Not so much anymore, but, when Clementine was small, I found myself, quite often, having to politely explain to people why we didn’t want any Barbie dolls or Disney princess movies as gifts. With the new baby, if it’s a girl, I think the process will be much easier. I’ll just have to send a link to the following trailer for the movie Miss Representation, which pretty much explains it all.
Miss Representation 8 min. Trailer 8/23/11 from Miss Representation on Vimeo.
[The documentary, which premiered this year at Sundance, will be broadcast for the first time this Thursday night, Oct. 20th, at 9:OO PM, on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. Of course, I can’t watch it, as I don’t have a television, for the very reasons noted in the above trailer.]
31 Comments
It’s amazing to me that we get anything accomplished as a species, with all of this fucked up sex bullshit coursing through our veins. I think it’s time for humanity to enter into a post-sex phase. Just think how much more productive we’d be if we didn’t worry about attracting mates, and waste time feeling bad about ourselves and how we looked.
Why would we bother to be alive if we had no sex?
Don’t overstate your point, guys.
Yes, let women be smart and in charge and powerful and all that. Then have sex with as many as you can. That way everybody is happy.
But they still should be hot like Geena Davis in A League of Their Own.
Come on, now.
I know they aren’t the only two possibilities out there, but, given the choice, I’d rather be in a society like ours than one in which women are covered from head to toe, and not allowed to leave the house without a male escort. And, yes, I realize that is a false dichotomy.
I was the scorn of the family because I wouldn’t allow Barney or Disney anything in my house.
I wasn’t worried that my son would want to become become portly and blue, however.
Wait a second, you aren’t suggesting that the video for Duran Duran’s classic song “Girls on Film” in any way contributes toward this insidious belief that women should only be valued for their looks, are you? I hate to contradict you, but distinctly remember that one of the women in that video was wearing a lab coat and glasses. While she happened to be incredibly sexy, and wearing nothing at all beneath the coat, the fact remains that they hired a professional scientist. The facts don’t lie.
Anyone know if Mark gets a cut if I already have stuff in my Amazon cart, come here and click his link, then complete my purchase?
I’m curious as to what people make of this argument. “They’ve tried making Barbie a scientist, and an astronaut, but they don’t sell. That’s not what girls want. They want pretty clothes and shoes. They want to imagine themselves as beautiful.” I think, to a large extent, it’s bullshit, but I suspect that, deep inside of us, thanks to millions of years of evolution, there is some piece of our reptilian brain that calls out to little girls, “You need to be pretty and accommodating to attract a mate who has the strength and energy to bring home big slabs of meat.” But our society amplifies that message to the point at which it’s deafeningly loud. LIttle girls, even if they might be inclined to follow a different path, hear the Sirens’ call. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us. For every Elizabeth Warren, there are a thousand Britney Spears want-to-bes, urging our daughters to exert their sexuality years before they’re equipped to do so. It’s maddening.
While we’re on the subject of women’s rights and the kind of world we want for our daughters, did anyone see that Republican frontrunner Herman Cain came out and said that he was against abortion, even in cases of “rape and incest”?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/16/cain-on-abortion-no-exceptions-for-rape-and-incest/
Not to confuse the issue, but Ann Arbor is going to have its first Slut Walk this weekend.
https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=177104105702249
You know when you live in a perverse world when you’re looked on with derision for wanting your daughter to be something more than a model or a pop singer.
From the campaign of the other Republican frontrunner, we get the message that women aren’t discriminated against anymore.
From Think Progress:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/17/345467/romney-legal-advisor-robert-bork-women-aren’t-discriminated-against-anymore/
Actually, I don’t think sex is the problem; the entertainment industry is. Don’t watch movies and TV; talk to other people instead. And the best amusement for a kid is other kids, not commercial fantasy.
http://youtu.be/XcWAPEW8Cf8
I wouldn’t argue about the overabundance of sexual imagery but some of this is just over the top. I can’t stand guns and have never entertained the thought of supporting war or joining the military. As a kid I loved toy guns, army men and playing war. I also watched the Three Stooges and never once hit my brother in the head with a hammer.
People get way too hysterical about some of this stuff. I know kids whos parents never let them watch TV or engage in anything related to pop culture. Some of these kids are weirder and more messed up than those of us who watched way too much television.
Weird by whose standards? Messed up by what measure? Yours?
While micromanaging your child’s life will only make them a nervous wreck, I don’t think that going to other way and abandoning parenting altogether is any solution.
Every household has some set of norms and morals that they want to instill in their children. Personally, I never had a TV when my kid lived with me. People called me an abusive parent for it, no joke.
I wasn’t a perfect parent (actually I was pretty awful), but I can say that my kid turned out better because he didn’t grow up with 24 hours of commercialized nonsense every day.
