I have always loved Pigtail Pals for its cool clothing, its brilliant founder, Melissa Wardy, and its high quality product. But today, I have one more reason for romance, something that trumps all other loves: today, my three year old daughter dressed herself. She chose all of her own clothing, from underwear to socks, and arrived upstairs for breakfast, fully prepared for the day. What was she wearing, you ask? Lucky for you, we stopped at Whole Foods on the way to school and I got a photo:
All black. Hee hee. Except for the blue socks, of course, which, I’m sure you notice, match. Hallelujah! (Where is her arm though? I can’t wait to show her this. She looks like ghost-girl.) But best of all, and this goes back to Pigtail Pals, check out the back of her T-shirt:
My daughter loves the words, the colored-spiral of them, the bumpy feel, and also, how incredibly soft the material is.
Seeing this outfit reminded me of what a great Xmas shopping destination Pigtail Pals is if you are looking for clothing for children.
Melissa Wardy founded Pigtail Pals when she had a baby daughter, named her after Amelia Earhart, and then couldn’t find a single onesie that showed a girl with a plane on it. Then, Melissa realized she couldn’t find children’s clothing showing girls doing much of anything at all. So she came up with some designs and started a company. Years later, Pigtail Pals has grown into a successful business and Wardy is coming out with a book on “redefining girly.”
Here are Pigtail Pals best-selling ‘Full of Awesome’ T-shirts.
I keep giving you these sites for shopping because there are alternatives out there. It sucks that sometimes we have to look so hard for them, but I think the more we talk about them, (along with the way marketing, in general, is shifting to FB, Twitter) we can get the word out to more people.
Final photo of a proud three year old, her shirt covered in doughnut crumbs just in time for school.
I am such a fan of Louis C. K. My husband and I stream his show about every other night and it cracks us up. I have never seen a man speak publicly about fatherhood so accurately. Louis has two daughters (we have three) and the conflicted emotions he expresses about raising his kids are spot on.
I just Googled “Louis C. K. contemporary fatherhood” and came up with a recent piece from The Atlantic.
Of course, to earn the title of America’s Dad (from someone other than me, I mean) Louis probably has to have a higher Nielsen share than what he currently pulls in.
So that’s me and the writer of this Atlantic article at least, so far. Join the club! If you are not watching Louis yet and are interested at all in parenting issues, you’ve got to check this guy out. He is X-rated and, at times, his language and the topics he goes into leave my mouth hanging open. But at the same time, he is charming.
The show we watched last night made me really think about all the basic ways in every day life, our culture does not support fatherhood.
Here is Louis C.K. on the challenges of having to use the bathroom the same time his daughters do:
I was at the airport with my kids, I was at JFK, and they had to go to the bathroom and I had to go to the bathroom. So take yourself through that logically. Where do I… What do I do? I can’t take them to the ladies room. I can’t just… “Go on in there, girls… Into the public restroom of an international airport.” Just release my custody of them to whoever’s in there. “Go ahead, good luck to you. Maybe I’ll see you later.”
So I gotta take them into the men’s room, that’s what I have to do, is take them into the John F. Kennedy Airport men’s room. Look here, girls! Nine penises! Nine penises that are all peeing at the same time. Nine farting men from all over the world, with their dicks out, shaking off droplets of pee from their syphilitic penises. Look, three of them have foreskins. You can see the difference now.’
So much of Louis’s show is about these interactions with his daughters, not sanitized. Clearly, his kids are a part of his life. If there were more fathers like Louis C.K., I bet there would be more family bathrooms in airports.
Louis also does an amazing job of expressing the conflicted feeling parents have towards children. He hides his ice cream from his daughters. When his kids are finally asleep, to get them back for staying up so late, Louis takes his bowl of ice cream into their room and eats it in the dark over their sleeping heads.
