SPARK a Movement!
1. (noun) a movement to speak out, push back on the sexualization of girls, and have fun while fighting for girls' rights to healthy sexuality.
2. (verb) to rouse strong feeling or action
SPARK is an intergenerational movement fueled by girl activists & their allies. Get at us on Facebook, Twitter, & and SPARKmovement.org!
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The five-year-old boy who lives up the street from me does not have a shelf groaning with stories about girl animals. Because you have to seek those books out, and as the parent of a boy, why would you? There are so many great books about boys to which he can relate directly. Smurf stories must make perfect sense to him: all the characters with this one weird personality trait to distinguish them, like being super brave or smart or frightened or a girl. I have been told that this is a good thing for girls. “That makes girls more special,” said this person, who I wanted to punch in the face. That’s the problem. Being female should not be special. It should be normal.
Favorite quote from this great piece. Read it!!
(Source: impostoradult)
the perception and promotion (especially to children) of maleness as default and femaleness as special/”different” is my biggest pet peeve and one of the chief reasons why i’m a feminist, so i very much enjoyed max barry’s thoughts on the subject:
Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories. My daughter has no problem with this. She reads these books the way they were intended: not about boys, exactly, but about people who happen to be boys. After years of such books, my daughter can happily identify with these characters.
And this is great. It’s the reason she will grow into a woman who can happily read a novel about men, or watch a movie in which men do all the most interesting things, without feeling like she can’t relate. She will process these stories as being primarily not about males but about human beings.
Except it’s not happening the other way. The five-year-old boy who lives up the street from me does not have a shelf groaning with stories about girl animals. Because you have to seek those books out, and as the parent of a boy, why would you? There are so many great books about boys to which he can relate directly. Smurf stories must make perfect sense to him: all the characters with this one weird personality trait to distinguish them, like being super brave or smart or frightened or a girl.
I have been told that this is a good thing for girls. “That makes girls more special,” said this person, who I wanted to punch in the face. That’s the problem. Being female should not be special. It should be normal. It is normal, in the real world. There are all kinds of girls. There are all kinds of women. You just wouldn’t think so, if you only paid attention to dogs and Smurfs.
Good Morning America asks whether the “babykini” is adorable or inappropriate - we’d go with something more like, “blatant marketing move to age children up and normalize sexualized thinking,” but maybe that’s just us.
if a studio as innovative as Pixar made 12–that’s TWELVE– films with female protagonists and a few had perhaps 1 or 2 strong tertiary characters were who were male and maybe 1 in 10 male characters with ANY speaking parts at ALL wouldn’t you think that was a teensy-weensy bit disproportionate, minimally a failure of imagination and maximally openly hostile in its dismissal of boys and men?
Would it feel an adequate comeback if I shrugged and said, well, there were kick-ass guy side characters who was love interests in one or two films. Jessie is great, yes she is. But guess what: THE FILM IS NOT ABOUT JESSIE. It’s about Woody. And Cars is not about what the comment referred to as the “Spunky Attorney Car” (Jeez, does she even have a name)? It’s about Lightening McQueen. It is NOT the same thing, and to even intimate that it is shows how inured you have become to the fact that female characters so rarely play the central role. We are happy with the crumbs of being “strong” but completely unnecessary (really) side characters.
A woman the UK press has called, “The Human Barbie” for her plastic surgery addiction has given her daughter a voucher for breast augmentation surgery…for her seventh birthday.
….words absolutely fail me.
![totheexperts:
[image: ‘Recess’ screencap of the classroom with subtitles “please take this new history book with a grain of salt, since it focuses primarily on white western males”]
MAN, I miss Recess. Beautiful.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm27fbkPSy1qaxo2mo1_250.png)
[image: ‘Recess’ screencap of the classroom with subtitles “please take this new history book with a grain of salt, since it focuses primarily on white western males”]
MAN, I miss Recess. Beautiful.
(via monkeyknifefight)
