A Ten-Year-Old’s Rant To "Boys Around The World"

Irin Carmon Apr 21, 2011 2:48 PM

http://jezebel.com/#!5794445/a-ten+year+olds-rant-to-boys-around-the-world

 Reader Becky Sayers writes, "I found this on 10 yr old [daughter] Eliza's bulletin board this morning in her room— when I asked her about it, she said it was an "editorial" she wrote last night after looking at the miniboden children's clothing catalog." With permission from both mother and daughter, we happily share this editorial with you.

Dear Boys from around the World,
There is just one ting I have to say before I go on. STOP BEING SO STEREOTYPICAL! . The reason I have to let this is out of my system I am yet to tell you. So today I was reading a Mini Boden magazine ( some place in Sweden), and the magazine people asked questions to the kids who were modeling. The one question that ticked me off was this question:
"What is the biggest difference between Boys ( That means you Boys) and Girls?"
Here are some answers that were in this "magazine". Kian, age 6, "Girls Like dolls, and Boys don't". Oh okay I know what you're thinking "Oh he's just six!". Well you better listen to this. Stefano, age 7, "Girls wear pink, and Boys wear blue and green." Okay you're probably thinking the same thing. "Oh he is just 7. Well here is another one. Aiden, 6, "Girls like nail polish; Boys like Soccer Balls.' Yeah I know he is six too. But getting closer to the older ones. Asha, age 8, "Boys are rougher and stronger." Yeah he's eight. Not six, or seven. He's eight. He's got a brain. He's smarter than six and seven yr olds. It's kind of old to me, because I am turning 11 this year. Okay so now that I have listed those Boys' opinions, I am going to list the reasons why I think they are stereotypical.
#1 Hey I'm a Girl, and I HATE dolls! I also hate Barbies, pink, my little ponies, and glitter is okay I guess. But I don't love it like boys think all girls do. But that's just my opinion. Well let me give you a quick lesson. Not all Girls like prissy stuff including me...Give it a ponder.
#2 Like I said I HATE pink. I despise it. HACK See I spat on it. That's how much I hate pink. Hey guess what Stefano, age 7, I wear blue, green, orange, and white about everyday like every other kid in America ( and for this kid in Sweden). I like just about every other color in the rainbow. Except for Pink ( the color not the singer). and purple. So Stefano, I think you have learned an important fact that not all Girls like pink.
#3 For one thing though I do like nail polish, but not just Boys like soccer. For example my friend Heidi is a master soccer player. You mess with her, she kicks you in the shins, or maybe just trips you on the field. Seriously I think you should stay away. For reals.
And finally #4 Okay one thing is that I could beat many boys in a wrestling competition that is up to my grade. Like at lunch today, I was an arm wrestling my friend that happens to be a boy. I beat him. Finally I took my hand off , because I knew he had enough. And also Jillian Michaels, or at least I think it is Jillian Michaels, she's really strong. Probably the strongest woman I've ever heard of. So Asha, 8, give it a ponder.
So really the only reason I wrote this editiorial was to address Boys to stop being so stereotypical and for reading that messy magazine. And the only reason I was reading the magazine was because I was bored. And I must have been really bored to be reading a Swedish magazine about clothes that strangely gets sent to my house.
A Random person in Avon Indiana
Eliza Sayers, age 10

Radical feminism: what it is and why we're afraid of it

Calling the chief prosecutor in the Assange case a 'malicious radical feminist' reflects our misunderstanding of feminism

• Jonathan Dean
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 February 2011 09.21 GMT
• Article history

Alongside the obvious questions of freedom of information and criminal justice, the Julian Assange affair has also made visible a multitude of contemporary anxieties concerning sex and gender. This was brought into sharp relief by claims that Assange's prospects of a fair trial might be compromised by the possibility that Sweden's chief prosecutor Marianne Ny is a "malicious radical feminist" with a "bias against men".

But what exactly is radical feminism? If popular attitudes to feminism are anything to go by, it's clearly something pretty terrifying.

Research suggests that, in the popular imagination, the feminist – and the radical feminist in particular – is seen as full of irrational vitriol towards all men, probably a lesbian and certainly not likely to be found browsing in Claire's Accessories. As an academic working on issues concerning gender and politics, I've had the good fortune of meeting lots of inspiring feminist women – and men – but despite searching I've yet to locate a feminist matching that particular description. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough. A more likely possibility is that the popular insistence that radical feminists – and often by implication feminists in general – are all man-haters reflects wider misunderstandings about the history of feminism and its impact on contemporary gender relations.

