Let the healing begin! I am going on a two week family vacation, away and offline (that’s the goal, anyway, as far as the offline part.) See you in August.
xoMargot
ReelGirl going on vacation
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Category Archives: Margot Magowan/ ReelGirl
ReelGirl changes its tagline
I started Reel Girl because I wanted to create a resource for parents on the internet where they could go to find great stories, movies, and toys that support girl empowerment. I’m the mom of three young daughters, and I wasn’t able to find the kind of information I was looking for in one place.
I also wanted to recognize how messed up our movie rating system is– and the values associated with that rating system. So many G movies perpetuate the absolute worst kinds of gender stereotypes, yet they are supposedly “for kids.” In my opinion, this kind of repetitive imagery is way more dangerous for children than hearing the word “shit.”
So ReelGirl’s rating system is S for stereotype and G for girlpower, 1- 3 possible.
Here’s the problem: I’m a ranter, not a rater. I’m not organized enough to pull this off. I need logos, to go through all the movies, books, and toys out there, and I don’t have the time. Any free time I get, I have something new to write about. So while I will continue to rate media and products, I’m going to recognize that mostly, I haven’t been.
I’m changing ReelGirl’s tagline from “Rating kids media and products for girl empowerment” to “Imagining gender equality in the fantasy world.” That’s mostly what ReelGirl is about. My hope is that ReelGirl supports and encourages real imagination (ha ha) instead of the same old recycled stories.
Since having these three kids, I really get how fantasy creates reality and reality creates fantasy in an endless loop. That’s pretty much what this blog is about. So the new new tag line is supposed to reflect that. Still, not perfect, because it leaves out politics, sports and other issues. More accurate might be: “Imagining gender equality” but too vague? I could go more specific, something like: “Imagining gender equality in media, merchandise, and politics.” If you’re good at titles, let me know your ideas.
New review of ‘Sugar In My Bowl’
Great review from Taunton Daily Gazette’s Rae Francouer: Excerpt below (though my story is fiction, book is great because it features both, you can order the book here.)
“Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex.” Edited by Erica Jong. HarperCollins, New York, 2011. 238 pages. $21.99.
Here is where you realize that sex and romance aren’t really that related. Here is where you must admit that sex is way more important. Here is where you see, time after time, that sex can be anything anytime anywhere but it had better be erotic or else. And here is where you see that within the male-female dynamic — largely the dynamic “Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex” concerns itself with — men take up a lot of space in women’s head. And here, men and women looking for something fun to read this summer, is where you notice that good sex commences once pretenses are abandoned….
There are no duds in this lively, fascinating collection but I do have favorites. Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” wrote “Skin, Just Skin: A Dramatic Triologue” meant to be performed by three women. It is perfect-pitch true, funny, real, delightful and smart. Three women talk about really good sex in incomplete sentences. Sometimes they surprise and delight each other.
Margot Magowan’s post-childbirth attempts — “Light Me Up” — at reconnecting sexually with her husband were horribly wrenching to bear witness to. It seems as if the female sexual body, in her case, threw up a protective wall for the sake and survival of the baby. It took a major emotional meltdown to explode a hole in the wall big enough for her husband to squirm through…In this collection you’ll find lots of women engaging in lots of sex. Therapists told these women they had low self-esteem. Nuns told them they were loose cannons. Friends called them sluts. But they persevered and today here we are, taking a long look and enjoying every written word of it.
Read the full review here.
Shelf Awareness reviews ‘Sugar In My Bowl’
The pieces in this anthology run the spectrum from prudish–Julie Klam half-ashamedly admits that until recently, her six-year-old daughter believed women’s private parts were simply called “the front”–to downright erotic–Susan Cheever’s “Sex with Strangers” explores the pleasures and perks of doing just that–and everything in between. Anne Roiphe and J.A.K. Andres examine children’s curiosity about sex, while Elisa Albert and Margot Magowan consider the impact of children on a couple’s sexual relationship. Jennifer Weiner and Karen Abbott create characters who persist in seeking sexual connection despite very real challenges of age and health.
But fantasy and play also figure large in Sugar in My Bowl, as Rosemary Daniell and gossip columnist Liz Smith remember former lovers whose touches linger for decades, and Rebecca Walker contends that, thanks to fantasy, the best sex she ever had was sex she never had.
