By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 3/17/2016
Yesterday Zainab Akhtar announced she was shutting down her Eisner-nominated website Comics & Cola. The reason was not the usual ones — no money in it, moving on, life changes. It was something much more troubling and dangerous.
By: Priscilla Yu,
on 1/6/2016
There’s been a lot of talk lately about what pronouns to use for persons whose gender is unknown, complicated, or irrelevant. Options include singular they and invented, common-gender pronouns. Each has its defenders and its critics.
The post Gender politics of the generic “he” appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sinead O’Connor,
on 8/21/2015
Flash forward to 2010. I was now a tenured full professor. I was working with two young male Ph.D. students who in some ways reminded me of myself thirty years earlier—inspired by feminism, wanting to have an impact on the world. Both Tal Peretz and Max Greenberg had, as undergrads, gotten involved in campus-based violence prevention work with men.
The post Learning from Chris Norton over three decades—Part III appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sinead O’Connor,
on 8/20/2015
In my 1980 interview with Chris Norton, he spoke of the tensions of being a pro-feminist man, of struggling with how to integrate his commitments to feminism with his daily life as a carpenter, where he worked with men who didn’t always share those commitments. He spoke of Men Against Sexist Violence’s (MASV) internal discussions of sexism and pornography, and of his own complicated relationship to feminism and other progressive politics.
The post Learning from Chris Norton over three decades—Part II appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sinead O’Connor,
on 8/19/2015
The guy at the front of the room was saying stuff I’d never heard a man say before, especially to a room full of young college guys. Through my basketball-player-eyes, I sized him up to be at least 6’5” with the broad shoulders of a power forward
The post Learning from Chris Norton over three decades—Part I appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Betsy Bird,
on 7/12/2015
A friend of mine who is not particularly into the children’s literary world, except that she has small children and reads to them, forwarded on to me this recent article in Vox. It sports the clickbait title I never noticed how racist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. It’s one of those pieces that sort of write themselves. Periodically we’ll see articles come out from new parents, shocked and horrified by some aspect of children’s literature. Whether its disdaining Maisy or taking issue with Knuffle Bunny, this comes up all the time. They’re sort of the easiest pieces an author can write. You’re already reading to your kids. Why not write something about the experience? I should note that even as I say this, I’ve spent a good portion of my career as a blogger doing EXACTLY THIS. So who am I to pooh-pooh other authors for doing the same? Besides, sometimes they make very interesting associations.
In this particular case I read the piece and found it was this curious amalgamation of good points (why yes, Little Black Sambo IS offensive!) and downright weirdness. First off, the author mentions books like The Cricket in Times Square, which is one of my favorite SURPRISE, IT’S RACIST! books out there. Folks tend to forget about it. The author of this piece, Ms. Leigh Anderson, also makes an effort to tie this into the We Need Diverse Books campaign, which is a nice idea. Essentially, the article is a call for reaching out and reading newer children’s books that have an eye towards both literary quality and diversity rather than just relying on the books you were read as a kid. I’m all for that.
Horrors!
Unfortunately the author of the piece effectively shoots herself in the foot when she begins to equate the existence of mothers wearing aprons in books with sexism. Several times throughout the piece she mentions a book (like Bread and Jam for Frances or Harry the Dirty Dog) and says that because the mother is wearing an apron and cooking for the other family members, the book is automatically sexist. Years ago when I worked in the Jefferson Market branch of NYPL I would get in a continual stream of grad students looking for “sexist children’s books” because they were writing various papers and needed examples. Never equating an article of clothing with sexism (my friend Erin points out that Ms. Anderson, “seems to be calling anything that isn’t feminist, sexist, which is ridiculous”) I really had to hunt and peck for these students to find anything that (A) might apply and (B) was still circulating (hat tip to Lois Lenski for helping me out on that one). Ms. Anderson, in contrast, is far too happy to throw all her childhood favorites under the bus. She writes:
“Here’s what happens when you try to recreate your 1979 childhood library: You buy Bread and Jam for Frances, Frog and Toad, Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, Heidi, The Cricket in Times Square, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, Stuart Little, Babar, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, and the whole Ramona Quimby series. All were treasured books of my childhood, read and reread to me, and then read again as soon as I could read to myself.”
Sacre bleu!
She then explains the problems with some of these books but not others. Ramona’s crime, as it happens, is that “Ramona Quimby’s mother begins the series as a housewife in 1955; in the mid-’70s she goes back to work; by the mid-’80s she’s pregnant again and quits.” Because, after all, that has never happened before. The crimes of some of the other books are left for us to infer. I assume the apron problem, such as it is, applies to Blueberries for Sal (never mind that Sal is a wonderfully androgynous character that both boys and girls relate to), Lyle Lyle Crocodile (where Lyle, who is male, cooks and ice skates with the missus), and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (anyone else remember how subversive making the cop a pig was?).
Eventually the piece becomes more about We Need Diverse Books and quotes some recent pieces about Shannon Hale’s experiences with boys and her books and the work of independent booksellers. All of which is worthy and good (though she does fail to spellcheck Whistle for Willie). As such, it’s a pity that she had to paint this piece with such a broad brush. Outright sexism did indeed exist in children’s literature in the past, but just because a book is reflecting the times in which it was written, that does not automatically make it unworthy reading.
