Looking for somewhere to vacation this summer? How about Charlotte, North Carolina, recently named “America’s Manliest City”?
I’m sure it’s a lovely place, but the title drives me crazy. The Manliest City Competition, created by snack company Combos, is a great example of how our society uses labels like “manliness” and “girliness” to define acceptable behavior based on gender.
Let’s take a look at the Manliest City Competition criteria. Cities were ranked more manly based on such factors as:
1. The number of home improvement stores
2. The number of steak houses and power tools per capita, and
3. Manly occupations, including firefighters, construction workers, police officers, and EMT personnel.
A few t-shirt designs from the PinkStinks online store.
Majora Carter. Janine Benyus. Maggie Aderin-Pocock. Ever heard of them?
Probably not. But besides embodying change and breaking down gender barriers, these women all have one thing in common: they’ve been featured as role models by PinkStinks, a British organization that provides young girls with alternatives to media messages.
By promoting real role models, Ema and Abi Moore–the sisters and founders of PinkStinks–encourage girls to feel good about themselves without needing to being rich, famous, beautiful, and fake. To the Moore siblings, the culture of “pink” is more than the color: it is a message that puts girls in boxes and limits them from reaching their full potential.
As for the role models they pick, women like Carter, Benyus and Aderin-Pocock move beyond the “pink” message.
Carter is an environmentalist who founded the Sustainable South Bronx Organization, Benyus is a science writer and president of the Biomimicry Institute, while Dr. Aderin-Pocock has a doctorate in mechanical engineering and makes handheld mine detectors and optical systems for the James Webb Space Telescope. Slightly more inspiring than the female role models the celebrity-obsessed world typically glorifies, right?
PinkStinks not only lauds women like this, but critiques the messages aimed at girls on a daily basis. For example, the organization analyzed a message on a Scrabble game box for girls that was colored in pink and displayed the game tiles spelling the word “fashion.” To revolt against the stereotypical images like this, PinkStinks also has an “Approved” section on their website, which applauds products that are not gender-biased.
Some creepy T- Shirts for 8 year olds, courtesy of the Zara Fashion Store.
And it doesn’t stop there. Aware of unethical advertising strategies aimed at young girls, PinkStinks actively campaigns against alarming commercial messages in the U.K. A recent one was against the Sainsbury Company’s sexist dress-up clothing for children which labeled doctors and pilots as boys’ items, and princesses, beauticians and 1950s nurses as girls‘. Thanks to PinkStinks, the company responded and changed their approach to dress-up clothing!
In addition to the campaign, PinkStinks also maintains a blog and a “Name and Shame” section to keep its U.K. audience aware of many of the outrageous commercial tactics that they are surrounded by.
While the Moore sisters are busy countering the culture of pink, their online store enables us to keep the revolution public. T-shirts titled “Future Role Model” and “I am no princess” can be found on their site.
It looks like the women behind the U.K.’s PinkStinks are making some major, global changes.
- Sheena
While the Moore sisters are busy countering the culture of PINK, their E store enables us to keep the revolution public. T-shirts titled “ Future Role Model” and “ I AM NO PRINCESS”can be found on their site http://pinkstinks.spreadshirt.co.uk/. In addition, during the Soccer World Cup Season this month, you can resist the media obsession with wives and girlfriends of soccer players (WAGS), by wearing a PINKSTINKS shirt titled “ WAGS:Women against gender stereotyping”.
WORLD CHANGERS IN ACTION, is all I can say about PINKSTINKS!
Just when I thought they couldn’t get worse, something new and insidious surfaced.
Gawker wrote recently about AA’s looks-based hiring policies, leaking internal documents that discuss AA’s “New Standard”: “Classy-Vintage-Chic-Late 80s-Early 90s- Ralph Lauren-Vogue-Nautical-High end brand.” Their employees are the front line of the brand’s new image, and should represent the company accordingly.
So who are they looking for to help represent the new look? The more important question is (and always should be in cases like this), who aren’t they looking for?
“None of those trashy [black girls],” said one e-mail from corporate. “We’re not trying to sell our clothes to them. Try to find some of those classy black girls, with the nice hair, you know?”
