Women's Work

Stumbled across this stunning -- in so many ways -- National Film Board documentary the other day. 

It is totally worth 94 minutes of your time to get to know New Zealand political economist Marilyn Waring.  Her ideas, boiled down to their most basic, relate to how what women do and contribute count for nothing in a world measured by leading, lagging and other economic indicators.

For example, activities which involve monetary transactions count as production even when they involve the degradation of the earth's resources, such as strip-mining. A sunset has no value, nor a mountain, and trees only count when they have been chopped down and sold. At the same time, Waring criticizes traditional economics for not finding a way to value community well-being. By current thinking, war and disaster are 'good for the economy' because they create jobs such as arms production and clean-up.

As Gloria Steinem wrote in the introduction to Waring's book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, she will change your worldview. She certainly helped me crystallize many inchoate ideas I have had about women's work and place in the world.

Sometimes this film, which requires zero expertise in economics, just blew me away. It even helped me formulate today's treeware column about childcare.

But Waring's about so much more than that. My young economist friend Aaron Braaten tweeted back at me the other day that Waring, one of his idols, was years ahead of her time when this film was made in 1995.

Unfortunately, she still is years ahead of her time.

But at least, now, there's a realization that, while it's still a man's world, women make it go round.

If you have an iPhone, get the free NFB app and watch it on your commute or in bed or wherever you are. Or sit at the computer.

Just don't miss it.

Chick flick flack

Yeah, I watched the Oscars last night, along with a million Tweeps who were firing off the cutting comments. Even I joined in on dissing the dresses. (Was Charlize Theron wearing grape-flavoured Cinnabons on her chest?) It's a sexist thing to do, I admit.

Was I thrilled that a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, was the first in 82 years to pick up Best Director and then, bonus, also Best Picture? Meh. Not really.

That's because, as Jane Fonda points out:

Women directors actually dropped by 2% since 2008, accounting for just 7% of directors on the 250 top-grossing movies of 2009. That's the same number as 1987. Only 2% of the top 250 films credited female cinematographers, and just 8% of writers were female; 86% of the films had no female writers credited. The list goes on.

Indeed, it does, as the annual report The Celluloid Ceiling reminds us. And men write 70 per cent of the reviews in the major dailies. (Which could help to explain why one of my fave flicks this past year, Nine, got so many thumbs down.)

So why is there this impression of a big breakthrough? Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and  Hollywood, says this to Reality Check's Sarah Seltzer:

The perception is based on the fact that that Kathryn Bigelow was nominated for an Oscar [for directing "The Hurt Locker"] and [woman-helmed British film] "An Education" was nominated for Best Picture, and "Precious" is obviously about a girl. Plus "It's Complicated," and "Julia and Julia" both made $100 million dollars. Several high-profile women released films this year: Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Mira Nair, Jane Campion. ... Also, two films that starred women were in the top 10: "Twilight: New Moon" and "The Blind Side." That's great, but then you look at the content of those films. That's why I think it's too soon to tell. We can all judge for ourselves based on whether more women get jobs starting next week.

You know how I will know women have moved ahead?

When I hear women's names rattled off at length in the thank-you speeches, thank you.

And names don't include ''Mom'' and ''my lovely wife.''

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: From regular commenter (and blogger) Cat Boreal:

There was a lot of talk about Kathryn Bigelow being nominated for Best Director, how her win would be a historic step forward for women directors, blah, blah, blah…

And yes, all this is true, but did anyone notice that her film could best be described as a testosterone fueled joy ride?  In other words, a guy-flick?  Basically she proved that girls can blow things up as good as the big boys.  As I mentioned before, I haven’t seen the film yet, so it might be more character driven than I’m given to believe after seeing the trailers and reading the reviews.  And while I’m happy that Bigelow won, I’ll be happier when a woman director wins the prize for a film that has a decidedly feminine voice.  When women’s stories are seen as being as worthy of praise/awards/money as anything made by a man.  Actually, I’ll be truly happy when gender doesn’t enter into it.  All this brouhaha reminds me of a speech by Joss Whedon where he discusses why he writes strong women characters:  “Because you’re still asking me that question.”

Bread and Roses

Happy International Women's Day.

So much more work to be done. Get involved.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: What Judy said.