By: Catherine Nichols,
on 9/11/2014
By: PennyF,
on 3/28/2014
As Women’s History month comes to a close, we wanted to share an important debate that Simon Blackburn, author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, participated in for IAITV. Joined by Scottish feminist linguist Deborah Cameron and feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, they look at what we can do to build a more feminist language.
Is our language inherently male? Some believe that the way we think and the words we use to describe our thoughts are masculine. Looking at our language from multiple points of views – lexically, philosophically, and historically – the debate asks if it’s possible for us to create a gender neutral language. If speech is fundamentally gendered, is there something else we can do to combat the way it is used so that it is no longer – at times – sexist?
What do you think can be done to build a more feminist language?
Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Until recently he was Edna J. Doury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and from 1969 to 1999 a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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The post Is our language too masculine? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John,
on 12/2/2012
About 12 years ago for a class project in art school I argued that sexism was not inherently embedded in the female nude in art (or images of women, period, as argued by the hardcore feminists there), but coded in the poses. Wish I’d thought of the following to make my point: The Hawkeye Initiative exposes what we’re so used to seeing that we don’t notice any more. It shows the ludicrous and the sexploitative in comics by replacing heroines with the buff Hawkeye character in the same pose—-drawn by whoever wants to participate, with some pretty hilarious results.
By: Alice,
on 11/29/2012
29 November 2012 is the 140th anniversary of the death of mathematician Mary Somerville, the nineteenth century’s “Queen of Science”. Several years after her death, Oxford University’s Somerville College was named in her honor — a poignant tribute because Mary Somerville had been completely self-taught. In 1868, when she was 87, she had signed J. S. Mill’s (unsuccessful) petition for female suffrage, but I think she’d be astonished that we’re still debating “the woman question” in science. Physics, in particular — a subject she loved, especially mathematical physics — is still a very male-dominated discipline, and men as well as women are concerned about it.
Of course, science today is far more complex than it was in Somerville’s time, and for the past forty years feminist critics have been wondering if it’s the kind of science that women actually want; physics, in particular, has improved the lives of millions of people over the past 300 years, but it’s also created technologies and weapons that have caused massive human, social and environmental destruction. So I’d like to revisit an old debate: are science’s obstacles for women simply a matter of managing its applications in a more “female-friendly” way, or is there something about its exclusively male origins that has made science itself sexist?
To manage science in a more female-friendly way, it would be interesting to know if there’s any substance behind gender stereotypes such as that women prefer to solve immediate human problems, and are less interested than men in detached, increasingly expensive fundamental research, and in military and technological applications. Either way, though, it’s self-evident that women should have more say in how science is applied and funded, which means it’s important to have more women in decision-making positions — something we’re still far from achieving.
But could the scientific paradigm itself be alienating to women? Mary Somerville didn’t think so, but it’s often argued (most recently by some eco-feminist and post-colonial critics) that the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, which formed the template for modern science, was constructed by European men, and that consequently, the scientific method reflects a white, male way of thinking that inherently preferences white men’s interests and abilities over those of women and non-Westerners. It’s a problematic argument, but justification for it has included an important critique of reductionism — namely, that Western male experimental scientists have traditionally studied physical systems, plants, and even human bodies by dissecting them, studying their components separately and losing sight of the whole system or organism.
The limits of the reductionist philosophy were famously highlighted in biologist Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, which showed that the post-War boom in chemical pest control didn’t take account of the whole food chain, of which insects are merely a part. Other dramatic illustrations are climate change, and medical disasters like the thalidomide tragedy: clearly, it’s no longer enough to focus selectively on specific problems such as the action of a drug on a particular symptom, or the local effectiveness of specific technologies; instead, scientists must consider the effect of a drug or medical procedure on the whole person, whilst new technological inventions shouldn’t be separated from their wider social and environmental ramifications.
In its proper place, however, reductionism in basic scientific research is important. (The recent infamous comment by American Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin — that women can “shut down” their bodies during a “legitimate rape”, in order not to become pregnant — illustrates the need for a basic understanding of how the various parts of the human body work.) I’m not sure if this kind of reductionism is a particularly male or particularly Western way of thinking, but either way there’s much more to the scientific method than this; it’s about developing testable hypotheses from observations (reductionist or holistic), and then testing those hypotheses in as objective a way as possible. The key thing in observing the world is curiosity, and this is a human trait, discernible in all children, regardless of race or gender. Of course, girls have traditionally faced more cultural restraints than boys, so perhaps we still need to encourage girls to be actively curious about the world around them. (For instance, it’s often suggested that women prefer biology to physics because they want to help people — and yet, many of the recent successes in medical and biological science would have been impossible without the technology provided by fundamental, curiosity-driven physics.)
Like Mary Somerville, I think the scientific method has universal appeal, but I also think feminist and other critics are right to question its patriarchal and capitalist origins. Although science at its best is value-free, it’s part of the broader community, whose values are absorbed by individual scientists. So much so that Yale researchers Moss-Racusin et al recently uncovered evidence that many scientists themselves, male and female, have an unconscious sexist bias. In their widely reported study, participants judged the same job application (for a lab manager position) to be less competent if it had a (randomly assigned) female name than if it had a male name.