Let me just repeat that for you for a second: “some of those classy black girls with the nice hair.”
Women of color have long been victims of a white beauty standard that others them. Black women in particular are generally represented as animalistic and hypersexualized. AA’s policy plays directly into those stereotypes, defining black women as either “trashy” (good) or “classy” (bad) based on outer appearance, as though a woman’s hair reveals all about her personality, politics, and ability to be a fashionable employee.
We’ve blogged about this before, but hair has always been a huge point of cultural contention, especially when it comes to a white-male-defined standard of beauty. Natural black hair has been seen in the past as ugly, lower-class, and even threatening. Other employee comments on Gawker suggest that when AA says “nice hair,” they mean “natural hair”—two employees were told to stop straightening their locks.
I’m sure American Apparel is patting itself on the back for this, like encouraging black women to wear their hair “naturally” is some kind of slap in the face to oppressive beauty standards. But really, all it’s doing is continuing a long history of white men telling black women how to look and act, lest they be deemed undesirable.
Why does anyone still support this cesspool of a company? Yeah, ethical manufacturing and no slave labor, blah blah blah, but at this point it’s clear that anything AA does for workers is coming not from a place of respect, but of pseudo-liberal principles that allow the company to earn cred with upper middle class white youth who think of themselves as so damn progressive.
AA can print “legalize LA” on as many pairs of brightly-covered briefs as they want, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that people of color, women, and especially women of color are nothing to this company but objects to be played with and adorned as the company desires.
P.S. CEO Dov Charney seems to be none too happy about the buzz this news is generating: employees are now bound by a confidentiality agreement regarding the hiring process. Any employee found giving information to media will be sued for—wait for it—ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
Beyoncé’s new video for her track, “Why Don’t You Love Me?” has been a hot topic of debate recently on a bunch of blogs we read.
The clip features Beyoncé as “BB Homemaker,” a character that pokes fun at stereotypical depictions of both the pin-up model and the seemingly-happy-but-secretly-unhappy 1950s/1960s housewife.
Beyoncé prances around in the video doing all the activities a housewife or pin-up model might do. Except, as a housewife she is quite inept. At one point she is doing some dusting in a sexy dress, but when you look closer, you realize she is dusting off a row of gleaming Grammy Awards. Then she’s trying to bake some cookies, but she’s actually just throwing flour around in her underwear. She also burns some kind of roast she’s cooking. And gardening seems to be more about looking fabulous than anything else.
It’s hard to criticize this video. My first instinct is to just enjoy and not analyze. But there are a few interesting issues that arise, whether Beyoncé intended to address them or not.
We're used to seeing white representations of 1960s housewives, such as Betty Draper
Over at Feministing, Ann argues that the video is transgressive because it depicts a black woman in two roles typically associated with white women.
Latoya at Jezebel, who responds to the post, claims Ann’s logic is flawed:
If these images are associated solely with whiteness, it’s because the history of women of color has been systematically erased, deemed unworthy of inclusion in the general framework of ‘the way we were.’ There were upper middle class black women in the 50s and 60s, even entire enclaves like Striver’s Row in Harlem. However, one did not have to be upper class, or even upper middle class, to be a housewife.
Although Latoya has an excellent point, Ann’s argument that a woman of color playing these roles is transgressive is still valid; the history of women of color has been systematically erased to the point that women of color are not typically associated with these roles in the mainstream media, so Beyoncé’s portrayal is therefore still challenging stereotypes. Here’s a black woman poking fun at roles the media has typically shut her out of, and doing it gleefully.
Plus, these are roles for women intended largely to please men, and Beyoncé is mocking the hell out of them. Set against the lyrics, this satire becomes even more meaningful.
Let’s take a look:
Now, now, now, honey
You better sit down and look around
Cause you must’ve bumped yo’ head
And I love you enough to talk some sense back into you, baby
I’d hate to see you come home, me the kids
And the dog is gone
Check my credentials…
I give you everything you want everything you need
Even your friends say I’m a good woman
All I need to know is why?
Why don’t you love me?
Tell me, baby, why don’t you love me
When I make me so damn easy to love?
And why don’t you need me?
