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Where the girls aren’t
August 25, 2010 in gender, social commentary, the munchkin | Leave a comment
My daughter the munchkin, age three, has begun to sort out the world into boys and girls. “I a girl,” she explains, and asks other people, “Are you a girl?” We do let her know that there are people who don’t fall into either category, but as everyone who’s been asked so far has responded as expected, she might not grasp that concept yet. She is starting to assign her stuffed animals fixed sexes. We ask her sometimes about one or another of them, and get answers that are charmingly clueless about the linguistic implications:
“What’s Doggie?”
“He’s a girl.”
(She has also been known to tell us that she has a husband and that “She’s”–the husband’s–“sick. She has to go to the doctor.”)
You can almost see her drawing conclusions about all the possibilities open to her as she watches movies and notices that Coraline of Coraline* is a girl, as is Violet of The Incredibles–both with blue hair, so that she has already declared the intention to have blue hair too; I think she sees it as a badge of big-girlhood. And we pay attention to what she watches, trying to ensure that what she’s seeing doesn’t narrow down her world while it should be opening it up. Coraline and Violet are smart, brave, and eminently capable. The princess model is everywhere–to Munchkin, the basic requirements, and benefits, are that you have long hair and wear swirly dresses–but she doesn’t balk when I tell her a story about her taking a hot air balloon to a castle in the clouds and being shown around by, not the Princess, but the President. (I specified that the President had long hair. I didn’t comment on what she was wearing, and the munchkin didn’t ask.)
Things have definitely improved in the media since the days of Bambi and Winnie the Pooh, in which the only female characters are introduced in order to be someone’s mother or girlfriend. Not wanting to deprive her of the classics nor give her the message that the world is populated entirely by boys and men, with books I freely change the pronouns sometimes. It’s quite easy to turn Pooh and Piglet into girls if you just pay attention as you read aloud. But you can’t do this with movies, and I’m dismayed to observe that Hollywood is stuck at the tokenism stage.
Here are several movies we’ve watched recently, all of which I’ve enjoyed very much, but that collectively tell my daughter, who loves them too, that she lives in a world where almost everything interesting is done by the boys and the men.
Madagascar: Four main characters. So what do you figure the breakdown is–two male, two female? Nope. Three female, one male? Don’t make me laugh. Naturally, one is female and the other three are male. Gloria the Hippo is also the least important of the four, the sidekick’s sidekick. All of the other major players–the penguins, the lemurs–are male. I’m not sure about the bush baby.
Madagascar Escape 2 Africa: Gloria the hippo gets a plotline! Naturally, it’s about her love life.
Monsters, Inc.: Great movie! And the little kid is a little girl! She’s supercute, too, and brave. Plus, as in Madagascar II, a small juicy part goes to a woman. But the characters we spend the most time with are all male. (It’s a kind of buddy movie, and one of moviedom’s rules is that two women can’t be buddies, at least not without committing suicide by the closing credits.)
Shrek: Another buddy movie, another pack of writers who seem to think that if you create one spunky female character, you’re done paying attention to girls and women. My daughter loves this movie. How I wish I could show her a version where the hero is a girl. Or the hero’s sidekick is a girl. Or half the minor characters are girls.
Robots: Male robot (not sure how that works) goes off to land of male robot hero to redeem male robot dad, teams up with male robot friend, defeats male robot villain. This one has a slightly larger sprinkling of female characters than the above, but the central story is once again about one-half of the, um, species.
Ratatouille: Has a great female character, Colette. She really holds her own–which she has to do, because every other named character is male. Naturally, her main role is Love Interest.
The Incredibles (or, as Munchkin calls it without intentional humor, The ‘Credibles): This one actually has four significant female characters (and a black one! Hallelujah!), and everyone in the family regardless of sex has superpowers, but I’m putting it on the poop list for two reasons: Although Mom and Dad are both superheroes, the story isn’t Elastagirl’s, it’s Mr. Incredible’s. (Of course she becomes Mrs. Incredible when she gets married.) And when they have three kids, of course two are boys and one is a girl, because the rule is that the girls may never, ever outnumber the boys, except in the real world we’re all actually trying to live in.
None of these would ring alarm bells on its own, but looked at as a trend, they make a depressing one. Who is making these movies? As young as they are–as much as they grew up in a world where women weren’t just nurses, secretaries, moms and girlfriends–they seem to bring to writing and directing a worldview no different than the male writers a generation or more older, like Ray Bradbury or J. R. R. Tolkien, both of whom I also adore, but who write about worlds almost exclusively male. (Don’t tell me about Eowyn. I’ve read the book and I know all about Eowyn. And about Arwen, Galadriel, Goldberry, Sam’s girlfriend Rosie, and Shelob. There you have it, the complete list of named female characters in a book of 1400 pages. It takes even less time to list the ones in The Hobbit, since there are none whatsoever.)