Sugar in My Bowl is proof positive that women can write seriously about sex and live to tell. It represents a remarkable smorgasbord of experience and perspective, and there’s a dish here for everyone.
Read the full review here.
Oreos for breakfast? Really?
After reading ReelGirl’s ‘Notes to the babysitter‘ post on my ‘let them eat cake’ (for breakfast) approach to feeding my three daughters, Babble.com’s Madeline Holler blogs on strollerderby:
No bad food, no bad food, no bad food. Come on! Oreos are bad food!
But, she’s got an open mind:
I remember when my daughter was 3, a child development expert talked about how important that kids be able to have a food shelf that they have unfettered access to. I tried it, but (1) we lived in a super small place then, too — couldn’t spare a low drawer in the cabinets and (2) I copped out and put “good” crap in there that she wasn’t all that jazzed about (which I’m sure was exactly my plan!).
I know I need to share my kitchen, my shopping list and my food, and let my kids drive their own eating. We have very little junk in the house and lots of fresh stuff, which they like. Sure, my kids rave about junky sweets, etc., but they also ask for fruit to snack on, don’t blanch at whole grain pasta or bread and one even orders up lentils whenever she gets to pick what’s for dinner. All good!
So it’s really me who is in the way. I’m not particularly worried about eating disorders — whether or not I change my ways — but I think it can’t be anything but infantalizing for older kids to have to ask if they can have a popsicle. It’s got to start sometime. It might as well be now.
Like every parent, I’d love to see into the future and know if I’m making the right choices for my kids. All I know is that my decisions about food feel right for our family. Our meal times are peaceful, my kids eat lots of ‘healthy’ food, and are adventurous eaters. (My seven year old’s absolute favorite food is kimbap– do you know what that is? Read about it here.)
For me, it comes down to this: Can you imagine being told what to eat? And how much? What if you were in the mood for a crunchy salad but someone forced you to eat roasted chicken? What we choose to eat is so personal with many factors involved including how hungry we are, what we ate last, if it’s hot or cold outside, the list goes on. How could anyone possibly know what you ‘should’ eat but you?
I suppose following someone else’s orders about what to eat is exactly what a diet is. But could that be why we’re so screwed up about food? Because since day one we’ve been trained to have no clue how to listen and respond to our own bodies?
More reviews for Sugar In My Bowl
From Loquaciously Yours:
For those of us who’ve been left/betrayed or afraid we’re about to be, and that’s probably most of us, a head’s up about Margot McGowan’s intense and beautifully narrated piece Light Me Up—have a box of Kleenex handy and a friend’s phone number close by.
Read the rest here.
Gender gap persists in imaginary world
Why write fiction?
I’ve always loved to, but I also felt like it didn’t matter as much. Writing about politics and culture is important. If you write about ‘issues,’ you can use your writing to change the world. Or try to. Making up stories might be fun but what’s the point?
Then I had three kids. Of course, I read my daughters stories, watch movies with them, and also, TV shows. I witness how the stories they listen to shape their imaginary play, how they dress, who their heroes are, the language they repeat, the art they make, and their own creative writing.
In her best-selling book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes extensively about children’s brain development, how babies don’t come into the world with fully formed minds that we, parents, are just supposed to observe and discover. Their brains are constantly being formed, rapidly growing and changing as they take in language, pictures, adult reactions, and all kinds of stimuli. Neurons fire in reaction, neural pathways are formed, and connections are created, assimilating the outside world to create the internal one.
So I’ve got to wonder: How might kids’ brains (and then, of course, adult brains) be different if the stories they were exposed to weren’t so dramatically and predominantly shaped by men?
If you ever doubt fiction is important in forming our deepest reality, beliefs, and actions, look at the most influential historical novel of all time: the Bible- not known for its female authors or kindness to women. We’re still fighting wars based on these ancient, repeated, and recycled stories.
One reason the stereotypes in kidlit are so sad is because we’re supposed to be experiencing fantasy, magical worlds. Yet, what we see, way too often, is the same sexism, depicted in cartoonlike proportions, that exists in the real world.