In Mary Somerville’s day, such bias was overt, and it had the authority of science itself: women’s smaller brain size was considered sufficient to “prove” female intellectual inferiority. It was bad science, and it shows how patriarchal perceptions can skew the interpretation not just of women’s competence, but also of scientific data itself. (Without proper vigilance, this kind of subjectivity can slip through the safeguards of the scientific method because of other prejudices, too, such as racism, or even the agendas of funding bodies.) Of course, acknowledging the existence of patriarchal values in society isn’t about hating men or assuming men hate women. Mary Somerville met with “the utmost kindness” from individual scientific men, but that didn’t stop many of them from seeing her as the exception that proved the male-created rule of female inferiority. After all, it takes analysis and courage to step outside a long-accepted norm. And so, the “woman question” is still with us — but in trying to resolve it, we might not only find ways to remove existing gender biases, but also broaden the conversation about what sort of science we all want in the twenty-first century.
Robyn Arianrhod is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University. She is the author of Seduced by Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution and Einstein’s Heroes.
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Image credit: Mary Somerville. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
By: Jason Low,
on 6/1/2012
Throughout the history of the United States, equality for all people has been fought for and won time and time again. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of 
Independence ”that all men are created equal,” and over time equal rights have been gradually extended to different groups of people. However, equality has never been achieved without heated debate, despite our country’s founding principle that all people are created equal in the first place.
The language used to seek equality has remained familiar over time. Posters demanding equal rights (pictured) contain messages we have all seen or heard. One of my theories is that since the human life span is finite, the message of equality has to be relearned by each generation as it comes to realize that more work needs to be done.
If humans lived longer, would full equality across racial and gender lines have been acquired by now? Ask yourself: Would women suffragists from the 1920s, who so 
vehemently demanded the right to vote, think it was fine for African Americans to be denied this same right? It depends. My theory also includes the caveat that empathy for others does not always translate into citizens banding together for the greater good. Then again, the social evolution of the United States is progressing. This progression is the reason the language and message of equality remains relevant.
Equality is a shared goal that not everyone enjoys. Racial intolerance for one group is no different than bigotry for another. Denying equality for a particular group plays into the kind of discriminatory trap that makes no sense if one applies the very same principles of equality indiscriminately. All people are created equal, period.
The Declaration of Independence was written with the hope of possibility. Think about it—the signers of this document were declaring a new and independent country! 
Jefferson’s words made a statement about human rights that became the foundation for a country unlike any other in the world. The signers never anticipated that their vision would eventually embrace so many different kinds of people, but that is the beauty of it. The Declaration was groundbreaking because it provided a foundation of principles and moral standards that have endured to modern times and that accommodate human evolution and its capacity for acceptance.
Stepping back and viewing all these posters as a whole, one could come to two conclusions. First: the human race does not learn from history. Second: humans 
repeat the same mistakes over and over. However, I believe that the preservation and repurposing of the messages of protest in all their different forms are evidence that we do learn from history, and that we apply these tactics when the moment calls for them.
Similar to my previous posts on Race-Based Comedy and Race in Advertising, this post is a small glimpse into a bigger topic that welcomes further discussion. These subjects would be commonplace in a college syllabus, but is there any reason why we shouldn’t introduce dialogue about such issues into our daily lives? At the dinner table, instead of asking your kids how their day was at school and receiving a one-word answer, try bringing
By: Lauren,
on 4/12/2011
This year’s Equal Pay Day falls on April 12, marking how far into 2011 the average woman must work in order to earn what the average man had by the end of 2010. In the 15 years since Equal Pay Day was established, the gender wage gap has barely budged, moving from 74 percent in 1996 to 77 percent in 2010. This amounts to a three-cent increase in women’s wages for every dollar earned by men. Given that women make up half of the workforce, the gender wage gap does not generate the outrage that it should, as is clear from the failure of the Paycheck Fairness Act last November.
Polls confirm that most people believe women and men doing the same job should receive the same pay. But many are unaware of the extent of the problem, believe the wage gap is a result of women’s choices or think that the gap is a relic of the past. Thus, Equal Pay Day is the perfect time for some myth busting.
Myth #1: The wage gap is a result of women’s choices.
We’re less likely to think the wage gap is a problem if we believe it stems from women’s individual choices—to choose one job or field of study over another, to “opt out” of the workforce to raise children, or to fail to negotiate for higher pay. These arguments, prevalent in the media, overlook important research to the contrary. For one, men are perceived as more accomplished than women even when they have the same resumes. As for women “opting out” to become mothers, author Pamela Stone shows [PDF] that many professional women who leave their jobs to engage in full-time caregiving are not “opting out” but are “pushed out”: They are stigmatized and their attempts to stay on the career track are stymied. Correspondingly, Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll found that mothers are less likely to be hired and are offered lower salaries than fathers and women without children.
Furthermore, while it’s true that men are more likely to be working in higher-paid fields, women make less money than men even when they occupy the same jobs. Researchers at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that in the largest 108 occupations, men outearn women in all but four: (1) life, physical, and social science technicians, (2) bakers, (3) teacher assistants and (4) dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers. With respect to negotiation, researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have demonstrated that although women are less likely to negotiate, they are penalized more heavily than men when they negotiate.
