“I do not believe in the idea of ladylikeness.”
God did not create ladies, He created women. A lady is a construct, a product, a thing made in the image of the thing some men think they ought not to be. A lady exists only in reference to masculinity - she cannot exist without a man. Being a lady is unnatural. Its hard work. Where a woman is, a lady does. She can never be enough, and is never, ever good enough.
A woman, on the other hand, is God’s good work. She is finished, she is complete, and while she is made of the same stuff as a man, she does not need a man to survive. She is strong. She has her own voice. She is enough.
And she is awesome.
Posted May 27, 2012 at 11:39am in FUCK YES feminism christianity quotables gender femininity matters of faith
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LEGO announced that after 4 years of intensive research, they have finally come up with a LEGO product that fulfills the desires of “how girls naturally build and play.” This new theme is called LEGO Friends and it’s a pink and purple, gender segregated, suburban wasteland populated by Barbie/Bratz style dolls. Many parents, educators, feminists, and media critics have spoken out against LEGOs attempts to separate girls into their own stereotypical isolated enclave within the LEGO universe.
In part 1 of my two part LEGO and Gender series, I’ll explore how LEGO went terribly wrong with LEGO Friends and provide a brief history of LEGO’s ridiculous and slightly hilarious attempts to market to girls since the late 70′s. In part 2 I’ll delve into LEGO’s intentional strategy to market almost exclusively to boys since the mid 80′s by developing and marketing sets that are male identified and male centered. In conclusion, I’ll offer LEGO a couple of suggestions that they can consider when creating and marketing new products.
For more information, links and a full transcript visit Feminist Frequency
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New Comic Day! Add your own alt text for panel 4.
“The original text for that last panel was: “Ugh. Society dictates that I sit here and put up with you until you get bored or interrupted, because asking politely for you not to bother me might make you aggressive. However, playing along despite having no interest in pursuing this conversation would make me a ‘tease’ and therefore worthy of insult. Even though I’ve never met you and you’ve invaded my personal space without my permission, asking for the basic right of privacy would be considered ‘causing a scene.’ I hate you for putting me in this position, and you don’t even realize it.”
It didn’t quite fit.”
(via liraelgoldhand)
I want to live in a world where little girls are not pinkified, but where little girls who like pink are not punished for it, either. We can certainly talk about the social pressures surrounding gender roles, and the concerns that people have when they see girls and young women who appear to be forced into performances of femininity by the society around them, but let’s stop acting like they have no agency and free will. Let’s stop acting like women who choose to be feminine are somehow colluders, betraying the movement, bamboozled into thinking that they want to be feminine. Let’s stop denying women their own autonomy by telling them that their expressions of femininity are bad and wrong.
Antifemininity is misogynist. What you are saying when you engage in this type of rhetoric is that you think things traditionally associated with women are wrong. Which is misogynist. By telling feminine women that they don’t belong in the feminist movement, you are reinforcing the idea that to be feminine and a woman is wrong, that women who want to be taken seriously need to be more masculine, because most people view gender presentation in binary ways. This rewards the ‘one of the boys’ type rhetoric I encounter all over the place from self-avowed feminists who seem to think that bashing on women is a good way to prove how serious they are when it comes to caring about women and bringing men into the feminist movement.
— Get Your Anti-Femininity Out Of My Feminism by S.E. Smit (via thechocolatebrigade)
(via airyairyquitecontrary)
Let’s Tip it
Over the last few months concerns around women and comics, particularly comics from the big two have been getting industry attention.
For years people and sites like When Fan Girls attack, founded by Kalinara and Ragnell and run later Maddy and Caitlin, GirlWonder.Org, Sequential Tart, and others have talked and talked and talked about the how the representation of women in comics, both from the creative side and the content side, is problematic.
In the last year there seems to have been change in this conversation. The participants in the dialogue are growing. The dialogue and issues moving from rumblings of a few to the roar of many.
There was the showdown at SDCC between Kyrax2 and DC which had people talking about women and comics and sites that had never talked about it before discussing gender issues in comics.
There was the successful Geek Girl Con that showed off the power of the female geek and comic fans. In fact Gail Simone said it “changed the game” and likened it to Woodstock.
