Best t-shirt

Willow Smith in a t-shirt celebrating feminist icons. Image via For Harriet: celebrating the fullness of black womanhood.

UPDATE: Rats, it’s photoshopped, but there’s a link for where you can buy the t-shirt.

Read Full Post »

My new article: The sexualisation of girls

I have a new article in Essential Kid discussing the four biggest problems I see with the conversation around the sexualisation of young girls. And I almost never say this about an article I have written but you can read the comments.

Not so long ago there was controversy over child models being photographed in French Vogue mimicking sultry adult poses and being dressed in women’s clothing and makeup. Everyone agreed that it was little girls looking like adults but some people still wondered what the fuss was about. Even some feminists view the concern about the sexualisation of children as really being a sneaky resurrection of female purity obsessions. To my mind, there’s nothing bad about little girls playing dress-up, or even playing with sexy dress-up ideas, if they’re genuinely choosing this play idea from a range of gender-diverse options. Shaming girls about femininity, even artificial constructs of it, is a big mistake. But the Vogue photos weren’t pictures of little girls playing – they were adults playing dress-up with little girls. That’s an important difference and we should pay attention, particularly when it is for commercial purposes. What was the magazine selling? Notably, little boys are not typically used to represent miniature versions of sexy adult men, why is that? It could be that this collapsing of sexiness and materialism into displays of girlhood is part of a wider trend in sexually objectifying women.

Read Full Post »

People, you’re arseholes

This is a very clever photography project from photographer, Haley Morris-Cafiero where she reverses the gaze by doing self-portraits in public that manage to catch the faces strangers are making behind her back in response to her fat body.

While creating an image for my Something to Weigh series, I decided to photograph myself sitting alone on the Times Square stairs to capture my solitude in a busy crowd.

After developing the film, I noticed that a man was standing behind me being photographed by an attractive blonde woman. Rather than pose for her camera, he was sneering at me behind my back. Five minutes later and at another location, another man turns his back to gawk at me while I am photographing myself sitting at a café table.

I have always been aware of people making faces, commenting and laughing at me about my size. I now reverse the gaze and record their reactions to me while I perform mundane tasks in public spaces. I seek out spaces that are visually interesting and geographically diverse. I try to place myself in compositions that contain feminine icons or advertisements.

Otherwise, I position myself and the camera in a pool of people…and wait.

As I discovered a while ago, one of the greatest things you will ever do for your own self-esteem is to stop thinking everyone’s body is your business. And god knows, you will be helping to make the world a more pleasant place while you’re at it.

Link via @jevoislafemme

Read Full Post »

Feminist parenting by spinster aunt

I Blame the Patriarchy being an adorable feminist aunt to her nieces.

The nieces Finn and Ro-Tel, ages 7 and 9, were here for a sleepover. Like all little girls, they are horse crazy. It is not enough that they have unlimited access to actual horses while they are here. In the bunkhouse they like to amuse themselves with toy horses as well. Ever the doting aunt, I maintain a supply of these future objets de landfill in a special cabinet.*

I’d bought a new addition to the plastic herd since the nieces’ last visit: an eventer set with Breyer horse, saddle, bridle, and rider doll complete. The doll was dressed, inexplicably, in a track suit. I’d selected it specifically because of the weird track suit, actually. It’s baggy and sort of sex-neutral, sending, I hoped in my ceaseless naivete, the message that this girl cares more about keeping her eyes on the prize than looking like a dudefantasy. But when we extracted the doll from the excessive packaging — a gaudy box showcasing the tracksuited doll and her mount against a breathtaking rolling green backdrop untouched by global warming — my lobe began to pulsate. Under its unisex duds, the doll was a proper mutant. That’s right, I’m talkin’ straight up Barbie syndrome. Gazongas like missiles, wasp waist, toothpick legs about 17 times as long as they ought to be, microscopic noselet, insipid smile with Porn2K-compliant parted lips. The face, with its giant dead mascara eyes, recalls the toddler beauty queen prosti-tot, while the bullet-boobs are pure Penthouse, and the blank expression is vaguely suggestive of both compliance and hardening cheese dip.**.