Myth #2: The wage gap is a relic of the past.
Concerns about equal pay may have been mitigated by recent reports that in major cities,
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By: Lauren,
on 4/5/2011
A decade ago, Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart greeter (one of the folks in blue vests who welcome you to the store), filed a lawsuit against her employer. She alleged that her supervisors had treated her harshly and, once she complained, had retaliated by demoting her. Rather than sue Wal-Mart on her own, she joined with six other women who also (allegedly) suffered discrimination at the company. These women included one who had been passed over for promotion, one who could not transfer to day shifts, and one who had been sexually harassed by coworkers. Together, these women claimed to represent all women at Wal-Mart, and asked for damages on all their behalf.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument on the case. The media has covered Wal-Mart v. Dukes as a gender discrimination case. And it’s true that the underlying cause of action is a violation of Title VII, the United States’s antidiscrimination statute. But the issue the Court heard is a procedural one: can the women who sued Wal-Mart bring their case as a class action? If they can, the huge damages at stake will likely induce Wal-Mart to settle on generous terms. (No company, even one as big as Wal-Mart, wants to risk a billion-dollar verdict.) If they can’t, then each woman must bring her case on her own. And while some women’s discrimination claims may be worth enough to interest a lawyer, others will not. Since the procedural question could make or break this case, it has taken on the same significance as if the Court were ruling on whether companies are allowed to discriminate against women.
So what is a class action? It’s a method of aggregating a large number of claims into a single lawsuit. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 — the rule that authorizes class actions — the lawsuit begins with an individual plaintiff. If she can convince the court her claim is enough like those of the people she seeks to represent, the court certifies the case as a class action. Once the class is certified, the plaintiff offers proof of her individual claim at trial. If she wins, the whole class wins; but if she loses, then the whole class loses with her.
The Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the women suing Wal-Mart had demonstrated they met two of the requirements of Rule 23.
First, it considered whether the women met the “commonality” requirement. Commonality calls for every class action to have a common question of law or fact that, if answered, moves the case forward. The requirement seems simple, but can be hard to meet for a diverse group of 1.6 million women. (Hence the references to the Dukes class being “too big to certify.”) The women argued that their common question was whether Wal-Mart’s corporate culture was “vulnerable” to sex discrimination, and whether allowing managers “excessive subjectivity” in personnel decisions ended up discriminating against women.
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By: Lauren,
on 11/22/2010
Last week, the Senate Republicans defeated the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill would have strengthened the Equal Pay Act by providing more effective protections and remedies to victims of sex discrimination in wages, including prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their wages with another employee, requiring employers to prove that wage differences between women and men doing the same work are the result of education, training, experience, or other job-related factors, and providing victims of sex discrimination in wages the same legal remedies currently available to those experiencing pay discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.
Was the bill perfect? Probably not (few, if any bills could be considered perfect). But the Republican senators threw the baby out with the bath water.
I think most members of the Senate believe that women should be paid the same amount as men for doing the same job. Yet many did not support the Paycheck Fairness Act. Perhaps their reluctance had to do with partisan politics or opponents’ arguments that it would be bad for business. Regardless of their reasons for not supporting the bill, if bill had been about pay discrimination on the basis of race, I think it would have passed long ago because the political fall-out for failing to oppose racial discrimination is much steeper than failing to oppose sex discrimination.
Why is it OK to continue to allow pay discrimination against women? Why do we accept this as a fact of life? And why should victims of sex discrimination in wages be denied the same legal remedies as victims of racial discrimination?
Issues pertaining to sex discrimination have been relegated to the second-class status of “women’s issues.” And because “women’s issues” have become imbued with divisive issues such as abortion, it has become more politically and socially acceptable to oppose legislation promoting the rights of women–even if it’s the right to equal pay.
Another reason the Paycheck Fairness Act experienced push-back is that many believe pay inequities are a result of women choosing jobs that are more compatible with family responsibilities or of women having less job experience because of years out of the labor force. But the Act did not state that women and men should receive the same pay regardless of work experience, occupation, or level of education. The Act acknowledged that pay differences based on these factors are not discrimination.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was about women receiving the same pay as men for doing the same work. It’s time we hold our Congressional representatives to the national principle that everyone (regardless of gender, race, national origin, or religion) deserves equal pay for equal work.
Mariko Lin Chang, PhD, is a former Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She currently works with universities to diversify their faculty and also works as an independent consultant specializing in data analysis of wealth inequality in the US. Chang is the author of Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It.
By: Lisa Chellman,
on 10/8/2010
This summer my attention was directed to YA author Hannah Moskowitz's blog entry about her perception of a problem with boy characters in YA fiction. Her main point is that one reason more boys don't read YA fiction is because male characters are stereotyped and sanitized; they don't act like real boys. "Boys need their blockbusters, too," she writes.
I have to confess that my reaction to her article, and many of the comments in response, was "Give me a [expletive deleted] break." Hello, Harry Potter? Not to mention Percy Jackson, Vladimir Todd, Eragon, Alex Rider, Pendragon, Cherub, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid... to name just a few extremely popular series for kids and teens that feature male main characters.