So what is radical feminism? Historically, radical feminism was a specific strand of the feminist movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. Distinctive to this strand was its emphasis on the role of male violence against women in the creation and maintenance of gender inequality (as argued by the likes of Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon). And while a minority of radical feminists – most infamously Valerie Solanas – were hostile to men, radical feminism was much more instrumental in generating widespread support for campaigns around issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment.

However, in Britain at least, radical feminism has never been particularly dominant, partly because – in the eyes of many socialist and postcolonial feminists – it has been insufficiently attentive to the intersections between gender inequality and other categories, such as race and class. So Rod Liddle's peddling of the tiresome rightwing idea that radical feminism has destroyed the family, along with Dominic Raab's assault on "feminist bigotry" and the Vatican's efforts to address "distortions" caused by radical feminism, rest on at least two implausible assumptions. First, they reduce feminism to a horrifying caricature that never really existed and second, they make the frankly bizarre suggestion that radical feminism is the dominant ideology of our times. It would seem that not only do these radical feminists commit the outrage of not wearing makeup, but they use the time this frees up to consolidate their world domination. Or an alternative explanation might be that these are the paranoid anxieties of fearful anti-feminists.

Their fear is not totally misplaced, for radical feminism has undoubtedly had some success. Fortunately for Dominic Raab, world domination is not one of them. Three decades ago, the notion that rape and domestic violence are pressing political issues rather than trivialities, or that men should play an active role in childcare, would have been seen by many as radical and dangerous. Today, thanks to the influence of the insights of diverse strands of feminism (including, but not limited to, radical feminism), these ideas have seeped into the mainstream. Despite this, genuine gender equality can seem distant, but many groups and individuals continue to push in the right direction.

Although the rights and wrongs of the Assange affair are at this stage far from clear, whenever accusations of "man-hating feminism" enter into a debate, our suspicions should be immediately aroused. For more often than not, the temptation to close down debate by tossing around accusations of man-hating radical feminism is caused not by a fear of debate, but by the deeper fear that feminism might actually have something important to say.

I am an Angry Bird

It's time to get angry

All this polite and smiley feminism is getting us nowhere

• Suzanne Moore
• The Guardian, Saturday 15 January 2011 

Children say the cutest things! Over Christmas one of mine told me that years ago she asked me why I was a feminist. It was on the way to school and I am not a morning person. Possibly she was expecting something about equal pay. Apparently I snapped: "Because men do horrible, horrible things". She was alarmed.

That was bad of me wasn't it? A little sexist? Warping the mind of a young girl. She is now grown up and thinks it's funny. It's probably not in any childcare manual and the right answer would have been stuff about wanting equal opportunities. Or I could have replied that anyone with a brain, man or woman, would see the necessity of feminism. I could have been "inclusive".

Nowadays, saying bad stuff about men is not how feminism conducts itself. We all lurve men. We are all smiley for fear of being labelled man–haters. And what is the result of this people-pleasing, ultra-feminine, crowd–sourced sexual politics? Sod all.
Reasonably sitting around waiting for equality while empowering oneself with some silicone implants does not really seem to have worked wonders, does it ladeez? Postfeminism – as personified by the Sex and the City generation – basically confused sexual liberation with shopping: a mistaken strategy even within its own market-driven terms. So we live on a permanent diet of crumbs from the table. A woman over 50 gets to be on TV! Whoopdiwhoop! It's a victory, sure, but is that all there is? It's time to wake up and smell the skinny latte.
A woman is murdered in Bristol and the response is to tell women to stay at home?! For their own safety. Though no one thinks it's a woman doing the murdering. A curfew on men would be considered a monstrous idea, even though most women live with internalised curfews anyway.
An argument about gangs of men who "groom" young women for sex becomes an argument about ethnicity and faith. Of course, these are issues to be discussed, but the central issue, surely, is the abuse of children. Turning vulnerable young girls into drug-addicted prostitutes is disgusting in any culture. But it wouldn't be a viable proposition if men did not want sex with these children. As with all arguments about prostitution, the one group we rarely hear from are the men who buy sex. The "punters".
I don't like the jargon "sex workers". We are all sex workers these days, unless we are celibate, as we are all encouraged to pursue lifelong sexiness. Most young women are endlessly groomed to be desirable after all. Yet the men who have sex with young, frightened, addled girls choose to do so. Such sex, we are told, is about power. To have sex in a car with a heroin addict is very cheap indeed. It goes on day in and day out, and of course it makes me wonder about male sexuality. As does the use of rape as a weapon of war. To say these things is not to say all men are rapists. But some are. To not say them does not make it stop.
It is as though feminism had to sex itself up to keep itself interesting. We are not hairy man-haters who bang on about domestic violence and abuse. We are fascinating women interested in fashion, relationships and true intimacy. OK, so we have a few little problems like having it all turning into doing it all, and finding a nice guy to do any of it with at all, but look on the bright side! We have got a few more female MPs, our girls are doing well at school and isn't life grand?
Well no. No it isn't. Just as the third way, or triangulation, produced a dire shutting down of political discourse, the triangulation of feminism, the third wave, as it was often called, has produced pitiful results. Part of the problem was that what many American feminists were writing in the last decade was simply superimposed onto British culture. It didn't work. We don't have a moral majority.