While no doubt thousands of women and men will still join together to celebrate IWD and in some cities still go into the streets, there is little question that the women’s movement is a shadow of its former self. The strategy of second wave feminism was firmly rooted in the welfare state. Women’s equality depended on social programs like social assistance, women’s services and child care. The neo-liberal turn begun by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s and continued by every government since put not only the women’s movement itself but almost all the policies we had fought for under attack. It was no accident that the National Action Committee on the Status of Women was the first organization to protest Mulroney’s neo-liberal turn towards free trade.    NAC saw that the turn represented by the Free Trade Agreement with the United States would impact disproportionately on women, through loss of jobs and attacks on social programs.   Women political scientists like Janine Brodie and economists like Marjorie Cohen have documented the impact of free trade and  corporate globalization on women’s economic and social equality. 

Please read the whole thing.

Support Bros

One of the greatest things about PM Stephen Harper's sudden professed interest in women's well-being -- at least that of those women who don't live in Canada, of course -- is how it's making many men here owning up to being pro-choice. They're actually blogging about it.

Now, a quick look at the male opinionators listed in my blogroll will reveal that there were already many guys out there who got it. It's just that, now, even more are speaking out. (And, yeah, even if it's about scoring partisan political points, who cares? We women need all the Support Bros we can get.)

In the US, in the wake of that Tebow anti-choice uproar, feminist bloggers are cheering on the likes of pro-footballer Scott Fujita as well as these guys:

Which brings us to this post today by BCer in Toronto Jeff Jedras (I added the boldface):

In a story in Embassy Mag (behind a subscriber firewall, but I’ve pasted the relevant sections below) Canadian International Development Minister Bev Oda confirms safe abortions, and even contraception, will not be part of the Conservative push on maternal and child care:

Oda says no abortion, contraceptives support
   

But the WHO reports that lack of both contributes to unnecessary deaths.

CIDA Minister Bev Oda says the government's child and maternal health strategy will not address unsafe abortions in developing countries or support access to family planning and contraceptives. Rather, she said that to ensure the aid agency remains effective, "it's the lives of mothers and babies that we are focused on."

<SNIP>

When asked about support for contraceptives and family planning in an interview last week, Ms. Oda said: "In order to maintain our focus, again our focus is on maternal and child health and mortality rates.

"We want to make sure that mothers, pregnant women, are healthy and can have safe births, and that the birthing process is made safer because if you look at the number of births during the actual birthing process, that's where a number of maternal deaths happen," she added.

"We also want to make sure when babies are born, they are born as healthy as possible so that they can live through their early age, up to the age of five, with as strong and good health as possible."

Which is pretty much on the same HarperCon Wombs on Wheels message track she was on when she spoke to CBC Radio's Carol Off last week.

I won't belabour all the reasons why maternal healthcare includes contraception, family planning, AIDS prevention and, yes, abortion. I've done it so often. I just want to emphasize Jedras' point:

The idea of a major push to address maternal and child care is a noble one. But ideology can’t be allowed to dictate the program and the help we’re going to give to women in need. We should listen to the experts on the ground about what is needed and what will be effective to meet the goals we’re trying to achieve and let them direct the resources accordingly.

That has always been the Canadian policy, and the Conservatives desire to address this challenge is legitimate, it shouldn’t change it now. Sadly, though, it seems that the trend of the Harper Conservatives allowing ideology to guide development and aid decisions is ever expanding.

Jedras also dug up this video. It's from CBC News yesterday.

Please pay special attention to the note The Family Canada put up with it.

Your letters and emails to Members of Parliament has paid off! Shelly Glover confirms that Abortion will now not be included in the Canadian Government's plan to help women and children overseas.

Pray for the Conservative Party of Canada and our Prime Minister! Donate and volunteer your time at www.conservative.ca

Forward this video to all of your Christian friends!!!!!

Canada: Now Under OMG Management.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Joyce Arthur has more.

Of course, Ignatieff is a politician, and bringing up abortion is no doubt a political strategy in part – but it’s also the absolutely right thing for him to do. It is impossible to tackle maternal health without addressing unsafe abortion, which is a leading cause of maternal death in most developing countries. Given the critical importance of legal safe abortion in saving women’s lives, and the Conservative Party’s well-known anti-choice stance, Ignatieff would have been remiss not to make it a burning issue. The majority of women in Canada are pro-choice, and we are surprised, pleased, and hopeful to see Ignatieff stand up to defend the rights of poor women in other countries.

Conservative politicians and commentators have heaped scorn on Ignatieff’s concerns, however, and condemned him for turning women’s health into a “political football.” But most of the politicking is actually coming from Ignatieff’s critics, who have launched attacks without the benefit of any facts, and even less compassion for women. Some of the coverage is so shockingly ignorant that it qualifies as being misogynist.

