Careers fashion day at school

As dolls go, Barbie is not a good inspiration for girls. Therefore the Girl Scouts should not be getting mixed up with Barbie. Alexandra Petri has more at the Washington Post blog.

Thanks to what a new Girl Scouts badge-earning booklet describes as “a generous donation from Mattel, Inc.,” there is a new patch Girl Scouts can get — the Barbie “Be Anything, Do Everything” patch. It’s bright pink, like the booklet, which includes some paper Barbie dolls whom you can costume in lovely career-related ensembles with pink accents. Barbie and her friend Teresa can be veterinarians (in short pink skirts) or chefs or even ballerinas.

No. Wrong. Bad move. Work isn’t about what clothes you were (except when it is, e.g. when you’re a model, but we already know that’s a lousy kind of work). Work is about what you do, not what you wear. Wearing something isn’t doing anything. It’s passive. [Read more…]

Mrs Potato Head wins a Nobel prize for physics

Yes but does gender stereotyping actually matter? Isn’t it just some trivial thing that floats past like dandelion fluff but doesn’t actually do anything? A couple of researchers decided to ask the question.

A duo of researchers at Oregon State University hypothesized that playing with sexualized dolls not only hurts self-esteem, it influences the way young girls think about their adult lives.

Past research in the U.K. has shown that nearly a third of female teenagers want to be models, while only 4 percent wanted to be engineers. Adolescent girls, it seems, are drawn to careers based on appearance, not knowledge. [Read more…]

Nowhere to hide

Catherine Briggs of LifeSiteNews (yes, the anti-abortion site) seems to have missed the point of a certain fundraising campaign by a wide margin.

In the world of social media, instant news has become a way of life.  Thanks to Twitter and the diffusion of information at less than a moment’s speed, the DC Abortion Fund’s latest outrage has nowhere to hide.

In a move that can only be described as tasteless and sickening, the DC Abortion Fund has offered a gift of a coat-hanger pendant to anyone who signs up to donate $10 a month or more to their organization.

[Read more…]

For sure

It’s conventional wisdom. It’s common sense. It’s what everyone knows. It’s for sure. It’s obvious. It’s dangerous for women to walk around alone, especially after dark or especially in places like parks where there aren’t a lot of people around. Imagine how dangerous it is to go into a park where there aren’t a lot of people around after dark!

It’s common sense, and it’s bullshit.

I’ve been treating it like bullshit my whole life, and I’ve been right to do so.

Think about it. Do rapists and thieves hang around in parks hoping someone will fall into their trap? Are parks after dark crawling with hopeful rapists and thieves, wasting their time while all the victims stay away?

Of course they’re not.

Beware of conventional wisdom. Beware of what you think you know if you’ve never for a second actually thought about it. Check your bromides.

 

Rooted in stereotype, and applied only to women

Even Time – never a radical, lefty, groundbreaking, nonconformist magazine – gets it that words do matter, because they say things and people pick up the things and believe them.

So, in an attempt to save you — writers, speakers, humans, journalists — from falling into the gender bias trap unintentionally, we’ve put together this handy guide:

Don’t Call Girls Bossy. Or Grown Women Aggressive.

Seriously, don’t do it. And while you’re at it, don’t call them pushy, angry, brusque, ballbusters, bitchy, careerist, cold, calculating — you get the point. [Read more…]

Equine contributions

So now that you know how to conduct yourself if you have the audacity to go out in public, let’s turn our attention to Congress and the pope. Congress has asked the pope to come along and talk to them next time he’s in town, officially.

Congressional leaders have invited Pope Francis to address a joint session of Congress during his expected visit to the United States next year.

He’s planning to come over in September for a conference on families. Because that makes sense, right? Having an officially celibate cleric participate in a conference on families? They should invite him to a conference on early childhood development, too; he could explain the benefits of being raped by the priest and watching nobody care. [Read more…]

Avoid isolated areas, don’t carry bags, be aware of your surroundings

And then, RAINN has

Avoiding Dangerous Situations

which is kind of them, because otherwise women would just keep seeking out dangerous situations, because women are so stupid that way.

  • Be aware of your surroundings. Knowing where you are and who is around you may help you to find a way to get out of a bad situation.
  • Try to avoid isolated areas. It is more difficult to get help if no one is around.
  • Walk with purpose. Even if you don’t know where you are going, act like you do.
  • Trust your instincts. If a situation or location feels unsafe or uncomfortable, it probably isn’t the best place to be. [Read more…]

Exposed to 18 years of prevention messages

The RAINN advice seems to be wrong in another place – page 2 of the pdf:

By the time they reach college, most students have been exposed to 18 years of prevention messages, in one form or another. Thanks to repeated messages from parents, religious leaders, teachers, coaches, the media and, yes, the culture at large, the overwhelming majority of these young adults have learned right from wrong, and enter college knowing that rape falls squarely in the latter category.

Really? These students have heard, in those 18 years, nothing but “rape is wrong”? They’ve been exposed to no repeated messages that pull the other way? [Read more…]