To see Naomi Wolf, that histrionic proponent of the third wave, pop up to demand that the women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape be named (surely they have already been shamed) is a logical conclusion of this deal. It is a dead end. Much of Wolf's work is privileged narcissism dressed up as struggle. The Beauty Myth did not have an original thought in it, but never mind, it remains the only feminist text read by many. Wolf and many of her contemporaries muddled the personal with the political to such a degree it is embarrassing. Wolf was snapped up by the media as she was beautiful – as though feminists couldn't be. Greer and Steinem were lookers, weren't they? Wolf's argument now about the anonymity of accusers in rape trials arrives on these shores a little after the Lib Dems dropped this peculiar proposal, which was never in their manifesto anyway.

Weirdly, this was really the only thing the Lib Dems have had to say about women since being in power. There are valid arguments to be made about not treating rape differently to other crimes. But the police here know many women won't come forward and all are aware of our appallingly low conviction rates.
Still, everyone seems to lose their heads around Assange. I picture Bianca Jagger washing his feet with her tears soon. Wolf actually compared him to Oscar Wilde. The similarity is that they were both in solitary confinement. Practically the same person then?
Of course, Wolf has every right to think what she likes about Assange's accusers – and to change her mind as she did about abortion – but what kind of feminism is she now espousing? I find it very difficult to know.
God, how I miss those troublesome women like Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone. They may have been as batty as hell but they had passion. And balls. They were properly furious at the horrible things men do to women. Who in their right mind, male or female, isn't? Your mother, your sister, your daughter are being told to stay inside and not complain too much. Take up knitting or vajazzling maybe?
Or take comfort from Gideon's "We are all in this together"? The last election was the most regressive for women I can remember. Women appeared as trophy wives, or not at all. The consequences of that are that this government – this new way of doing politics – is hitting women and children the hardest. Women are suffering most from the cuts that men are making. Just look at the figures.
This makes me very angry indeed. Which I know may increase "visible signs of ageing", but it's way too late now. Feminism has been dumbed down into politeness and party-political promises for far too long.
The backlash is happening in front of our eyes. Recession, of course, leads to reactionary measures and some of this reaction is taking away the few gains women have made. We can take nothing for granted. We need fire in our belly for this fight, not a bleedin' gastric bypass.
Angry Birds is the name of a game about birds and pigs. It is, as everything is now, an app. But I don't want an app. I want a movement.
Angry Birds. I am one. Join me.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Reconsidering personal perceptions of outward appearance

Experiment: Try covering your mirrors and go a whole day (or more!) without looking at yourself.  Do you become more conscious of how often you normally look at your reflection throughout the day?  How does it effect your feelings regarding your personal appearance?

"Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them" (Entwistle 7).
"Modish" dress is dress which styles continuously change
"Fixed" dress includes traditional religious and ethnic garments and describes dress that is "characterized by its continuity with the past rather than the logic of 'change for change's sake'" (Entiwistle 45).  Fixed is not entirely an accurate term as traditional dress can and does evolve over time, although not at the rapid rate of fashion; more accurately we could term it "quasi-fixed" dress. 
'"Fashion" is a general term which can be used to any kind of systemic changes in social life' (Entwistle 45)
"Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles: fashion in a sense is change"(E.Wilson as quoted in Entwistle 2000: 45).

Source cited:
Entwistle, Joanne. (2000)  The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

Considerations: Dress and demonstrations of power. Does (or how does) dress emphasize and reinforce specific systems of power in western society?  Gender binaries?  Feminism? Socio-economic?

We're back and we're all new...

please bear with us as we attempt to find a new direction for this blog...

I'm thinking something along the lines of a critique of society and cultural norms/expectations in regard to gender and appearance.