Love this:
“according to a high-level Huffington Post source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but with a distinctly Greek accent.”
This is why we need women in power positions (even if they don’t pay bloggers.)
Read the rest here.
Got this photo from Melissa Wardy at Pigtail Pals. A friend of hers took it in Las Vegas. Aren’t we Americans lucky that we can get a “boys rule” or “girls rule” M & Ms mix?
Can the gendering of products get any more stupid?
Really look at this picture.
This is how fucked up we are about gender. In the future, people are going to look back on 2012 and try hard to understand how intelligent human beings could ever be so deranged.
The absurdity of this product is no different than the relentless, aggressive marketing pushed on kids in movie theaters, Target stores, and at birthday parties across America every single day.
My kids were playing at the park up the street and made friends with a boy and girl who spoke fluent Norwegian. An hour later, my three daughters were in their backyard, splashing around in a hot tub. At some point, I was telling the mom, who is Norwegian and a doctor, about my blog. She said that her daughter is not, and never was, into princesses. She told me she’d noticed how sexist American movies and TV are, and that the media in Norway isn’t like that at all. (“What is going on with this American talk show host and contraception?” she asked. “That would never happen in Norway.”) She started pulling out books and DVDs from her shelves. Not only did most of them include female characters but they were pictured front and center. I bet the reason that her five year old daughter isn’t a “girlie-girl” is because she’s hasn’t been brought up on American media. You’ve probably heard of the Scandinavian Pippi Longstocking, but what about this Norwegian grandmother?
Or this elephant firefighter?
All of her DVDs look like that– the submarines, soldiers, police, and helicopters are female characters. I wish I spoke Norwegian.
“I’m not a feminist,” she told me. “I never had to be before I came to America. It’s so sexist here, maybe I am one now.”
A couple days ago, I blogged about how my kids love to read the cereal boxes while they eat breakfast and how the games and toys advertised are ridiculously male dominated.
Our current favorite cereal is Special K with red berries. It’s really good. And there’s a woman on the box! A superhero? A villain from Star Wars. Um, no. It’s a woman on a diet.
It is really driving me crazy that from cereal boxes to LEGO to card games to movies, we are bombarded 24/ 7 with these messages and images about gender. It sucks!
Reel Girl rates Special K ***SSS***
My children love card games, and even though I don’t, I’m learning to. Cards are a great activity for the whole family to do together. Playing them also teaches kids math, how to follow rules, strategy, and how to win and lose gracefully.
But what are the card games that we play with our kids also teaching them about gender?
So the all time worst has got to be Old Maid. Ugh. Horrible. Even before I knew I was a feminist, I was offended by this game that teaches kids no one wants to be stuck with the lone female card. I thought this game was so weird when I was a child and I still do. A racist card game would never be allowed to be sold to children. It’s not funny. As far as I’m concerned, Old Maid should be banned for its sexism. Reel Girl rates Old Maid ***SSS*** Do not play this game with your kids, or call it something else and use different cards.
My favorite card game right now is Slamwich. It’s really fun to play for my 8 yr old and 5 yr old. The cards are diverse in the gender representation. Most of the cards are food (the idea is to build your own sandwich) but there are also “muncher” and “thief” cards, three females and two males types. As far as amount, there is one more male thief card than female thief card. Reel Girl rates Slamwich ***GGG***
Another game we play is called Sleeping Queens. Can you tell by the name I have a problem with this game? At least it’s not called Sleeping Princesses, right?
The game was invented by a little girl, so that’s cool, except I wish she wasn’t influenced to play to this “female get rescued” script. It makes me sad about her imagination. The idea is to wake up the Sleeping Queens which you can do by picking a king card or rescuing her with a knight. Not so great. A dragon can block a knight from stealing a queen (we refer to the dragons as she). Playing a sleeping potion puts a queen back to sleep and that can be blocked with a magic wand. Queens are the power cards, the goal of the game is to get them, but they can’t wake themselves up. This game is pretty fun to play. Reel Girl rates Sleeping Queens ***G/ SS***
I loved this movie. I loved it so much that I wasn’t going to blog about it, because I do have some of my usual complaints about gender stereotyping, and there is that awful sexist joke. But then I read a harsh review in the LA Times and feel like I must defend the movie.