I read that Adolf Hitler never watched any TV. Actually, I think I saw it on the History channel.
Actually, Hitler loved Disney: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1579629/Did-Adolf-Hitler-draw-Disney-characters.html
Of course, that doesn’t mean anything, except that Hitler had bad taste, but I’ll link to it anyway.
Me, I’m all for kids making up their own fantasies, instead of ingesting commercial spectacles; and playing outdoors with other kids, rather than sitting and staring at the furniture. Weird but true…
My god, sometimes I really hate to even associate myself with liberals. I’m more afraid of my kids playing with the children of uptight, humorless parents than I am of them encountering a Barbie doll. Seriously.
Bit of a reach here, Peter:
“…but I can say that my kid turned out better because he didn’t grow up with 24 hours of commercialized nonsense every day.”
Talk about nonsense. You don’t have a freakin’ clue how this affected your child’s upbringing. You’re just projecting your bias onto a happy, but unrelated, datum. Yes, a world in which television is kept a a minimum for kids appears, in aggregate studies, to make for a healthier population. But to make such a firm statement about what a noble stand you took on TV for your seed is a bit hubristic, if you ask me. Maybe your kid just has extraordinary natural ability to turn out well IN SPITE OF limited TV viewing, not BECAUSE OF. Just throwing that out there. The fact remains: You don’t know.
And Bob, you started to make a good point and then your backside rears up with your “… sometimes I really hate to even associate myself with liberals…” line. Why even go there? Do you always divide the world thusly? You sound like a total asshole in real life. I’m dead serious. You’re a bigot about “liberals” which pretty clearly from your posts means “anybody who doesn’t agree with me”.
Bob, I don’t know that I’d call someone uptight for not wanting his Asian-American daughter to grow up thinking that the ultimate pinnacle of beauty to which one should aspire is impossibly big titted and blonde. And if you don’t think mass culture, as it exploits images of women to sell products, actually does damage, you should read a book on anorexia. Or, better yet, google “thinspiration”.
No, youre right I don’t know what would have happened. Should I just have said fuck it and forced him to watch nickelodeon all day long while I read him the bible from a corner?
Seriously, man, what’s all the hostility? Do you have kids? I guess not.
I grew up in a family that had tv 24/7. I know what happened to me. My kid turned out better. I’ll never know why, you’re right.
Brainless, I’m nearly as liberal as it gets. You kind of illustrate my original point that I get embarrassed to be one of you sometimes when I participate here. And I really was trying to be funny. Maybe I’m just a bad writer. My point is liberals have a real tendency to be way too fucking serious and humorless. I do have kids, I neither park them in front of the Disney channel or force them to live a television-less lifestyle.
I certainly don’t want my daughter to be a dumb bimbo…or whatever the point of this was.
How the fuck did it get to needing to read a book on anorexia?
And I’m not sure where the hostility is in my posts Peter. Your words are vastly more hostile in tone than mine were.
I wasn’t accusing you of being hostile, I was speaking to Mr. Brainless.
I agree with Brainless, Bob and Peter.
Peter, Bob and Brainless were great. I know people talk a lot about King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but my favorite part of the 1963 march on Washington was their rendition of “If I Had a Hummer”.
I’m not hostile, Peter. Just felt the need to call you on your bullshit. You were making a rational point and then just went off the rails with a ridiculous assumption. The fact that you don’t like it makes it seem hostile toward you, not what I said. (Reread it as if I was talking to EOS about his stance on paying for fire protection. Substitute “fireman” for “TV” where appropriate and “you small-minded twit” for “Peter” where found.)
More bullshit: I do have kids. So, you’re really striking out here. I struggle with the same issue of access to and quantity of media as everyone else, but I would hesitate to say that any single issue about or rule to enforce our household “norms and morals”, as you so well put it, has any overarching effect on my kids. Kids are too complex to boil it down so easily.
Bob, if you believed you were being humorous, believe differently. Again, I’m just throwing this out there, but maybe all those “uptight, humorless” liberals are actually being funny as shit, but you just don’t get it.
Kids are complex, yes. A household without television is a household with more opportunities to think and communicate, in my opinion. I don’t think that’s bullshit at all.
Granted, there are plenty of other ways to fuck kids up.
Parents have less and less influence over their children every year. Removing the TV is one way to address that. There are others. Can we at least agree on that much?
The one joy I have left in life is looking at images of hot young women. Please do not take that away from me.
Someone needs to make a Naomi Wolf doll.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/19/naomi-wolf-arrest-occupy-wall-street?newsfeed=true
Yeah let’s just change all the media! Ridiculous. If you don’t like what’s on TV then do like Mark does and turn it off. Then you can be out of touch with reality just like the makers of that documentary.
Also please stop breeding people.