The Atlantic posts another example of his ambivalence:
“When am I going to go to momma’s again?” Louis’ daughter asks as they do their pre-bedtime routine. “I like momma’s better. I like momma’s better because she makes good food. And I love her more so I like being there, too. I like being here, too. It’s just not as great.” Louis takes it in with great equanimity and, as she turns away to go to sleep, he gives his little daughter the finger.
When we have more fathers like Louis C.K., the world will be a better place.
My daughter and I have a favorite song on Red: “All Too Well.” I think it’s about Jake Gylenhaal, clues being: reference to sister, plaid shirt, he’s close to his mom, Taylor had Thanksgiving with his family at Maggie G.’s house and that’s scarf season, right?
Whatever you think about Swift, and I’m a fan, she’s great with lyrics. Some lines from “Well” I really like “you called me up again just to break me like a promise”…”Cause here we are again on that little town street, You almost ran the red cause you were looking over at me” (Can totally picture that) and finally “Time won’t fly it’s like I’m paralyzed by it.”
Swift is a talented story-teller. I recommend the whole CD.
“All Too Well”
I walked through the door with you
The air was cold but something ’bout it felt like home somehow and I
Left my scarf there at your sister’s house
And you still got it in your drawer even now
Oh, your sweet disposition
And my wide-eyed gaze
We’re singing in a car getting lost Upstate
The autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place
And I can picture it after all these days
And I know it’s long gone, and that magic´s not here no more
And it might be okay, but I’m not fine at all
Cause here we are again on that little town street
You almost ran the red cause you were looking over at me
Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well
Photo album on the counter
Your cheeks were turning red
You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin-sized bed
And your mother’s telling stories ’bout you on the t-ball team
You tell me about your past thinking your future was me
And I know it’s long gone, and there was nothing else I could do
And I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to
Cause here we are again in the middle of the night
We’re dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light
Down the stairs, I was there, I remember it all too well
Yeah
And maybe we got lost in translation
Maybe I asked for too much
But maybe this thing was a masterpiece
´til you tore it all up
Running scared, I was there, I remember it all too well
Hey you called me up again just to break me like a promise
So casually cruel in the name of being honest
I’m a crumbled up piece of paper lying here
Cause I remember it all all all too well
Time won’t fly it’s like I’m paralyzed by it
I´d like to be my old self again
But I’m still trying to find it
After plaid shirt days and nights when you made me your own
Now you mail back my things and I walk home alone
But you keep my old scarf from that very first week
Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me
You can’t get rid of it, cause you remember it all too well Yeah
Cause there we are again when I loved you so
Back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known
It was rare, I was there, I remember it all too well
Wind in my hair, you were there, you remember it all
Down the stairs, you were there, you remember it all
It was rare, I was there, I remember it all too well
I LOVE TowardTheStars.com so much, I interviewed the founder, Ines Almeida.
The pics I posted below include images of girls b/c that is what Reel Girl is about, and I love collecting these images. Check out Merida’s expression, how cool is she? And in all the Merida dolls, I never saw this one before. That’s why I love TowardTheStars, Ines culls through everything and finds the best. My oldest daughter is also into detectives and spies, so I posted some of those images, and a few other toys/ games that I’m buying. So this is my personal list. TowardTheStars has all kinds of great toys and products for kids.
Why did you start TowardTheStars?
I have an engineering degree in Computer Science for all of my life I have been part of male-dominated environments where I was a minority. My career progressed from engineering to management and executive roles and during this journey I was confronted with the gender biases from others and with my own limiting beliefs that sometimes stopped me from voicing my opinions or applying for a particular role.
As I started coaching my female colleagues, I found out that we shared a lot of common patterns: we struggled with the lack of female role models, and we were trying to overcome the “fairy tale syndrome”, a need to be perfect, congenial and at the same time highly effective. This left little space for taking healthy risks and for being audacious.