Tell me, baby, why don’t you need me
When I make me so damn easy to need?
I got beauty, I got class
I got style, and I got ass
And you don’t even care to care
Looka here
I even put money in the bank account
Don’t have to ask no one to help me out
You don’t even notice that
…
I got beauty, I got heart
Keep my head in them books, I’m sharp
But you don’t care to know I’m smart
Now, now now now now now now
I got moves in your bedroom
Keep you happy with the nasty things I do
But you don’t seem to be in tune
Ooh…
…
There’s nothing not to love about me
No, no, there’s nothing not to love about me
I’m lovely
There’s nothing not to need about me
No, no, there’s nothing not to need about me
Maybe you’re just not the one
Or maybe you’re just plain… DUMB
Beyoncé is saying that she “makes” herself easy to love, but the guy doesn’t love her anyway. In the end however, she realizes she is worth loving for all her qualities—smarts, ass, class, etc., and that he is “dumb” for not loving her. In combination with the video, in which the character of BB Homemaker makes fun of all the things she is supposed to do to make her man happy, the message seems to be that the idea of trying to make yourself lovable for a man’s sake is ridiculous.
Of course, the delivery of the message isn’t perfect. There are some mixed signals in the video and in the lyrics. At times, Beyoncé is playing the role of the pin-up quite straight, gyrating in sexy outfits to prove she is a desirable sex object for other, wiser hetero men. Latoya at Jezebel really gets to the core of the issue when she quotes a post on Beyoncé she previously wrote for Racialicious:
“…the woman Beyoncé portrays always defines herself against a man, and any empowerment she receives is from severing herself from one man and into the arms of another or attracting more male attention.”
This is exactly what’s happening in “Why Don’t You Love Me.” Nevertheless, I have to admit that I loved this video and I think that as long as we watch it without expecting Feminism with a capital “F” from Beyoncé, it’s worth admiring for its comedy, its camp and Beyoncés bomb body. Not to mention, of course, her wicked voice.
OK, so why did Rolling Stone find it so necessary to show Lea Michelle (Rachel)’s underwear and hint at the idea of Dianna Agron (Quinn) riding a bike’s handlebars sans panties? Oh, that’s right. It’s Rolling Stone, makers of the most sexist magazine covers I’ve ever seen. And we use women’s bodies to sell magazines. How could I have been so silly.
Here in my hometown of Vancouver the main part of the Olympic Games might be over, but people are still talking about it. During the Games I was fortunate enough to attend three figure skating practice sessions. I’m a huge figure skating fan, but getting to follow its biggest event so closely made me think about how strong the pressure is on skaters to conform to traditional ideas of what it means to be masculine or feminine.
For one thing, figure skating is one of the only sporting events that calls the women’s event a “ladies” event, thanks to the sport’s regulators at the International Skating Union (ISU). So while you could buy tickets to women’s curling, women’s hockey, and women’s biathlon, your figure skating tickets would be for the ladies’ short or long program. Until fairly recently, women singles skaters weren’t allowed to wear pants in their programs. In Ice Dancing, women skaters are still required to wear skirts, and men aren’t allowed to wear tights.
Skater Elena Sokolova's cutesy nickname may distract from her skill
The “ladies” label and costume requirements contribute to the trivialization of women figure skaters’ athletic ability. One example of how this trivialization occurs is the tagging of skaters with cutesy nicknames by commentators, as Russian figure skater Elena Sokolova was when Dick Button called her “cupcake”. Unfortunately, the name stuck.
>And just as women figure skaters are pressured to appear as feminine as possible, so too are male figure skaters policed into conforming with ideals of manliness.
The quadruple jump has been a kind of holy grail of men’s figure skating, but under the judging system that was implemented after the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the points skaters get for a quad are limited, and this opens the door for skaters who don’t have the quad to beat those who do. We saw this happen in Vancouver when Evan Lysacek beat out Russian skater and former Olympic and World Champion Evgeni Plushenko to take the gold medal.
Going into the long program Plushenko argued, “You can’t be considered a true men’s champion without a quad [quadruple jump].” Former world champion Elvis Stojko also weighed in, calling the night of the free skate: “The Night They Killed Figure Skating”.