Does no one in the entire production process look at the cast list and say “There’s something odd about this picture”? Do any of them imagine watching it with their daughters? I wish that before the script moves on past its first draft or casting begins, everyone involved would consider whether it would pass the Bechdel test: the story has two named female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man. It doesn’t sound like that onerous a requirement, but it would be a huge leap forward.
Our little girl is just becoming aware of the fact that she is a girl, and as she sorts out what that might mean, the message she gets from almost all of the movies we show her–when they don’t just stare past her as if she doesn’t exist–is that it means her role in life is Minor, or at best Secondary, Character. I feel as if we are doing her a terrible disservice.
*A movie that passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and more
Playing the “real Americans” game
August 22, 2010 in politics, social commentary | 8 comments
It’s election season, and like clockwork the wedge issue appears. Pick an unpopular group and stir up potential voters with the prospect of their doing something dreadful. Even Republicans are starting to shy away from using marriage between same-sex couples as the bogey–maybe the number of supporters, even within the party, is just rising too fast–so this year’s scapegoat is Muslims.
The New York Times quotes Elliott Maynard (Republican candidate for Congress in West Virginia) as saying, “Ground zero is hallowed ground to Americans” (GOP Seizes Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections). And Newt Gingrich said on Fox, “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.” Do you see the sneaky little move they’ve made there? Muslims are equated with a foreign country at war with the United States.
Which is exactly the bigotry being tapped: the myth that Muslims aren’t Americans. Even the ones who live and worship in New York; even the ones killed at the World Trade Center because they worked there or were trying to rescue others who did.
Maynard again: “Do you think the Muslims would allow a Jewish temple or Christian church to be built in Mecca?” I don’t know whether there are synagogues or churches in Mecca; I doubt it, because the Saudi government, which, unlike Islam as a whole, controls what does and does not happen in Mecca, does not allow religious freedom.
Well, we do, despite our support for our ally Saudi Arabia being so knee-jerk that our response to its apparent sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks was to attack a different country. And to suggest, as Maynard has done, that the mass murder of 2000 Americans makes a spot ground sacred only to Jews and Christians is not only an offense against religious freedom, it’s an offense against Judaism and Christianity.
Some Americans feel that that spot has been hallowed by the tragedy that struck there; some don’t. I’m one of the ones who do; I’m sure some of the New Yorkers who are Muslim do also. What an insult to them to say that my worship is welcome near there but theirs is not. When we play the “real Americans” game, real people get hurt.
Generation yada yada
June 25, 2010 in social commentary | Leave a comment
Is there something typically Gen X about hating to be arbitrarily lumped together with millions of other people? Because I’m supposedly a Gen Xer, and I hate it.
It might be that the whole Generation X phenomenon got off on the wrong foot with me because, while I actually fall pretty much in the middle of the range by some definitions, when the term became very popular it seemed to refer only to people who were a solid ten years younger than I was and, frankly, were widely seen as such a bunch of slackers that “Gen X” and “slacker” were used interchangeably. As inward-focused as the Boomers (who were supposedly their parents–again, a misstep–my parents were born in 1938 and 1941), but out of cynicism instead of entitlement, we were supposed to be a bunch of 17-year-olds with garage bands and a growing obsession with online life. However, I was married, politically active, idealistic, and a chronic overachiever, and I didn’t have an internet connection yet. So I was predisposed to think the armchair sociologists were full of it.
Also, the name was insulting. It still is. Or maybe it reflects that even the generation-labelers can’t always find a catchall term. So if we are X, the Unknown, the Uncategorizable, maybe we shouldn’t be categorized.
Every time I read something about the characteristics of the generations, I feel like I’m reading astrology. You know how if you read your horoscope, you’ll pick up on the parts of the description that fit and ignore the ones that don’t? Unless you have at least a mildly scientific turn of mind, in which case you’ll notice how wrong, wrong, wrong it is? Guess which kind of reader I am. Here’s what popular culture says about my generation. “We”:
-are pragmatic and perceptive
-are savvy but amoral
-are more focused on money than on art (these three from Wikipedia)
-were transformed by, or at least aware of, the music of Kurt Cobain specifically and grunge generally
-liked hanging out in “the espresso bar, the record shop, the thrift store” (Time article, “Gen-X: The Ignored Generation?”)
-were latchkey children and are therefore self-reliant and neglected and feel alienated from our elders
-find the media obsession with Boomers really irritating
I’d say it’s got me about 40% right. Not impressive; my daily horoscope usually does better than that. For the record–I’m griping at the Time guy here–I’ve never heard the album that supposedly shaped my generation, Nevermind, and I love Boomer icon, Bob Dylan, who, please note, has released a hell of a lot of albums in the late 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s for someone who’s supposedly the sole property of people who were teenagers in the 60s. (Also, he isn’t a Boomer. He’s going to be 70 next May.)
