In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: December 2008

Gasp! Kids’ toys are… gendered?

We frequently take on cases of blatantly sexist advertising around here. This stuff tends to show up online from all over the world — well, from everywhere except perhaps Sweden, because in Sweden they have the Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK). The ERK recently accused Irish airline Ryanair of sexism after they rolled out an ad-campaign featuring a Britney-Spears-style schoolgirl. A campaign which didn’t cause anyone to bat an eyelash in Ireland or the UK because what, girl-flesh being used to sell something, whoa stop the presses yawn.

Of course, they’re right that relying on traditional “sex sells” tactics is sexist, since it almost always involves putting women who meet conventional beauty standards on display to attract the male gaze. It’s just that most of us are so thoroughly inured to this tactic that our mouths would seize up from saying “sexist” too much if we tried to point out problems in advertising. It’s refreshing, but kind of surprising as well.

The ERK’s latest target is Lego, the beloved Danish company that makes billions of little interlocking plastic bricks (and my former employers, I should mention). Lego has always liked to think of itself as a fairly enlightened and progressive company, but now the ERK has accused them of sexism as well — could this cause a flare-up in the age-old Svensk-Dansk rivalry? Riots on the Oresund Bridge? Probably not. I just find inter-Scandinavian enmity amusing.

Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK), has lambasted Lego for a recent catalogue that features the photos of the kids in their colour-coded rooms.

The girl’s picture is captioned “Everything a princess could wish for…” and features a pony, a princess and a castle. On another page, a boy is pictured playing with a fire station, fire trucks, a police station, and an airplane with the caption “Tons of blocks for slightly older boys.”

ERK has expressed concern that this type of portrayal promotes a stereotype that is degrading to boys and girls.

However, Lego has defended the catalogue, pointing out that other photos in the catalogue show boys and girls playing together.

I am shocked…. SHOCKED! — that any toy company in this day and age would depict a little girl as a princess playing with a pony in the midst of a whole lot of pink, and a boy playing with trucks and airplanes. It’s as if they think society has some kind of gender-stereotyped idea that boys and girls play with different toys! No, seriously: I’m fairly sure this comes as a surprise to nobody, not even ERK. The Swedes are correct that it’s a classic case of gender stereotyping in action, but the issue of how “boys’ play” is segregated from “girls’ play” runs a lot deeper than the thoroughly predictable mise-en-scène of this winter’s Lego catalog.

Let me tell you a little story about toy design. Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Denmark…

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Friday Random Ten – the World is Crumbling edition

You know the drill: Put your MP3 player on shuffle and post the first 10 songs that come up. The video for my #1 (sort of):

1. Goldfrapp – A&E (Gui Boratto Remix)
2. Chad VanGaalen – Flower Gardens
3. Kaki King – Can the Gwot Save Us?
4. Bill Evans Trio – Two Lonely People
5. Franz Ferdinand – Darts of Pleasure
6. Santogold – Your Voice
7. M.I.A. – The Turn
8. Cat Power – Peking Saint
9. Foals – Olypic Airways
10. Dime Fangs – Califone

MGMT:

More tunes below the fold.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Reading is Awesome

Hello, all!

Last summer, I spent two weeks guest posting here as The Girl Detective, and had a wonderful time.  (I also blog at Modern Mitzvot and cross-post many of my entries to Alas, A Blog).  Now I’m thrilled to be back on board as one of Feministe’s new book reviewers.  I’ll be writing up one or two books (along with the occasional movie or album) each month; if you’re a member of a small press or are self-publishing, drop us a line at feministe@gmail.com and we’ll let you know where to send review copies.

Also, Jill suggested that we try out a book club, which I think is a fabulous idea.  (Note: if you’re not an Oprah fan, feel free to call it a discussion group.  If a discussion group sounds boring, you may call it a text-centered opinion exchange collective.  I’ll be privately calling it The Read ‘n’ Think.)  For our first book, how about Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s So Many Ways to Sleep Badly?  Here’s the description from City Lights:

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s exhilarating new novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants, and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions, and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine.

Sounds good to me!  Shall we discuss it on, say, January 4th?  Nice Sunday book chat?  We won’t be too hung over from New Years, right?

Posted in Uncategorized

What’s in a name?