The LA Times is upset that the film strayed too far from the original, created new characters, and also implied that it was too colorful.
I don’t mind the journey away from the book. I enjoyed the new characters.
Of course, I wish more of those new characters were female. I wish Audrey’s role was not the love interest/ muse, that Ted’s whole quest wasn’t about trying to impress her. I’m pissed the movie shows kids that boys are attractive for what they do, how heroic and brave they are, but girls are attractive for how they appear. Still, Audrey is a Token Feisty. She’s an artist and it is her love of trees that inspires the movie. She also has a role to play at the end.
And I was laughing through this whole movie. I was not bored one time. I loved the short, evil corporate guy (Ted’s mom calls him a “babyman.”) and his Girl With a Dragon Tattoo bob. In fact, all the hair in this movie made me smile. The mom and the Granny sport high piles of curls that look like mountains of fancy mashed potatoes. And speaking of the Granny (played by Betty White) she is also a Token Feisty. One of my favorite animated characters ever.
I didn’t think the movie was too colorful. I loved the swirly orange and pink trees. And those pink trees are used to make the famous thneeds, the useless accessory that everyone decides they must have. So you know what that means, right? The thneeds that everybody wants are pink! The thneed cracked me up and reminded me of those baby slings I see all the moms is San Francisco wrap around themselves in 12 different ways and wear so beautifully, but for the life of me, when I had tiny babies, I could never figure out.
One of my consistent complaints about animated movies is that the crowd scenes leave females out (not to mention Dr. Seuss books crowd scenes.) The crowd scenes in “The Lorax” are stunning and fascinating with lots of diversity shown, especially with body types.
Finally, I love the message about environmentalism and the warning not to let corporate greed steal your soul. There are allusions to contemporary times such as a “Too big to Fail” sign. The once-ler is not a bad guy, he just got on the wrong path. He redeems himself in the end WEARING PINK. I wish I could post a picture for you, but I can’t find one so you’ll have to see the movie.
Reel Girl rates “The Lorax” ***GG/S***
My kids are obsessed with placing their cereal box directly in front of their bowl at breakfast. Each girl carefully situates her box and then reads it (or pretends to) while she eats. Today, my five year was staring at this picture:
She asked me: “Why do girls always wear pink?”
I wanted to know: Why is there one girl in this group of 5 kids in the “Create your own rap and dancing avatar!” game? Why do kids have to get bombarded from every direction with multiple images of boys and few if any images of girls?
Frustrated, I flipped her cereal box.
Darth Maul, Yoda, R2-D2, C-3PO, Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jar Jar Binks and our Token Feisty: Queen Amidala. These images are all advertising pens that are prizes inside the box. My daughter got Jar Jar Binks. She decided to give it to her male cousin. Why do you think?
Can you imagine a cereal box picturing 8 female heroes and villains to 1 male? Or 5 female rap avatars to 1 male?
Reel Girl rates Reese’s Puffs ***SS***
We live in a Victorian built in 1911. I love my house but space is limited, all three girls share a room. Desperate for space, we decided to get the most out of the bay window landing on the stairs. The glass reaches too low to build a window seat, our the first idea. So we lined it with cushions, put in a carpet, painted it, and squeezed the piano in. Love, love, love, it’s like another room!
It’s so great that a female architect designed and gets to intro the new LEGO Town Hall set. Here’s the video.
Do you think this architect is grateful she didn’t have to play with the ridiculous Friends set when she was a kid?
But my enthusiasm waned when the architect introduced the minifigs. First comes the Mayor, the boss and the most important one, the star of the set. He’s male. (We see his cool office inside as well.) Next comes his secretary, guess what gender?
I was spacing out listening to this video and the reason I even started to pay attention was I heard the architect was going on and on about “a new print on her torso and there is this old tradition that you have to wear something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And she’s wearing a new necklace and yeah, a new print.”
I did a double take and realized she was talking about the bride. Specifically, her dress and accessories.