Six years ago a little girl came into my life, Ally, she was 2.5 years-old at the time. As I spent more time with her and started to look at the world through her eyes and started experiencing the messages she was getting all day long from society, toys, media and marketing, I started becoming more uncomfortable with what I was experiencing. I was looking at the root cause for all my own limiting beliefs; I was looking at the reason why my colleagues struggled to speak up, why women were risk-averse, why girls don’t pursue science, engineering, technology, math, sports and leadership.
Ally was surrounded by toys, books and media that were constantly telling her that her worth came from her external appearance. Everything related to science, maths, leadership, risk taking, audacity, sports seemed to be missing from products targeted to girls.
I decided to do something about it and started to raise awareness with parents and educators via social media. I created my own ipad app with empowering stories for girls 7Wonderlicious, I created a small website with a list of empowering books for girls and another focused on short youtube videos with all the PSAs and documentaries I could find about gender stereotyping and sexualisation of girls, it was all cobbled together very quickly. My community grew to 100,000 people online across several social media channels. This year I decided to leave my corporate executive role in IT to launch TowardTheStars a global online marketplace for empowering gifts for girls. It is a natural progression and I am now pulling together all the work achieved previously into one single site and committing all my time to this worthy cause that I am so passionate about.
What are your most popular items?
We have a couple of small clothing businesses with empowering messages that are doing extremely well turning over close to 1000 dollars in the first month.
Products that support charitable causes are also very popular, people love to know that by buying a gift they are helping to improve the lives of girls somewhere in the world. We have fair trade gifts that are handmade by Indigenous communities in Africa and Australia for example.
Of course my book site (now fully integrated with TowardTheStars) is also extremely popular, people love to discover books with young bold female protagonists. I also spent years compiling top quality resources for parents, our parenting books are a huge hit, parents are always very grateful and enthusiastic when they discover that there is expert advice in book form that will help them counter stereotypes, sexualisation, body image issues etc.
Do you mostly support small businesses?
My goal with TowardTheStars is to create a venue for parents, educators, businesses, independent producers and not for profits to come together to discover new innovative ways to put an end to the stereotypes that are so prevalent in our society and in products targeted at children. I strongly believe that small businesses, artists and craftspeople are central to this movement because until we create great alternatives we are stuck with media and toys that belong in the middle ages.
This is why I invested in developing a true multisided marketplace where people can setup their shop in a few minutes and list their items directly on the site. This was a huge software development project but now the movement can grow organically. New independent producers join every day. It is a real pleasure to wake up every morning and discover new delightful items listed on the site. This girl empowerment intension box was listed last week for example, I was delighted to discover Ann’s work for the first time because she found TowardTheStars and decided to join us.
TowardTheStars will always give more visibility, priority and support to small businesses; I consider them my partners in crime and will do anything within my reach to make them successful. These are the people that welcomed me into the community two years ago and inspired me to create this venue.
TowardTheStars also provides products from larger businesses via our affiliate model with Amazon.com. We do this for the following of reasons:
To give access to parents and educators to our growing list of empowering books that was created more than 2.5 years ago. We want to ensure our amazing authors are represented within our community. I am privileged to be able to call some of these authors and experts my friends, many have supported this project from its inception.
To ensure that our community has access to products related to STEM that are less likely to be produced by small businesses.
To ensure our community has access to good alternatives being created by the large corporations. Great movies like Brave by Pixar, series like Doc McStuffins by Disney or anything from Studio Ghibli.
By providing a comprehensive range of products that counter stereotypes and/or are gender neutral we keep our community coming back to the site, which of course will benefit our small businesses too.
How does a business join your site? What are you looking for?
As soon as they register and login they are able to create their own shop and list their items, it is very user friendly and a business can setup shop in just a few minutes. Of course all items must comply with the strict guidelines that we put together with the help of some of the top child development experts in the world. This site will remain free of sexualisation and stereotypes. I review all listed products myself.
This video gives an excellent summary of what we are looking for.