The team at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project got some news to be thankful for just before Thanksgiving last week: judges in New York State can no longer bar people from legally changing their names to traditionally “masculine” or “feminine” names simply because of the possibility of “confusion.”

It may come as a surprise to many of you that this is even an issue, but the Sylvia Rivera Law Project has been helping trans people in New York State change their names for over six years now, and believe me, name change petitions get denied for all sorts of spurious reasons. (Incidentally, I’ve been part of the collective that runs SRLP for almost as long.)

Another fact you may not be familiar with: in the United States, it’s one of your rights to change your name, enshrined in the Civil Rights Code of New York and many other states. I’d suggest that you all exercise this right early and often, but it could get to be a bureaucratic pain in the neck very rapidly.

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What would they say if you were dead?

Thomas posts about Anthony Ottaviano, an attorney at Paul Weiss in New York who was murdered by his girlfriend’s stalker. More specifically, Thomas writes about the New York Post’s sensationalist coverage of the murder — which basically amounts to “Pervert killed by other pervert.”

Ottaviano’s girlfriend, Edythe Maa, is a dominatrix and fetish model. Ottaviano also enjoyed BDSM in his private life. Maa had a stalker, who kidnapped her and killed Ottaviano before killing himself. This is how the Post describes it:

Ottaviano and Maa partied together at kinky New York City fetish parties, sometimes with him wearing lipstick, a garter belt, stockings and high heels.

His secret leather-loving lifestyle – seen on photos posted on fetish Web sites – turned out to be his downfall.

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A Few Good Women

You know an article is going to warm your heart when the sub-head is “Obama ushers in a feminist revolution in foreign policy and national security.”

And warm my heart it did. A.J. Rossmiller, friend of Feministe and author of Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon discusses how women are not only the backbone of Obama’s foreign policy team, but they’re bringing in new perspectives and areas of expertise that are particularly important in a post-Cold-War world. He writes:

The diversity of their paths to power is also an encouraging sign of future egalitarianism in the national security establishment. At least a few of the major players, including Rice, Power, and Sewall, studied issues and areas that were not traditionally perceived as primary in national security, such as conflict resolution, failed states, and post-conflict management. Rice, for example, is an Africa expert succeeding a long line of predecessors who were mostly students of the Cold War and of European politics. Sewall and Power have devoted great energy to humanitarian issues, with Power’s rise to prominence sparked by her Pulitzer-winning book on genocide. Under a Cold War model, these focuses might not have been paths to prominence; but in an era of international terrorism, counter-insurgency, and failed states as a major security problem, they are vital areas of expertise.

Other women, though, took traditional paths up through politics, academia, and think tanks, working their way through the networks of old white men who have long dominated these areas. And even those who took a less conventional route hardly lack immersion in traditional “hard power” topics: Sewall is an expert in military operations and counterinsurgency, having authored the introduction to the 2007 Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and the experiences of Rice and Power in conflict zones may give them a better sense of the realities of war than the old Sovietologists ever had.

To copy his closing line: Best of all, this is just the beginning.

Fem2.0!

Feministe is co-sponsoring the Fem2.0 conference in Washington D.C. this February, and I hope some of you will consider coming. The purpose of the Fem2.0 conference is to bring together leaders of feminist organizations with feminists who have built communities and politicked online, so that we can pool resources, discuss goals, and create stronger connections between the issues women actually face and the policy goals that feminists espouse. The conference goals are:

To harness the power of women on the Internet to promote women’s issues.

To create a forum – starting with the Fem2.0 website and continuing through the event – for women to discuss the issues that are of most concern to them today, and to encourage them to use the Internet to learn more, express their opinions about them and advocate for policies that benefit women and families.

To create an opportunity for a “meeting of minds” across generations and media platforms.

To unite women’s voices behind the issues that the vast majority of women support, such as education, healthcare, workplace fairness and economic security.

To position women’s issues and their advocates for the incoming administration.

To draw new audiences to women’s issues, especially those who are Internet-focused and can cross-pollinate to increase activism.

Expand the audience of women engaged in online media activity and activism.

And some amazing feminist activists are going to be there, from big-org leaders like Kim Gandy and Eleanor Smeal to inspiring bloggers and writings like Maegan Maegan “la Mala” Ortiz and Carol Jenkins.

Register here.