Yes, there are gender differences in verbal development and reading preferences, and perhaps teen boys aren't into novels as much as their female peers. But is it true that YA publishing is seeing a dearth of fully realized, three-dimensional teen male characters? Maybe it's because I work in a public library whose policy is to select widely from books that get good reviews in professional journals, and not in a major chain bookstore whose main emphasis is profit (I have noticed that at Borders and Barnes and Noble the shelves of the YA section are filled with "pink" books), but I don't see evidence of such a trend. And I'm certainly not about to attribute teen boys' reading habits to a lack of "real" boys in literature.
Honestly, my perception is that female characters are still playing catch-up. Twilight becomes a worldwide sensation, and suddenly boy readers have no literary heroes to identify with?
I appreciate groundbreaking, feminist YA fantasy author Tamora Pierce's comment on Moskowitz's post. She doesn't cite her sources, but I agree with her perception that -- particularly in fantasy and science fiction genres -- male characters still dominate the field, both in sheer numbers and in terms of how they are portrayed. Yes, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series, Kristin Cashore's Graceling, and Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series hit it big. But from where I'm standing, a current of sexism runs through the public's response to these exciting books -- this attitude, verbalized or not (and so often it is; as a public librarian, I can attest to this), that these books are great reads for both boys and girls in spite of having female main characters.
Anyway, today Abby (the) Librarian linked to this related post by popular YA author Maureen Johnson: "Sell the Girls. It's a long essay but worth the time to read it. Like Moskowitz, Johnson starts with the alleged "crisis" of literature for teen boys, but she takes it in a completely different direction.
So, we’re thinking about boys and girls and what they read. The assumption, as I understand it, is that females are flexible and accepting creatures who can read absolutely anything. We’re like acrobats. We can tie our legs over our heads. Bring it on. There is nothing we cannot handle. Boys, on the other hand, are much more delicately balanced. To ask them to read “girl” stories (whatever those might be) will cause the whole venture to fall apart. They are finely tuned, like Formula One cars, which require preheated fluids and warmed tires in order to operate—as opposed to girls, who are like pickup trucks or big, family-style SUVs. We can go anywhere, through anything, on any old literary fuel you put in us.
Largely because we have little choice in the matter.<
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By: Lee & Low Books,
on 4/29/2010
An Indian woman and feminist shares three encounters with women who are working for women’s rights and for peace within their traditions. It’s long, but it’s worth it:
All too often, I think we forget the balance of which she speaks. In one conversation, we talk about how tradition binds communities, provides a sense of self and of shared heritage, and is something worth preserving. In another conversation, we talk about how tradition all too often treats women as second-class. They can be one conversation.
By: Miriam,
on 3/12/2010
Yesterday we posted a video on the frustrations of biracial people being put into little boxes. Taking a very different view is Michele Elam, with a thought-provoking article about the pitfalls of “mark one or more races” on the census.
On her blog, author Shannon Hale takes a look at the lack of girls in children’s movies, the limited roles they play, and an appeal to parents: take your sons to movies with girl heroes. The same goes for books and the same goes for other types of diversity: give the children you know books with heroes who don’t look like them.
Race-Talk has an in-depth look at drug policy and the way it contributes to racial disparity in the U.S. There’s some speculation on why drug policy evolved the way it did, but also a concrete look at its effects.
In the speculative fiction world, Asimov’s has an essay on Western speculative fiction authors writing about non-Western cultures; Rose Fox at Genreville provides a rebuttal and a more nuanced look at the issue. (By the way, have you heard that we’re going to be diversifying MG/YA speculative fiction with the imprint Tu Books? And that we’re really quite excited?)
And on that note, we’re off! Have a good weekend and happy reading!
By: Lee & Low Books,
on 2/11/2010
A look at how black children look at dolls—light and dark—in the 1940s and today.
There has been improvement, and that’s great. But what’s really telling is the difference between the boys and the girls; the boys universally look at the black and white dolls as equally pretty, but the girls were split, many of them preferring the white doll. This small study isn’t enough to tell us why the difference exists, but it’s easy to speculate that girls feel more pressure in regard to appearance and prettiness, and are therefore more aware of racial stereotypes when it comes to beauty. Girls of color face sexism as well as racism, and the combination can be particularly painful.
By: Miriam,
on 1/15/2010
Our thoughts and prayers are with those in Haiti, and those with family or friends there. Remember when giving to relief efforts that only nonprofits who already have operations in Haiti are situated to give immediate assistance. Aid Watch brings an explanation of why this is the case and suggestions for how to respond, and the U.S. State department is offering a super-easy way to donate: “text ‘HAITI’ to ‘90999′ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.” Via Ta-Nahisi Coates, Haitian American Evan Narcisse writes about what Haiti means to him, and about its role as the first black republic and fusion of art forms that makes it an amazing place.
Closer to home, npr.org shares a story of young black men being disproportionately unable to find jobs. The statistics, the personal stories of discrimination, and the explanation of the vicious cycle of black unemployment are heartbreaking, but very much worth the read. Gender norms also play a role in discrimination: in Dallas, a four year old boy was suspended from prekindergarten for wearing his hair long.