I grasp that Barbie syndrome isn’t breaking news, but that’s no reason to ignore that it’s still standard practice in 2013, and that it’s still flippin’ icky.

Once apprised of my mistake, I naturally wanted to remove the doll from the niecely midst, but this was a no-go; they’d formed an instantaneous and unbreakable bond.

“My ceaseless naivete”. She has a great turn of phrase and I do love feminist parenting stories from the trenches.

Read Full Post »

My new article: “What’s missing from the Retro Wife debate?”

There have been several critical replies to the “Retro Wife” article, but they’ve either sought to make the argument that Makino is misrepresented or to make the argument that the trend is overblown, not that her sentiments about stay-at-home mothering, even the more gushing ones, could possibly be valid. There is a great tendency in us to see the desire to reach our potential as being in opposition to mothering. You can either be finding yourself and achieving your goals or you can be nurturing children. In this false binary either a woman’s energy is for herself or her baby, but in reality our lives and loves are more complicated than this.

From my article in Daily Life here.

Read Full Post »

“please do not post any photos from last night”

I have mixed feelings about this trailer for the documentary, Sexy Baby – a film about developing your sexuality in the digital age – but as I have not yet seen the film it would be unfair to comment too much.

I don’t want us to be overly anxious as parents about teenagers. For instance,  the problem with sexting isn’t about new technology or the (incautious) joy of sharing naked photos, it’s really about slut-shaming, which isn’t new, it’s a problem older than the hills. Perhaps a reflection of how young my own children are, of more concern to me is the accessibility of hardcore porn on the Internet, which is also covered in this documentary.

Read Full Post »

Ask yourself how it would feel if these messages were to you as a mother

Shaming teenage parents is wrong.

Read Full Post »

Men in laundry commercials, and not as jokes

I’ve seen the future and it is an advertisement for American laundry products, Tide and Downy.

Read Full Post »

Biddulph discovers something that I think we’ve been calling feminism

Parenting expert, Steve Biddulph, who I am not a fan of for various reasons, is best known for his book, Raising Boys. Now Biddulph has begun calling attention to the plight of girls with the launch of his new book, Raising Girls. That’s nice, except man oh man, does this guy do some fabulous mansplaining.

Check out these examples from this Sydney Morning Herald article:

“I’m about to retire [but] I want to light a fire under the girl question,” Biddulph said. “People are waking up to this around the world. There is a movement to save girls.”

That movement would be feminism, right? But further on in the piece you get the picture that Biddulph thinks he might be inventing the movement.

Now he quotes alarming statistics to emphasise his point – anxiety and depression has doubled among girls, self-harm has increased 60 per cent, and 13 per cent suffer an eating disorder. One-fifth of girls are now having their first sexual experience at 14, and in the last year girls overtook boys in the binge-drinking stakes.

One of these statistics is not like the other one because one of them might be about girls’ pleasure. Exactly what concerns Biddulph about girl sexuality? Because sexually active teenage girls don’t trouble me, but sexually active teenagers with significantly older partners do, and sexually active teenagers who do not feel in control of the decision to be sexually active trouble me greatly, and sexually active teenagers who are not enjoying the activity concern me a huge amount. So, I’d like to see statistics for those kinds of questions rather than one simply examining whether some fourteen year old girls are having sex, which seems a rather patriarchal preoccupation to me.

Biddulph said aunts need to become more involved in their nieces’ lives as confidantes, and mothers should model positive behaviours like healthy body image.

Except, perhaps Biddulph should ask some mothers about their body image? He might find this problem of misogyny, where women are raised to hate their bodies and to feel pressure to fit into an incredibly narrow definition of beauty, predates his own awareness of the problem and his decision to write a book about it.

“I want to start a more active feminism, to help girls see what their options are,” Biddulph said, noting the original feminist mantra of ”girls can do anything” has been reduced to a choice between supermodel, movie star or pop singer.