As a skating fan, I can concede that discouraging skaters from attempting a quad jump could be a problem. However, it’s dismaying to see what could be an interesting and civil debate disintegrate into personal attacks based on skaters’ ability to conform to an arbitrary idea of “manliness.”
Another US skater who found himself in the public eye is Johnny Weir. Weir has been criticized in the past for being too effeminate and flamboyant,but during the Olympics two Quebec announcers for the French-language channel RDS took it to a whole new level. The announcers were forced to apologize for homophobic comments they made after Weir’s Olympic long program, wherein they suggested he should be made to undergo gender testing and joked he should enter the women’s competition.
The combination of artistry and athleticism involved in figure skating makes it unique among the winter Olympic events. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to police athletes’ gender. Worrying about how many rotations on a spin or whether someone two-footed the landing of a jump is one thing, but spreading homophobia and trying to pigeon-hole athletes into strict gender codes doesn’t help the sport; it only limits athletes’ ability to express themselves and fully utilize their talents.
The media pays a lot of attention to violence in kids’ video games. But when we’re looking at messages in games, I’m also concerned about the troubling signals in games designed for tween girls. In an article in WIRED magazine, Tracey John asks whether games that encourage girls to be pretty and liked above all else could be just as damaging as games like Grand Theft Auto.
What is Carrie the Caregiver teaching our daughters?
John mainly deals with console games, but I also looked at a variety of PC games and noticed similar lessons and messages. Mostly I tried time-management games where the player takes on the role of a young woman running a business, including Carrie the Caregiver, Pet Show Craze, Sally’s Salon, and Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure.
1. Girls should be encouraged to pursue caregiving occupations.
Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of this type of game is Carrie the Caregiver. The first game in this series sees the ever-perky Carrie working in a nursery where she exhibits an unnatural level of enthusiasm all day as she feeds, burps, and changes babies. Check out the trailer:
Even the games where the main character runs a business involve small service-industry businesses like Sally’s Salon or the bakeries in Cake Mania, which reinforce the perception that all women are natural caretakers.
2.Ambitious older women are your enemies.
The older woman enemy in Pet Show Craze
The back-stories for the games usually include an older, angry, cold, and ambitious woman who’s trying to put you out of business.
Most of these games have twin goals of earning money and boosting your reputation (usually represented by hearts), indicating that likeability is just as or more important than money. If you don’t worry about what other people think of you, these games suggest, you might end up like the frigid, older woman you’ve been fighting.
Do you know of any boys’ games that encourage the player to spend time collecting hearts to make people like him?
3. Your customers will reinforce race and gender stereotypes, and beauty is key.
All the male characters in Pet Show Craze gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, even the little boy
Pet Show Craze has some of the best examples of this: each type of character owns one type of animal and your black customers are the only ones who own monkeys. Also, all the male customers gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, but most don’t get a kick out of the sporty girl.
Rewards in these games include unlocking new outfits for your character and new décor for the business.
4. You’d better end up in a (heterosexual) relationship
Many tween girl games include the main character finding love. For example, the entire story of Cake Mania 3 revolves around making sure the main girl character gets back in time for her wedding. Further, Carrie the Caregiver adopts a daughter from Africa and meets her future husband, Will.
Even the more unique Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure, which features a muscular girl with dreadlocks repairing cars, revolves around a back-story in which she falls in love with a guy who helps her fix cars. The amount of attention given to this story and its happy resolution implies her ending up with the guy at the end is just as important as the success of her business.
So are these games as harmless as they seem on the surface? Or are they telling young girls that being beautiful and being liked are the goals, not just in the game, but in life?
As you’ve probably heard, actor/director/writer/producer/fat guy Kevin Smith was recently booted off of a Southwest flight for being too fat to fly. The internet has been ablaze with commentary on both sides, but Kate Harding’s input over at Salon’s Broadsheet blog does a fantastic job of pointing out the problems with sizeist airline seating policies:
I think of the thousand humiliations, small and large, most fat people have already endured in their lives — the insults from family and “friends,” the cow-calls on the street, the discrimination, the bullying, the news every day that their bodies constitute a horrifying crisis for the American public. I think of how dreadfully uncomfortable it is, physically and emotionally, to fly in a fat body that isn’t bruised by the armrests and doesn’t require a seatbelt extender, and how much worse it would be if I weighed significantly more, like some of my family members and dearest friends do. I think of how few people would be willing to raise the kind of fuss Kevin Smith has (let alone how few fat folks could get so many people to listen) because they would automatically be too ashamed of themselves if a flight attendant made a public spectacle of removing them from an aircraft.