PBS Kids is teaching kids to be aware of and avoid discrimination with their It’s Not Fair! website. My favorite part is Inequity, a game where two players—one representing the Pointyheads, the other representing the Squareheads—answer questions about fairness in America . . . but when the judges are Pointyheads or Squareheads, the game, well, It’s Not Fair!
And lastly, Feministing presents this 1981 Lego ad:
and reminds us why it’s so great, and why many of us wish Lego’s advertising for girls still looked like it.
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By: Lizzy Burns,
on 1/4/2010
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream
About: In the early 1960s, as the Space Program was proceeding with the Mercury 7 astronauts, a handful of people asked "why not included women in the astronaut program?" Beginning with Jerrie Cobb, a top female pilot, a total of thirteen women went through preliminary testing conducted by Dr. W.R. Lovelace. This was not part of any official NASA program. Lovelace ran the privately-funded program. Attempts to make the program official -- or to include women in the space program as astronauts -- failed. The first American woman astronaut would be Sally Ride in 1983; the first American woman astronaut who was also a pilot would be Eileen Collins in 1995, over thirty years after the "Mercury 13" attempted to show they, too, had the "right stuff."
The Good: Stone is passionate about this story, and Susan Ericksen, the narrator, brings that passion to life. Listening to Ericksen is like attending a lecture by someone who loves a subject and wants to share that love with the world.
The audio does not have any of the photographs in the book; it does have a bonus CD with photographs and references and bibliography. The audio works extremely well all by itself, in part because of Ericksen's spirited delivery; but it's nice to have the bonus of photos and the full list of works cited. I do want to get my hands on the actual book, to see the other pictures I missed. But, if I didn't know about the pictures would I think something was lacking in the book? No.
This is a nonfiction book with an opinion, and not just an opinion that is being voiced. It's an opinion that wants to be persuasive. It's not so much about the women who underwent the testing; it's more about prejudice and institutional sexism. The intended reader of this book was born after both Ride and Collins went into space. To an adult (and particularly an adult whose school photo books had "what I want to be when I grow up" with "boy jobs" such as "astronaut" and "girl jobs" such as "teacher" or "mother"), that sexism is so understood and expected that every now and then I thought, "c'mon, how can you not know that?" I had to remind myself that today's teens don't know what it is to be told no, they can't do something based on sex; or to have the rules be made in such a way as to exclude them from participation.
So, yes, the problem with the women ever seriously being considered by NASA was that they lacked the specific flight experience of being jet test pilots. Since women were barred from being jet test pilots, the discussion ended, rather
By: Lisa Chellman,
on 7/10/2009
My post last week about Diantha McBride’s open letter to children’s publishers prompted some interesting discussion in the comments. Responding to the issue of gendered readers’ advisory, Mr Chompchomp from GuysLitWire pledged to write about books with guy appeal that happen to star female characters. He came through this week, naming four of my all-time favorite fantasy series—for my own enjoyment and for booktalking to kids—in the process.
While the topic’s fresh in my mind, here are some more novels and series with female protagonists that have strong multi-gender appeal:
I followed Mr Chompchomp’s lead and stuck to speculative fiction here, but what other books or series—of any genre—would you add?
One final point of discussion (for today): In thinking about my own tendency toward gendered readers' advisory, I realized that when I'm booktalking a "girl book" (a book starring a girl) to a male reader—or said male reader's guardian—I tend to say things like, "But it's full of action! But she's tough and kicks butt!"
But, but, but. I become an apologist for girl-centric fiction. It's like I'm saying, "I'm sorry this book is about a girl, but actually it's quite exciting, if you'd only look past the disappointing fact that it's about a girl." Do I use these kinds of qualifications when I'm booktalking a "boy book" to a girl? No. I hate that.
I even had trouble writing this post! That sentence above, "Here are some more novels and series with female protagonists that have strong multi-gender appeal"? The "that" was originally a "but."
Sexism runs so very deep in our culture, in ourselves. Even when I'm actively trying to kick it to the curb, it's still there. Ugh!
People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!
I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.
When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.
Before he married my mother, my American Indian dad had lived all over the world and had developed an international appetite. My mother was well traveled and a good cook, and she would have gladly tried her hand at ethnic cuisine, but she just couldn’t get the ingredients required. If we had stayed in New Orleans like my mother wanted, most of the ethnic essentials would have been available, but my dad’s job moved us several times, and in the late 1950’s we wound up in Pittsburgh (where people had never heard of red beans and rice or fried chicken) for three years and, a couple of moves later, we finally landed in an awful little jerkwater town in Alabama where people fried almost everything that hit the dinner table. In those pre-internet days, living in such a place meant living among people who had never even heard of tacos much less humus or mushu pork. We had to drive a hundred miles either north or south to a real city (not the one attached to the nearby military base) to buy culinary ingredients (and almost everything else), and even in those cities, there wasn’t much to choose from. We’re talking about the south in the 1960’s, where everything was either drowned in mayonnaise or deep-fat fried in lard or corn oil. I remember when I saw my first tub of yogurt in a grocery store. Eureka! In those pre-Starbucks days, my mother was considered weird for lacing her coffee with vanilla or rum flavoring and drinking it iced. At nineteen, I married my first husband, who was from Washington, D.C. He whisked me off to points north and introduced me to a world of culinary delights that I never knew existed except in my dad’s travel tales: lox and bagels, vichissoise, souvlaki, and every other imaginable ethnic cuisine in that truly international city. I had hit the mother lode! I was in absolute heaven. I was also introduced to a city where women and minorities could actually get good paying jobs and were not treated like second-class citizens. For the first time in my young life, I made friends with gay people, African Americans, and people from Japan, India, Egypt, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela. And I found Native Americans other than my dad’s family, a first. I became a hippie and ate granola. I joined the National Organization for Women and burned my bra at a rally. I loudly protested the war in Vietnam. I was reborn! It was the 1970’s and anything was possible. I gladly waved goodbye to the “good ole days.”