My hope and dream is that this movement will inspire many others to innovate and produce great stereotype free products. I am already quite impressed with the level of conversation between buyers and sellers. The community is keen to provide feedback and our small business quickly respond to the desires and feedback of the parents and educators. Several of our businesses have already adapted/evolved their products based on feedback. We had a number of awesome t-shirts listed on the site with really great empowering designs and quotes but they were only available in pink initially, after some feedback from the community our sellers were happy to provide new colour options.
What are your future plans for TowardTheStars?
Continue to provide great resources and options to parents and educators looking for media and toys for their children;
Continue to support and engage small businesses and independent producers, inspiring them to innovate and produce outstanding items;
Do as much as I can to drive visibility to the site and promote the great work of our businesses, make them successful;
Expand our community functionality on the website to enable real conversations and ideas to emerge.
Get help! This project is growing fast. I am looking to expand my team as I am literally working night and day. I barely get any sleep. I am tired but very happy!
Sam Gordon is the first female football player ever to be shown on a Wheaties box. She is nine years old.
We are a cereal eating family. At any given time, we have about 7 boxes in our pantry. My children’s favorites right now are Cheerios, granola, and Special K with strawberries. My kids are also obsessed with looking at, or if they can, reading the boxes. Each one will place the box in front of her bowl to give her “privacy” and easy access to the info. (Don’t ask me, but apparently, my husband also did this as a kid, and from the time and energy marketers put into these boxes, my guess is it’s a common practice.)
About a year ago, I blogged about the awful, horrible, offensive Special K box . Check out who my daughters get to read about in the morning:
That’s right, this woman’s weight loss gave her “a sense of pride I’ve never felt before.” She’s telling my daughters that the biggest accomplishment of her life is losing weight. That’s just the lesson I want my daughters to digest along with their morning cereal.
Around the time I blogged about Special K, I posted pics of the “junk” cereal boxes. Even I was shocked at the total lack– LACK– of female characters. If a female does show up on the box, she is literally marginalized.
Here’s Cocoa Pebbles. On the front of the box, there’s Fred, waving at us. At the top of the box, you can see buddies, Fred and Barney, driving cars and having fun.
More fun for Fred and Barney can be found on the back on the box. There they are playing a racing game with their cars. A game you can access on your smart phone as well. How cool is that?
Where’s Wilma? Is she car racing? Is she in a game at all? No, silly. Women can’t drive! They’re not fast, they don’t compete, they don’t care about winning. Women are above all that boy stuff. Women, just like the Special K lady, care about “health.”
There’s Wilma, on the side of the box, hoping kids are getting enough Vitamin D.
I was on FB and saw this post from my friend Lateefah Simon, that shows what I meant perfectly. Here is her post:
This sweet lady ran like a bat out of hell to catch the Caltrain this morning. Her cute black boots were moving at crazy light speed. She didn’t have time to swipe her clipper before boarding the train. She was soaking – breathing hard but managed to find a seat. The ticket taker dude approaches her first. Lady with the cute rain boots pulls out clipper and tells story about what happened. She’s kicked off the train. Next one comes in an hour. Sad cause it’s storming.
Sadder because I hate waiting. Booooo! At least my boots are fresh. Just wanna get yo work. Sheesh.
This is about catching a local train, right? No big deal. But clearly, the runner is a hero and the ticket taker dude, a villain.
If you were writing a story about a woman catching the train, running for it “as if her life depended on it” you might create a plot situation where her life actually depend on it; that will evoke the emotion in the reader that the runner experiences. To evoke and communicate that emotion, you have to make the reader care if she catches the train, understand what it means if she misses it so that the reader misses it to. For me, coming from this place, plot doesn’t feel contrived but the opposite, fully accurate.
Writing a Middle Grade book has been one of the best experiences of my life. I am learning so much, and every day is a new adventure, both in my story and the real world.