What would our world look like if most great artists, film directors, and novelists were women? And had been for thousands of years?
Here’s just one modern example of how reality shapes fiction and fiction shapes reality. Every year, Forbes Magazine does a survey on the richest imaginary characters. This year, the list includes tycoons like Scrooge McDuck, Richie Rich, Smaug (the dragon from J. R. R. Tolkein) Bruce Wayne (of Batman) and Mr. Monopoly.
Of the gender gap on the list, Forbes‘ Michale Noer writes:
“There are 14 male characters on the list and one female character on this year’s Fictional 15. Sadly, that’s not unusual. There are always women on the list, but too often, only one.
The highest-ranked woman ever was ‘Mom’ from the television show Futurama, who placed fourth in 2007, with a fictional net worth of 15.7 billion. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider video games and movies has appeared on the Fictional 15 three times since 2005. There have never been more than two women on the list in a single year.
Our fictional reporters- the best in the business- have worked hard to rectify this gender imbalance, even breaking the Fictional 15 rules against folkloric characters (the Tooth Fairy appeared in 2010.) But the gap persists.
Some female characters are perennial candidates. Miss Havisham, the well-off spinster from Great Expectations, is considered every year and dismissed on the grounds that she simply isn’t rich enough. And at every fictional story meeting, someone is sure to nominate one of Disney’s princesses, usually Snow White or Ariel. One problem here is that you need to infer their wealth from the fact they live in castes and wear fancy dresses. They aren’t known for being rich within their fictional worlds the same way as C. Montgomery Burns or Bruce Wayne.”
Forbes‘ Caroline Howard gives this explanation:
“Why so few? The answer is quite simple: a small pool of candidates. For some reason, authors, screenwriters, directors, and comic book artists haven’t been creating many ultarich female characters. that is equally true for writers of yore, present and those tackling future or fantasy.
Kind like the real world. Look at the Forbes Worlds Billionaires list. A paltry 1.5 % are self-made women- 19 out of 1,210. And if we include heiresses and widows, that makes 103 ladies, or just 8.5%.”
Obviously, a crucial step towards ever achieving gender equality is imagining what it would look like. Does anyone know what that would be?
Women kiss and tell in new book
Sugar In My Bowl, edited by Erica Jong, is a collection of essays and short fiction about female sexuality by writers like Julie Klam, Fay Weldon, Jennifer Weiner, and many others including me. The book is coming out June 14, but you can preorder it on Amazon.
Gail Collins, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has a hilarious essay in the book that describes how her Catholic education warped her perceptions of sex.
She writes: “I was possibly one of the least sophisticated teenagers in the United States outside of Amish country, and although I knew the mechanics of how babies were made, I had not yet really come around to imagining that people actually did that kind of thing voluntarily.”
Until Collins was well past puberty, she believed that virginity was the same thing as being unmarried and was completely mystified by whatever was going on between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. She warns that’s what can happen to a girl when she’s “taught about sex by women who didn’t have any.” That would be nuns, who, apparently, had all kinds of special insight into gender differences:
“Boys were not much more than little sex robots, and they could not be held responsible for their actions. Once, we were all called to assembly to hear Charles Keating, the head of the Citizens for Decent Literature (and future star of a huge savings-and-loan scandal), who told us the story of a young mother who went walking down the road with her two small children while she was wearing shorts. The sight of her naked legs so overwhelmed a passing motorist that he swerved off the road and killed both the kids. And it was all their mother’s fault. We were then asked to sign a pledge never to wear any kind of shorts, including the long Bermuda ones.”
In another great essay, novelist Min-Jin Lee writes that it wasn’t until her husband pointed out to her that she’d left sex out of her writing that she realized she had. Re-examining her literary heroines (and their creators) including Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre, and Hetty Sorrel, all scandalous for their day, Lee writes: “Looking backward at my betters made me realize that I was shy at best, cowardly at most. Okay, I was terrified to write about sex. Why?”