There was a reason why things cost less in the good ole days—people made less money than they do now. Duhhhhh! And women were paid a lot less than men as a rule. In those days, women were expected to get married, be housewives and mothers, and generally become servants of their husbands. The poor women who had to work were treated like children by their bosses and they certainly made a lot less money than their male counterparts. It was hard for a woman to become a professional like a doctor or lawyer or engineer in those male-dominated fields. Many women attended college, but they were supposed to become teachers and nurses and secretaries, and until the 1960’s, they were expected to quit working when they got married. Women in those days did not generally make large purchases such as cars and homes, and their husbands usually handled the family finances. And God forbid, if a single woman got pregnant, she had few choices: (1) an illegal back-alley abortion; (2) a shotgun wedding; (3) a home for unwed mothers. If anyone found out the truth, the poor woman was branded for life. Ah yes, the good ole days!
Whenever I receive those “good ole days” emails, I always wonder if the people sending them to me have undergone lobotomies. Don’t they remember the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam? How about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, Selma, Birmingham, Little Rock, the entire state of Mississippi? Do these people even remember the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. King? Do they remember “restricted” clubs, schools, restaurants? No Jews, blacks, Asians or American Indians allowed. I remember all of that and more.
Having grown up in the south, my memories of the “good ole days” include whites-only signs everywhere, segregated schools, the “n” word, the Ku Klux Klan, rampant racism and classism, Confederate flags, and fear—fear that the southern white Christian way of life would shortly come to end. And it did. That termite-ridden society inevitably came to a screeching halt not long after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and right about the time Johnson ramped up the bombing in Vietnam.
Short-sighted, nostalgic twits have blamed the sea change in American society on everything from Elvis to the Beatles to the mini-skirt, but entertainers and fashion trends are never the cause of societal change, they are merely reflections of it. Even though they had gone through two world wars, Americans before the late 1960’s were still rather isolationist. Except for a very small minority, they really believed in the garbage their government and their TVs were spewing into their living rooms every night. But there is a big world out there beyond our borders, and it was spilling over onto American soil and airwaves exponentially. Did eleven states suffering from social dry rot really think they could keep American apartheid alive indefinitely while the riots raged in south central Los Angeles and our nation’s capital? Did they really think they could get away with killing three freedom riders from the north and four little black girls in Birmingham and Martin Luther King in Memphis? Did men really think they could keep women enslaved in the interior when women in New York and Chicago and San Francisco were burning their bras and demanding equal rights? Yes, most of them really thought they could, until it all came crashing down on their obtuse little pointy heads and the “good ole days” were gone forever.
People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!
I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.
When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.
Before he married my mother, my American Indian dad had lived all over the world and had developed an international appetite. My mother was well traveled and a good cook, and she would have gladly tried her hand at ethnic cuisine, but she just couldn’t get the ingredients required. If we had stayed in New Orleans like my mother wanted, most of the ethnic essentials would have been available, but my dad’s job moved us several times, and in the late 1950’s we wound up in Pittsburgh (where people had never heard of red beans and rice or fried chicken) for three years and, a couple of moves later, we finally landed in an awful little jerkwater town in Alabama where people fried almost everything that hit the dinner table. In those pre-internet days, living in such a place meant living among people who had never even heard of tacos much less humus or mushu pork. We had to drive a hundred miles either north or south to a real city (not the one attached to the nearby military base) to buy culinary ingredients (and almost everything else), and even in those cities, there wasn’t much to choose from. We’re talking about the south in the 1960’s, where everything was either drowned in mayonnaise or deep-fat fried in lard or corn oil. I remember when I saw my first tub of yogurt in a grocery store. Eureka! In those pre-Starbucks days, my mother was considered weird for lacing her coffee with vanilla or rum flavoring and drinking it iced. At nineteen, I married my first husband, who was from Washington, D.C. He whisked me off to points north and introduced me to a world of culinary delights that I never knew existed except in my dad’s travel tales: lox and bagels, vichissoise, souvlaki, and every other imaginable ethnic cuisine in that truly international city. I had hit the mother lode! I was in absolute heaven. I was also introduced to a city where women and minorities could actually get good paying jobs and were not treated like second-class citizens. For the first time in my young life, I made friends with gay people, African Americans, and people from Japan, India, Egypt, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela. And I found Native Americans other than my dad’s family, a first. I became a hippie and ate granola. I joined the National Organization for Women and burned my bra at a rally. I loudly protested the war in Vietnam. I was reborn! It was the 1970’s and anything was possible. I gladly waved goodbye to the “good ole days.”