About five years ago, I wrote a novel and though it got me an agent, the book didn’t sell. Editors universally told my agent: great writing, not enough plot/ motor. ( An adapted part of the novel is published as a short story in an anthology that came out last year from Ecco, Sugar In My Bowl)
Plot had never really interested me, as a reader and as a viewer of movies as well. Most important to me is character and then, in books, language. Watching movies, I would often space out during the plot and then, five minutes later, have no idea what was going on.
In my book that didn’t sell, most of the action takes place in the character’s head. I still love to read books like that and, like any writer dealing with rejection, can think of many examples of writers in that style– Virgina Woolf, come on, people! But you know where that style absolutely will not fly? A Middle Grade book, a book for kids. Kids don’t want to read pages of introspection. They want action, adventure, but still, thank goodness, they want loveable characters.
Writing the MG book has shown me why plot is important in general: a fiction writer needs to show, not tell. Everyone knows that, but I never really understood it until this book. A writer can describe a character but what really shows the reader who she is her actions. It’s like how I tell my kids, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.” You know how I learned that, I mean deeply learned it? From being a parent. I can talk at my kids until I’m blue in the face, or I can show them. The latter is the only thing, the only thing, that really works. I think that is why being a parent is so challenging; if you’re yelling at your kid, you’ve got to look at your own pattern of behavior and who wants to do that?
Before, when I was told that all narratives had a pattern, I was kind of annoyed. Weren’t we all more original than that? Recently, I turned to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book thatI’d first read in my early twenties. Back then, and now at 43, it’s obvious that the “universal quest pattern” is tailored to male experience. For example, Campbell has sections on “Woman as Temptress” and also, throughout, females are the prizes to be won, the reward at the end of the adventure, or as with Odysseus, symbolic of homecoming.
I wondered, for a female hero, do we just flip the genders to complete the quest pattern?
In some ways, yes. As I’ve blogged about quite a bit, if women were mostly in power positions, if women had written most of the narratives that create our “universal” cultural imaginary, men would be sidelined, sexual objects, and relegated to the romance section.
“Inclination to help” doesn’t create heroes, it waters down drama. Writers need to raise the stakes, not lower them, or the story is a bore. Writers don’t raise the stakes because humans are tragic and neurotic, we love pain blah blah blah. Writers raise the stakes so the readers will “get it;” feel it. A kid feels like “the walls are caving in” when she has to move to a new city, share a room with her sister, share a toy, invite someone she doesn’t want to to her party; a writer literally will show the walls caving in, a world being destroyed.
So this is how I’ve come to understand internal action, action in a character’s head and physical action. I believe in the pattern Joseph Campbell lays out, and believe that it is a universal human experience/ sequence: (the call to adventure; refusal of the call; supernatural aid– the “helpers” I just blogged about; crossing the first threshold and on and on. Read the book, it’s great.) But here is where I differ with Campbell. I don’t think this pattern is representative of a life story, that a narrative mirrors the trajectory of a life experience compacted. I think its the opposite: the narrative pattern is the magnification of a moment. These moments we experience every day. Many “little” moments are heroic and feel heroic to us. Getting out of bed for my three year old, cleaning our room, sitting down to write. On a slightly larger level: quitting a job, starting a job, going to a new school, going on a trip, making a new friend, learning a new skill. We take risks that may seem small to an observer but to us, in our hearts and our heads, they are full of drama and symbolism.
This is why it gets me so upset that females aren’t protagonists in children’s media nearly enough. That in the rare occasions that females do get to star, most often they are surrounded by male characters; that females, except for the pink ghetto, almost always exist in the minority. Males have whole cast of characters to help them take risks and achieve their dreams. Females don’t.
But instead of lecturing you about now much a new model is needed, I’m going to get back to writing that book and show you.
I know its easy to gasp at this post, as great writer Lisa Belkin tweets she did. I went bug-eyed. But, more importantly, we all need to look at how this marketing influences us as parents. No one is immune.