Horoscopes are fun only until you take them seriously. It’s absurd to think that everyone born between May 21 and June 21 has something significant in common, and it’s absurd to think that everyone born between 1961 and 1981 has something significant in common. Which I suppose points up the real problem. Just as astrology stops being amusing and starts being scary when people actually take advice from Jeane Dixon, generation-wisdom becomes foolishness, as do all generalizations, when you stop saying “Taken as a whole, people born during these years are more A, B, and C and less Q, R, and S than the people born during the previous twenty years” (a valid sociological analysis) and start saying “Gen Xers are like this.” Implying: all or most of them are like this. Right, and women are bad drivers and black people are lazy and white men are pigs. Can we stop with the generalizations?
Sermons in Stones 
Bullies and the people who abet them
December 2, 2010 in social commentary | Leave a comment
On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” this morning I caught a little bit of an interview about bullying. The interviewee said that it was hard to collect information from adults who’d been bullied as children because, even after all these years, they were so ashamed that they often didn’t talk about it even to their spouses.
So I realized I ought to come out of the closet: I was bullied all through elementary and junior high school. It never got physical, except for the time that bitch Lisa Ogden knocked me down at the bus stop. Her taunting on the bus was worse than the damage to my knees, though. I dreaded coming into school many days. In 7th grade I got such bad headaches I wept from the pain, and my parents took me to the doctor, who diagnosed stress. That made sense to me. The stress had little to do with schoolwork, and everything to do with having to spend five days a week, week in, week out, in a place where people who hated me were permitted to harass me.
May I state the obvious? Bullies thrive where adults allow them to. Teachers and administrators can’t control everything that happens in a school, but they have a lot of power; if they declare a behavior unacceptable, that behavior will occur less often. This may be easier to do with physical bullying than with taunts, which are so easily muttered as kids pass in a hallway, but it works for everything. Look, we have rules in our classrooms against chewing gum and showing up late; I don’t think it’s too much of a challenge to add a rule against abusive speech. The teacher, dictator of the classroom, decides what constitutes abuse. I would enthusiastically support any teacher who did this, whether my child were the victim, a bystander, or the bully.
When I was a teacher at a boarding school, I knew of some kids who persistently bullied the others, extorting their boom boxes and the money they got from home, hitting them whenever they could get away with it, and generally setting up their own little kingdoms. What was worse was that their dorm parents knew about it and looked the other way–one even said he thought it helped keep kids in line. Never mind that the kids being kept in line were often really good kids and the one who needed reining in was being allowed to do whatever his sadistic imagination invented. My own suspicion was that that dorm parent got some kind of kicks from these power dynamics, but he was pretty rule-happy so it might just have been that he couldn’t deal with any behavior not explicitly outlawed by the school rules. That same dorm parent earned an immortal spot in my memory when he was supervising a trip to a football game and a sweet kid, an advisee of mine, was kicked viciously by another kid (about whom I’m sorry to even report this, because I generally liked him– but he had some Anger Management Issues). Another teacher saw it and brought the kids over to the dorm parent, who literally began looking through his manual and said, “It doesn’t say anything here about kicking . . . ”
The same thing happens in prisons. There are punishments the guards aren’t allowed to use, so they let the prisoners inflict them on each other. It’s not substantially different than inflicting them themselves, though if the courts actually declared it a violation of the clause against cruel and unusual punishment, they would have to put a moratorium on imprisonment.
I have a lot of remorse that I never brought this issue to the headmaster, my only consolation being that I don’t think he would have been any more effectual than I was.
I saw a less extreme case in the next school I taught in, a Catholic school in California. I apparently made an impression on the students when I told them I would treat putdowns between them as a disciplinary matter, just like talking back to a teacher or failing to turn in homework. One of my brightest students, ‘Jonathan,’ came in for a lot of bullying. I don’t know whether my rule made his life outside the classroom easier, maybe harder; I know that he didn’t get put down in my hearing. When I talked to another teacher of the same grade about the bullying problem, though, she said, “You have to admit that Jonathan asks for it.” Wow, blaming the victim, in a religious school! She was even Catholic, which I was not (come to think of it, the dorm parent who thought bullies were a useful part of the boarding school’s discipline system had hankerings to be a chaplain). Privately, I diagnosed her as a former bully herself, but I never actually asked.
Grownups need to be grownups if kids are to be safe. If they have unresolved issues that make them despise the kids who get bullied, they need to get over them or recuse themselves from teaching. If, like most teachers, they hate the bullying but just don’t know how to help–I encountered well-meaning teachers like this when I was a girl–there are good resources nowadays. They can start in the earliest years with You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, by Vivian Paley.
ETA that Doug Stowe at Wisdom of the Hands also posted on this topic yesterday: adult bullying in schools
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