More and more the dialogue and debate is moving out of sites like mine which critics deride as representing a “vocal minority” to other sites like Comics Alliance, CNN, Jezebel and the Beat who wrote a few weeks ago about New York Comic Con:
The New 52 has been a success at getting outliers interested in comics again. But looking around the Javits, at the ocean of non-white faces, and of female faces, it became VERY clear to me that all the angry blog posts begging for more diversity in the comics isn’t just a few loudmouths—even though they are treated as such by the big companies. It’s the reality of the world. Reaching this audience through inclusion might just be the most important goal for the mainstream comics industry’s continued survival.
And now today on Wired’s GeekMom where Corrina Lawson just nailed it.
You need to go read the whole thing, but I’m going to pull out this:
We’ve reached a tipping point where this idea of “superheroes are only male adolescent power fantasies” is going to be challenged and, eventually, proven a myth. It wasn’t always so and there’s no reason it should be that way. Superheroes are a mythic fantasy about taking control to do the right thing. There’s nothing inherently male about that.
DC said with the reboot that they wanted to push past the boundaries of their current audience, yet the majority of their content so far says otherwise. It was a perfect storm in which many of these women, myself included, said “enough is enough.”
And this
But I object to the idea that somehow, well-written and well-drawn female characters who look beautiful and powerful at the same time will suddenly make the male audience run for the hills. Women read a ton. They love male characters. They’re not asking for a radical changeover. They”re just asking, as Busiek said and Hudson said in her article, that the two major superhero companies stop actively trying to drive them away. The movies, especially Marvel’s movies, do a great job also appealing to the female audience.
I don’t see why that’s so hard to replicate in comics.
If there was a major corporation that said “you know, our audience is just white people, we don’t have to listen to any concern of minorities because they just don’t buy our comics, we want the white consumer” I don’t think that would go over well at all. But because it’s women, it’s somehow more accepted. It shouldn’t be.
Again you have to go read this. But she’s right. You know she’s right. I know she’s right. Hell I’ve been saying the same things for the past year. Others, as I’ve said, have been saying it for YEARS. But of course when you say these things there’s pushback, derision, and outright anger. Just last night after there was a link in my site from the CNN story, I had this posted on my blog:
Women have their pop culture niches, men have theirs. If you are drawn to ours fine, but don’t come complaining about our world because it wasn’t made for you, because IT WASN’T MADE FOR YOU. Make your own crappy comics that nobody but women will read and see how loudly we don’t care.
And that’s one of the mild ones.
But Corrina is right, this is the tipping point. This is the time. This is it.
We’ve 51% of the Goddamn world and I think we’re more than just a “vocal minority” in the readership.
Change can happen. Change has happened. But there needs to be more. So help tip it.
Be a “Loudmouth”. Raise your voice. Let the companies know you don’t want crappy portrayals of women or art that objectifies women or being told that you don’t matter. Write letters. Speak out on line. And vote with your pocketbook.
As Corrina says “Enough is Enough.”
Tip it.
“Empowered” and “sexy” are not universally synonymous. That a woman is not a sex kitten does not mean that she’s any less comfortable or empowered or any of that stuff. See above, re: not a homogenous demographic. Stop making sexiness a universal demand. Let some characters be unsexy. And for f*ck’s sake, please, please stop drawing women who are injured, or dead, or being tortured, or punching bad guys, in sex-kitten pin-up poses. That is bad visual storytelling, and it is INCREDIBLY creepy. Let women be heroes for the sake of heroism. Women don’t have to be damaged or traumatized to be strong, or to want to make a difference. Corollary: Dropping rape into a backstory is not a panacea for making a female character complex and gritty.
Imagine you have a daughter. Imagine the kind of women you’d like her to want to grow up to be. Write them. Write women you’d want to be friends — really good friends — with. Write women you’d get in arguments with. Write women you’d be legitimately scared of. Write women like your mom, like your aunts, like your wife, like your friends, like your nieces and nephews and daughters and bosses and friends. We are not aliens… This, too, goes back to “doing things.” A lot of the time, male characters act, and female characters are acted upon. Let female characters make difficult choices — and sometimes choose wrong — and have struggles and the same real victories. Because without those things, they’re not characters; they’re just window dressing.
— Rachel Edidin talks about portraying female superhero characters at Comic Alliance
(Source: georgethecat, via brokenbats)