Just today, I went with my daughter’s class to a show at the Contemporary Jewish museum on writer Ezra Jack Keats. Keats’s Snowy Day is the first published children’s book by a white author to feature an African-American protagonist. Much of the show was devoted to the breaking of this boundary, and the all white world of kid lit. Next series of art in the show? A book where Peter, the protag is upset that a baby girl is coming into the family and everything is getting painted pink. His transition? In the end, the boy helps his dad pinkwash the new room.
I felt like it was so ironic that we were just talking about color and breaking boundaries and stereotypes, and then this. How many books we read lovingly to our kids, how many movies do we take them too, that show them, repeatedly, in so many ways that girls wants diamond ring rattles while boys want saw rattles? And the challenge is Keats books aren’t plastic and tacky, they are drop-dead gorgeous.
So how do we find our way out of the gender matrix? A first step, I think, is trying not to point the finger at others, be aware of our own biases as best as we can, and, most importantly, how we may passing those biases on to our kids.
Before I go into the gender issues of the fourth Harry Potter book, Goblet of Fire, as usual, I want to say: the book is great. I am going straight to the next one: Order of the Phoenix.
I didn’t love this Harry Potter as much as the others; this is the first time I’ve read a new one and not adored it more than the last. The first chapter was great and terrifying. But after that, 200 pages of Quidditch and Ministry politics bored me. Too many names and characters. Of course, it also annoyed me that the Quidditch heroes and ministry bigwigs are all male.
If it were not for the last 150 pages, I would be giving the book a harsher review right now. But that last section, oh my God, it is terrifying. The plot twists are so boggling and compelling, I reached multiple level of shock. I watched the movie last night and thought it was good, but there is just no way the film can replicate the complexity or the terror of these pages.
Here’s a passage describing Harry’s first look at Voldemort:
It was as though Wormtail had flipped over a stone and revealed something ugly, slimy, and blind–but worse, a hundred times worse. The thing Wormtail had been carrying had the shape of a crouched human child, except that harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. It’s arms and legs were thin and feeble, and it’s face–no child alive ever had a face like that–flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes.
The thing seemed almost helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around Wormtail’s neck, and Wormtail lifted it. As he did so, his hood fell back, and Harry saw the look of revulsion on Wormtail’s weak, plae face in the firelight as he carried the creature to the rim of the cauldron. For one moment, Harry saw the evil, flat face illuminated in the sparks dancing on the surface of the potion. And then Wormtail lowered the creature into the cauldron; there was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Harry heard its frail body hit the bottom with a soft thud.
Eek. Chills. And this goes on, relentlessly, for pages of scary shit.
As far as the rest of the book and my thoughts on it, the Harry Potter gender matrix remains firmly intact. Mad-Eye Moody, a character I loved, is the fourth Dark Arts teacher to be male. Will we ever get a female?
Bertha Jorkins, the only female Ministry official I’ve noticed, is present in her absence as deconstructionists would say.
The villain of the book is male. I can’t name a female Death Eater.
Winky and Rita Skeeter are new female characters with key parts. Winky’s part is small but important.
Mostly, I am pissed about Fleur Delcour. The only female champion to compete, one out of four. Not only did she suck as a competitor, in the book and the movie, but the male competitors, Krum and Cedric, have much bigger parts. And Fleur is half-Vela? What is up with the Vela? They’re supposed to be sirens?
I actually felt like the whole Triwizard tournament was contrived, a plot device. Why would Hogwarts create danger when there is so much danger already? When Dumbledore apologizes to Harry at the end for putting him in danger, I said to my TV “You should be sorry.”
I continue to love Hermione, but it annoys me how she is always above it all. Ron gets pissed at Harry for getting all the attention. I am pissed at Harry for getting all of the attention. But Hermione, she’s OK with it. Why? Obviously, when she waves her hand in the air, wanting to be called on, she is desperate for recognition.
Hermione doesn’t care about Harry’s stardom, because that is the role of the female, specifically the Minority Feisty, in kidlit. She is brave, she is smart, she is strong, but her purpose, and this could not be more true with Hermione, is to help the male on his quest.