There was a reason why things cost less in the good ole days—people made less money than they do now. Duhhhhh! And women were paid a lot less than men as a rule. In those days, women were expected to get married, be housewives and mothers, and generally become servants of their husbands. The poor women who had to work were treated like children by their bosses and they certainly made a lot less money than their male counterparts. It was hard for a woman to become a professional like a doctor or lawyer or engineer in those male-dominated fields. Many women attended college, but they were supposed to become teachers and nurses and secretaries, and until the 1960’s, they were expected to quit working when they got married. Women in those days did not generally make large purchases such as cars and homes, and their husbands usually handled the family finances. And God forbid, if a single woman got pregnant, she had few choices: (1) an illegal back-alley abortion; (2) a shotgun wedding; (3) a home for unwed mothers. If anyone found out the truth, the poor woman was branded for life. Ah yes, the good ole days!
Whenever I receive those “good ole days” emails, I always wonder if the people sending them to me have undergone lobotomies. Don’t they remember the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam? How about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, Selma, Birmingham, Little Rock, the entire state of Mississippi? Do these people even remember the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. King? Do they remember “restricted” clubs, schools, restaurants? No Jews, blacks, Asians or American Indians allowed. I remember all of that and more.
Having grown up in the south, my memories of the “good ole days” include whites-only signs everywhere, segregated schools, the “n” word, the Ku Klux Klan, rampant racism and classism, Confederate flags, and fear—fear that the southern white Christian way of life would shortly come to end. And it did. That termite-ridden society inevitably came to a screeching halt not long after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and right about the time Johnson ramped up the bombing in Vietnam.
Short-sighted, nostalgic twits have blamed the sea change in American society on everything from Elvis to the Beatles to the mini-skirt, but entertainers and fashion trends are never the cause of societal change, they are merely reflections of it. Even though they had gone through two world wars, Americans before the late 1960’s were still rather isolationist. Except for a very small minority, they really believed in the garbage their government and their TVs were spewing into their living rooms every night. But there is a big world out there beyond our borders, and it was spilling over onto American soil and airwaves exponentially. Did eleven states suffering from social dry rot really think they could keep American apartheid alive indefinitely while the riots raged in south central Los Angeles and our nation’s capital? Did they really think they could get away with killing three freedom riders from the north and four little black girls in Birmingham and Martin Luther King in Memphis? Did men really think they could keep women enslaved in the interior when women in New York and Chicago and San Francisco were burning their bras and demanding equal rights? Yes, most of them really thought they could, until it all came crashing down on their obtuse little pointy heads and the “good ole days” were gone forever.
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By: Lisa Chellman,
on 12/2/2008
I've latched onto a couple of interesting discussions taking place in the Kidlitosphere in the past 24 hours. Take a look...
By: Vivian,
on 6/25/2008
In this show: Marissa Campos shares thoughts on the gender stereotypes. Thank you Marissa for providing tonight’s audio. Let me know where you are: Click on ‘Join the CLIP Frappr Map’ in the menu bar. Post a comment: Click the comment button below or leave a voice mail by clicking ‘leave me a message’ in the menu bar or by [...]
Sad to hear. I wish her the best.
And to the bigots and the bullies, I hope that someday they learn empathy and become better people.
Zainab Akhtar is a wonderful writer and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed following Comics & Cola these past years. Too bad she burned out.
I’m wondering what happened though? I feel like us fans of her site deserve more of an explanation so we can all, the whole comics community that loved her, have some real closure.
Who are these bigots who consistently attacked her? Are there specific instances here? Was it just a lot of little attacks over a long period of time?
I think we can start a productive conversation(maybe, at least theoretically) if we have a clearer picture of what was going on which led to this disturbing end.
One of the best writers-about-comics I have ever read, and I can only hope there is a bidding war over her picks her up.
I’ve never heard of this site, and this is the first time I’ve seen this site mentioned here, so I’m assuming the “relevance” is out of respect, mostly.
BTW, I’m looking at her twitter, and she could be my new favorite person ever.
Vichus, I linked to her site constantly in KnB and she wrote for the site for over a year so!
Spencer said: “I’m wondering what happened though? I feel like us fans of her site deserve more of an explanation so we can all, the whole comics community that loved her, have some real closure.”
We already know what likely happened. It was probably the same stuff every non-white-guy talks about, ranging from blatant sexism to constant, wearying micro-aggressions (accelerated by the fact she is both female and Muslim). If you don’t know the problem, you haven’t been paying attention to years of complaints and discussion.
Demanding specifics is unnecessary and wallowing in wanting to know the morbid details. Fans “deserve” nothing but to learn to be better supporters of different, diverse opinions and to support those who call out this kind of horrible treatment when and where it occurs.
I almost want to install the Facebook comment system so I can “like” Johanna’s comment.
I just wanted to know if there was anyone we could hold accountable, in the comics community, for making her shut down her site. I’m sorry that came off as insensitive.