Thanks Steve, can’t wait for you to “start” our feminism for us.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

Read Full Post »

Louise Curtis responds to my 10 Questions About Your Feminist Parenthood

Louise Curtis is a reader of my blog and is also the author of a contemporary fantasy ebook. Recently she turned her attention to responding to my 10 questions about your feminist parenthood and her answers are both fascinating and honest. After writing this not so long ago on my own blog, I really appreciate the way Louise examines the relationship dynamics with her male partner as one of the more potentially difficult challenges faced in feminist parenting. I have included part of her response below and you will find links to the rest of her response and her book at the end of the post.

(You can find all the many other responses in this series here. If you’d like to respond to these questions yourself you can either email me your answers and I’ll put them on blue milk as a guest post or you can post them elsewhere and let me know and I’ll link to them).

How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?

Getting married turned gender roles into an obsession long before I had a baby. When little Louisette arrived, the spotlight on my marriage grew even more intense.

For me, the weakest point of my marriage is the risk of falling into a mother-child relationship with my husband. Anyone who can’t be trusted to do their share of household chores is not an adult.

I knew it was the weakest point of our relationship before we married, and have carefully (often tearfully) explained it to my husband over and over. He simply doesn’t understand what I’m saying. The more powerful members of society never do understand what it’s like to be the less powerful member. That’s one of the perks of power – everything seems fair from where you’re standing.

It’s not all his fault, however. Organising things and making household decisions (from groceries to what kind of house to buy) makes me feel powerful, so I have a tendency to jump in before he has a chance to do his part. It’s not like he’s the only one sending us in that fatal mother-child direction. (And yes, it’s definitely fatal. How can I be in love with someone I see as a child? How can he be in love with his mother?)

Having a daughter also gives me a highly convenient litmus test for feminism. All I have to do is think, “How would I want my daughter treated in this situation?” and I know when someone is treating me badly. I hope that by the time Louisette grows up she’ll have enough self-worth to figure out her rights without needing a prop.

What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

I tread a compromised path, like all mothers. To survive in our society, I think a woman must be able to believe in her own attractiveness, and I choose not to fight that particular battle, because I know Louisette would suffer for it. My prettifying efforts started from her birth, when I dressed her in attractive and usually pink clothing. I believe a girl who is constantly told how pretty she is as a child will be better able to handle the sudden awareness of societal messages saying, “Shouldn’t you be thinner? Shouldn’t you have bigger breasts? Shouldn’t you have blonder hair?” as she grows up. I will teach her to use make-up, to shave her legs, to do her hair. She can stop doing any of those things if she wants to, but she’ll have the skills to fit in if she chooses the more comfortable path.

At the same time I already try to steer her away from the stories that equate goodness and worth with beauty, and that tell the reader the purpose of life is to get married – like Cinderella. Beauty is nice, and everyone has a little bit – but there must be more to you than that.

As a writer, I believe stories tell us who we are and what matters. When I write my own novels, my protagonists are almost always female. They have problems, and they solve them – actively. When they like a boy, they generally tell him, and if a boy treats them badly they don’t stick around. Why would they? But generally they’re too busy saving the day to care too much what boys think. Isn’t that true of all the world’s most interesting women?

Most of all I try to be aware of the contradictions in both society and myself, so that when my little one is old enough she can sort truth from lies, and choose what compromises to make in her own life.

Mental illness runs in my family, so I try to teach Louisette resilience as both a preventative and a cure. I watched a psychology video once that presented toddlers with a problem. Both started off by crying for help, but when no help arrived in a few moments the boys stopped crying and attempted to solve the problem themselves. The girls continued crying.

I try so hard to sit on my hands when my own baby has a frustrating problem to solve – so she learns that waiting to be rescued isn’t the solution to everything. You can’t learn resilience without frustration, and you can’t learn it without pain. Sometimes I have to let her fall down. I remind myself constantly that we all unconsciously let little girls fall down less often than little boys – and that’s not a good thing. (We also shush little girls more than little boys, but that’s another story.)

Louise Curtis blogs here and you can read her full answers to the questions here. Her first published book (young adult contemporary fantasy) is for sale here for $2.99 (the beginning is free).

SEE THROUGH

Amy is a young empath stolen from her Normal parents by law on her fifth birthday – with deadly consequences. Her carefully constructed serenity is ripped away a second time when her empath community in Canberra is attacked from within.

Read Full Post »