Why is being the designated “helper” a bad thing? Helpers exist in all myths, be they fairy godmothers or talking animals. They exist in myths because they exist in real life. Anything we accomplish, we don’t do alone. That is not to say that helpers don’t turn into betrayers or monsters later in the story; that can happen, but helpers are always there; no one accomplishes anything without help. Recognizing that and opening up to it, helps dreams come true. But too often, females are cast in the role of helper, not quester. So who supports females as they risk taking actions to accomplish their dreams? Whether in the form of a cheerleader, a smiling/ applauding first lady, or a Hermione, men are shown, if they dare to achieve, they will have support. Women, not so much.
One thing I did like about Hermione– and this may surprise you– is her transformation into “beauty.” I liked that Rita Skeeter called her pretty before she turned against her and that Hermione won the admiration of Qidditch stud, Victor Krum. The reason I liked this take on Hermione is because I could not be more sick of the smart/ mousy-beautiful/ dumb dichotomy females are forced into. The ugly feminist and dumb beauty queen are flip sides of the same coin; stereotypes that keep all women down. What if women didn’t have to choose? What if we could be smart and beautiful? Think more women would run for office or become CEOs? Women are taught the more success they achieve, the more unattractive they will become. Men are told the opposite. How do you think that affects ambition and motivation? With Hermione in this book, J. K. Rowling broke out of the gender matrix, and I applaud her for it.
My nine year old daughter read most of the last third of the book with me. It was kind of funny because she kept telling me she didn’t want to listen until I got to the underwater part and I can totally see why. That girl has good taste. Later, when I complained about it, she told me later that she had no idea what happened it the beginning of the book. It’s true, it’s a confusing opening after the first pages.
After we finished, my daughter drew this.
It’s adorable, but, aside from some exceptions as mentioned above, I feel like this series is such a lesson in, a replication of, the gender matrix. There it is in her picture: 2 boys, 1 girl; boy is the lead; the text celebrates his competition and victory.
Look at the cover:
It’s not so much J. K. Rowling that I take issue with, but all the people that told me this is a feminist series. It’s not. Yes, it has more female characters than most, but it has a lot of characters. These are 7 books, some over 500 pages. As I keep writing about it, this is a great series, but it’s Harry’s story.
This poster for “The Hobbit” is all over downtown San Francisco where I just was with my 9 year old daughter and her entire class on a field trip. What’s missing here?
I know, I know, it’s not Hollywood’s fault. I should blame J. R. R. Tolkein instead. He created the series around mostly male characters. But before I go into Tolkein, I want to know: Have you ever seen an ad for a major motion picture featuring 13 female characters? Ever? Do you think all the other people passing by noticed that this poster is all male? Or is it so similar to all of the other all male, mostly male, front-and center male posters that no one notices that females go missing? It’s just a “normal” annihilation, kind of like a board room meeting at Facebook.
Here’s why J. R. R. Tolkein can’t shoulder the responsibility of sexism in 2012 USA:
(1) The gender imbalance is not just this movie, it is representative of a pattern, a gender matrix that Hollywood rarely breaks out of.
(2) Everything is derivative. Are we going to be reproducing sexism thousands of years from now because the Bible, the Greek myths, the classics, and DC comics are narratives created by men?
(3) Even when Hollywood makes a movie from a spin off of a character in a classic, time and time again, a male is picked as the new main character i.e. “Shrek 3” led to “Puss In Boots.” The latest?
“Oz The Great and Powerful.” The life story of Oz, the fake ruler, the imposter. He gets his own movie. I’m sure it humanizes him very nicely.
The real ruler of Oz? That would be Ozma. When I was a kid, she was my favorite character in the L. Frank Baum series, because she was the real ruler of Oz, the rightful ruler, and also because she had dark hair like me.
Anyone ever heard of her? Do your children know who she is? There is a book about her. Where is her movie? I didn’t see the preview.