Lee, a Korean-American, traced part of her reticence back to a disappointing class she took in college called “Women’s Studies and Asian-American History and Literature” that didn’t inspire her quite as she’d hoped:
“Alas. In print and visual media Asian women were often hookers, mail-order brides, masseuses, porn stars, dragon ladies, submissive sex slaves, and yes, cartoon characters with long black hair, red lips, and racially improbable bosoms. Asian men were sinister gangsters, inscrutable businessmen, angry nerds, and scheming eunuchs. If Asian women were oversexual, then their brothers were asexual.”
Twenty years later, after her conversation with her husband, Lee googled “Asian women” and got 14 million hits, mostly sexual references in the same genre as her college course.
“I may see myself as a forty-two-year-old writer, mother, wife, and former lawyer, but fourteen million hits trumped my subjective reality.” This distortion changed Lee as a writer. From then on, “When relevant, I wrote about sex, even Asian pornography and date rape, because I wanted to be honest about what was significant inside and outside my world. For most of my adult life, I had been uncomfortable with my body- my racial and sexual envelope. This time, in my pages, I thought, maybe I can talk about how it is for me, and I wrote it down. If I had been angry about the lack of self-determination of Asian women’s bodies and lives, I had been staging a feeble and arrogant protest by refusing to write about sex.”
One of my favorite pieces in the anthology is by critic, novelist, and New Yorker contributor Daphne Merkin. Her essay– about how she abandoned a prestigious literary fellowship to pursue the magnetic lust of a summer romance– shows how sexual obsession colonized “all the available mental space in my head.”
My story is called “Light Me Up.” I wrote it because so many love stories, especially those with female protagonists, end with ‘happily ever after,’ when the girl gets the ring. I wanted to introduce a newlywed couple and then throw some scary challenges– involving sex, money, and a new baby– their way.
You can read an excerpt from Sugar In My Bowl here.
Ask the questions
Lists are limited because lists are limiting.
Obviously, a major part of the challenge for girls is that there is so little diversity in kids’ media. Even the princess who only wants to find her man wouldn’t be bad if she were one of many role models. I guess this is why we always talk about diversity. It’s important; it’s everything.
So, after each of my reviews, I’ve decided to add a few discussion questions. Hopefully, the addition of questions will highlight the critical thinking aspect to reading, watching, and playing; that it’s interactive, not passive and that’s really the whole point.
ReelGirl gives good headlines
This is a new feature at ReelGirl. It’s basically what I would put on the front page if I were the news editor of the world. Please share your links. (My husband came up with the title.)
From the New York Times: Disney is marketing to your womb. I’m not even going to give some snarky commentary here. This article speaks for itself. Read it and freak out.
From The New Republic on the literary glass ceiling: Why are most book reviews written about works by men? Depressing statistics here, both on women writers and literary gatekeepers such as editors of lit mags; when discrimination starts this early, women can’t catch up. Gatekeepers reply, they’re just looking for the best and most important works, gender doesn’t matter to them at all. Hopefully, this bummer of an article will inspire women to write. There is a point! You need to get your own stories out there. No one else is going to do it for you.
Go Arianna! The Huffington Post and AOL make a 315 million dollar deal. What would you rather be: married to a millionaire (make that gay millionaire) or be one yourself?
Just in case moms who work need something else to feel guilty about, CNN is reporting that working moms have fat kids. Who decided to do this study? Why? Was it some group thinking: let’s mess around with all of women’s worst insecurities? By the way, CNN reports no similar study on dads who work.
And speaking of studies, Match.com funded one done by two women, Helen Fisher and Stephanie Coontz. And guess what these women researchers found? Match.com is announcing that women aren’t the ones who want to get married, men are. Hmmm…I wonder if who funds and creates studies has anything to do with what gets studied and what the ‘results’ are?
In the Huffington Post, Tara Sophia Mohr writes about sexism at “Top Chef.” As with the women writers, judges are just looking for the best and most important chefs who just happen to turn out male. Mohr has a brilliant idea for the show: blind judging. This would counteract gender bias and be a great ratings hook too, by the way. Bravo bigwigs– are you listening?
Did you notice something missing from the Superbowl entertainment besides Axl Rose? No Cheerleaders! First superbowl ever! This made it more watchable for women around around the world. Cheerleaders are bad for women; this fact has nothing to do with athletic prowess and everything to do with being a sideshow. Cheerleaders tell women their role is to support the real stars, men.