LEGO deserves kudos for letting a female intro this set. When she comes on she says: “I bet you’re surprised to see me,” so I’m thinking its the first time she’s gotten this role. I hope she had a big role in the Town Hall design as well. But LEGO, please try to break out of the gender stereotypes with your minifigs. Remember, you’re marketing these characters to kids. You’re giving kids tools for fantasy play and showing children what they can be when they grow up. Except for the “lady reporter” the adult figs are all limited to “traditional” gender roles. What about a female mayor and a male secretary? Would LEGO ever consider that?
Reel Girl rates LEGO Town Hall ***G/SSS***
JoJo’s Flying Side Kick is about a Tae Kwon Do student who must break a board with a flying side kick in order to win her yellow belt.
JoJo is nervous about the test, telling her Grandaddy: “I’m freakin’ out!” He helps her by giving a tutorial on fancy footwork from his boxing days. JoJo experiences other fears– a creepy-looking tree, the swing that hangs from it, a boy from her class tells her she “yells like a mouse.” In order to nail the side kick, JoJo uses the footwork, imagines the board is the tree, and gives a giant yell: “KEEEYAAAHHH!”
This book is really fun to read out loud. I love how all of the protagonist’s fears are woven together and then conquered in unison. The story teaches kids the great lesson that courage doesn’t mean having no fear but doing something even when you’re terrified. Reel Girl rates JoJo’s Flying Side Kick ***GGG***
Adelaide is the story of a kangaroo born with wings. She knows she doesn’t quite belong in her family of wingless creatures, so she hooks up with a pilot and travels the world, exploring and having adventures.
She decides to stick around Paris where she loves the art and culture but misses kangaroos. One day she saves two children from a burning building but is seriously hurt in the fall. (Her wings can’t carry all that weight.) After a hospital stay, she decides to visit the zoo where she meets and falls in love with a kangaroo named Leon. I really like how this story ends with a wedding and then baby kangaroos but its an unexpected surprise. The “happily ever after” finale isn’t the focus of Adelaide’s quest, but its nice that she finds her soulmate showing heroic, powerful females can fall in love, too. Reel Girl rates Adelaide ***GGG***
Shrek the Third: Fiona’s Fairy-tale Five is kind of chesey, and a cheaply made, stapled together book, but I adore it. There is much to love about the first Shrek story/ movie: how Fiona transforms at the end from “beautiful” princess to fat, green, troll to find true love. How great is that? So much potential here to flip fairy tales– and the notion of what it is to be “happily ever after” and what beauty and love is too– on its head. Not to mention that so much of the Shrek franchise is about making fun of Disney.
But as the far as the big screen, the female potential for greatness in this epic remains tragically unexplored. All three movies are Shrek’s stories, not Fiona’s. Fiona is only the Token Feisty, the strong female character included in many contemporary animated films so the audience won’t care or even notice that all of the other characters in the film are male, including the star who the movie is often titled for.
Fiona’s role is the love interest. The Shrek movie sequels are even more disappointing with the third one morphing into another animated father-son type saga (and Justin Timberlake vehicle) where Shrek must find an heir– male, of course. Fiona’s part is reduced to nothing. Where did she go? It sucks to see “Shrek 3” with your daughters, to say the least. But luckily, there is this cheap, little book. From the back of Fiona’s Fairy -tale Five:
“When Shrek is off finding an heir to the throne, Fiona must watch the kingdom. But soon Prince Charming and his band of villains storm the castle. Fiona has little time to turn a group of prim and proper princesses into lean, mean fighting machines. Can the fairy-tale five come together to take back the castle?
This book would make such a great movie, it kills me. Imagine the princesses voiced by Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph joining Cameron Diaz’s Fiona. This little story is so subversive too, because Disney absolutely forbids its princesses to interact with each other. (Or even look at each other, embossed on diapers, T shirts, or coloring books each one gazes off in a different direction, ignoring the other. Great model for female friendship, huh?)
But who got the spin off movie from Shrek? That would be Puss in Boots. I want to tear out my hair. But check out this book, it’s also a good “gateway” story if your kids are into princesses. Reel Girl rates Shrek the Third: Fiona’s Fairy-tale Five***GGG/T***
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