money. Women who cared about social causes, who were political, who wanted to have an impact on the world often had a hard time writing checks. That is, they didn’t do it. Many progressive women don’t like to talk about money. It’s almost like it’s dirty or evil, that money is corrupt and used to hurt people. Women who generously volunteered their time often would not financially support the same causes.
Money isn’t good or bad, it’s energy. It’s a tool. More women need to get comfortable using it.
There are few things more empowering that writing a check to support a cause you believe in. If you are feeling pissed off or like a victim, few things can make your mood or outlook turn around faster than giving money away. It feels really good and that’s why I do it. Philanthropy is one of my most selfish acts.
How much money should you give? It should hurt, at least a little. I’m not into martyrdom, but you should notice it. For a long, long time the church has recommended tithing your income. I think this is perfect amount as general rule, though I, personally, don’t usually give to the church.
One more reason to do it: Since I started giving money away, it has flowed to me more easily. I know that sounds kind of hippy-dippy, but I think it’s more than karma. I think it has to do with healthy risk taking. Clinging to money and feeling fearful isn’t much help to anyone.
Besides writing stories, I believe if more women tithed their income, we would absolutely change the world. Just try it. See how it feels.
What do you get if you’re a boy with your Happy Meal? Oh, Hot Wheels.
, she’ll start to go for the Barbies if I’m not super counteractive with this relentless gender marketing. UGH. One more reason not to go to McDonalds. Wow, so much money money and effort by huge companies doing their best to stereotype little kids.