I’d love to add my commentary to this, but honestly, Kate’s pretty much got it covered. What seems to be getting lost in all of this discussion of whether or not fat people are obligated to pay more, emotionally and financially, to exist in a thin-centric world, is just that: fat people are people. Larger bodied people deserve the same respect as thinner people, period. We all need to keep this in mind as we discuss the questions and controversies that will arise in this conversation.
Anne Taintor is an artist who has taken the iconic images of the 1950s era and turned them upside down with just a few words, giving the classic images new meanings.
The Anne Taintor products add interestingly witty layers to the one dimensional images of the “ideal” woman.
Images of women in 1950s and ’60s America depicted strict standards of “perfection” with their flawless hair, white faces, and red lips. This type of image can still conjure up thoughts of a Leave It to Beaver life filled with women in housewife roles baking apple pies and vacuuming in high heels.
But Taintor plays on this connection of a “wholesome” idea of a woman with the clever comments she adds to the images.
Anne Taintor products range from compacts and coasters to file folders and flasks–all with the trademark comments that are both silly and insightful.
One of my favorite products from the Anne Taintor web site is a makeup bag showing a proper looking woman with the Anne Taintor caption that reads: “maybe I want to look cheap.”
There are also items like notepads that have women’s faces smiling back at the viewer, featuring words such as “why yes, I am overqualified” pasted beside the classic image.
The few words pasted on the classic images of women point out the rigid standards women conform to in the media more generally.
In a culture where girls and women see “perfect” pictures of women almost everywhere they go, it’s refreshing to see silly products that poke fun and mock those pressures to look and be a certain way.
You can check out all the Anne Taintor products here.
If you want to let Anne Taintor know how you feel about her products and their impact on women, send an email to cs@annetaintor.com.
When you look at today’s pop music scene, it’s easy to become discouraged. Women in song, in music videos, and on stage are expected to be oversexualized and Barbie-doll beautiful, and it seems as though talent has taken a backseat to sex appeal.
But in this gloomy musical landscape, a few bright lights stand out. One of these is the brilliant Marian Call, an Alaskan singer-songwriter who describes her style as “acoustic folk funk with a twist of jazz.”
Others, like the memorable nerd anthem “I’ll Still Be A Geek”, deal with being a female geek in a society that expects women to care more about sororities than sci-fi.
Quite a few of Marian Call’s songs express the joys and frustrations of being a woman who is passionately unique, and unwilling to conform to society’s image of what a woman “ought” to be like. The title track of her recent album, “Vanilla” is a good example.
She sings:
I’m not sexy, but I really want to be
I hear that’s normal for my demographic
I don’t look good in skirts, and even wedges hurt my feet
And I can’t keep a straight face and say ‘orgasmic’
Oh, I’m not hip, but I really want to be
All the bands I like you’ve heard of, and I watch too much TV
And I’m not cute, and I think too hard to be sweet
But not enough to get a real job or converse insightfully –
This is the part where you politely disagree.
My virtues are vanilla at best, but you can always call on me.
When asked about the meaning of the song, Call wrote, “I’m grappling with a very narrow definition of sexy here, the shallowest imaginable MTV bad girl diva dancer definition. Have no fears for my self-image; it’s just fine.”
Marian Call is a highly intelligent and talented woman, and she doesn’t have to perform in tiny leather outfits to prove it.
Support talented women in the arts! Visit www.mariancall.com to find out more about Marian’s music and lyrics; you can also follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mariancall.
Looking for somewhere to vacation this summer? How about Charlotte, North Carolina, recently named “America’s Manliest City”?
But Taintor plays on this connection of a “wholesome” idea of a woman with the clever comments she adds to the images.