Go to her page for a misogyny round-up.

If you can bear it.

Coming up short

The welfare of women continues to dominate the political agenda through the suspension of Parliament.

And so, a few items of note.

Over at Rabble.ca, Murray Dobbin nicely sums up how the Harper government has run "roughshod'' over women.

Nothing new there as regular Broadsides readers know. If I had the time, I would add in a lot more starting with the threats to our reproductive choices and the pending elimination of the long-gun registry.

By coincidence, Regina Mom today documented the dollar value of some of the cuts to programs that helped women achieve equal rights and economic parity.

Finally, NDP leader Jack Layton took advantage of the current political climate to issue a news release challenging party leaders to put Canadian women and children first.

Mr. Layton invited Mr. Harper, as well as Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, to cooperate in 2010 to improve the lives of Canadian women and children. He outlined a series of concrete New Democrat proposals that, if embraced by the other parties, would mean real progress for women and children. Those proposals include:

• Employment Insurance rules that deny eligibility to six in ten women;
• adopting key recommendations of the 2004 Pay Equity Task Force;
• increasing support for women’s groups working to prevent violence;
• launching an inquiry into 520 missing or murdered Aboriginal women;
• launching a federal initiative to ensure every child has daily access to healthy food;
• boosting the Guaranteed Income Supplement to end poverty among seniors (overwhelmingly women).

It's stunning to me that, in this country, in this century, kids and seniors go hungry.

Who was it who said that, if you want to know the true measure of a man, watch how he treats old people, children and animals?

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Layton had an op-ed in today's National Post.

Canada is among the wealthiest nations in the world, yet 70% of Inuit preschool-age children live in homes where there is not always enough food. There are many mothers in Canada who live in unsafe places, who are going without food, electricity or heat because of persistent, deep poverty. These deprivations have a devastating effect on Canada's very youngest, evidenced by the fact that infant mortality rates in low-income neighbourhoods are almost double those in richer ones.

Mr. Harper acknowledges that the solutions to maternal and child health problems are "not intrinsically expensive." This holds true for Canadian women and children as well: Providing safe drinking water on reserves, addressing the affordable housing crisis, and funding organizations that support women and children are all relatively inexpensive compared to the health and social costs of poverty in Canada, which are estimated at more than $20-billion per year.

<SNIP>

To put the full consequences of (Harper's) indifference into perspective, imagine a city the size of Winnipeg full of children: That is the number of our kids who live in poverty in Canada today.

As a country, we have the ability to take decisive action to end this cycle of marginalization, and Mr. Harper has shown that he knows that investing in women and children will get the job done in the developing world. It will be pure hypocrisy if he refuses to make similar investments here at home.

Pink and the brain

Okay, first the photo at right. My sister Irene and me, circa some year I prefer not to reveal. I am about seven years old. The dress I am wearing, which came with a matching coat. It was a gift from my childless Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Jimmy who lived in the US who would frequently visit us bearing all sorts of goodies.

I still have the Ponytail ''My Treasures'' box Irene and I each got. For once I got the pink one, because it wasn't clothing, I guess. Ponytail was THE thing back then. I also had a hair curler box, a diary and an autograph book, none of which came in pink. (This is relevant, believe me.)

Anyway, about the dress. It was baby blue. Irene got a pink one, which made me crazy with jealousy. (I imagine she's not wearing it in the photo as she was a tomboy and probably got it dirty.) Irene always got the pink outfits while I got the blue ones. This was because, as was explained to me, I was the fair one and blue was more flattering while pink looked better with Irene's olive skin.

Yeah. Try convincing a seven year old with an answer like that.

My mania for pink continues today, as anybody who walks through much of my house soon learns.

Seems that little girls' are now obsessed with pink  -- as any modern parent can confirm. This, apparently, at least according to a couple of sisters in the UK who have launched PinkStinks.com. Here's The Guardian on their colour war.

For maybe the past decade or so, little girls have inhabited a universe that is, almost entirely,  pink. It is made up not just of pink princesses and fairies and ballerinas and fluffy bunnies, but of books, bikes, lunchboxes, board games, toy cookers, cash registers, even games consoles, all in shades of pink.

This Christmas is no exception. There is a pink globe, specially for girls. Scrabble has been repackaged in pink (the tiles on the front of the box spell FASHION). Monopoly has gone pink, with the dog, thimble and shoe pieces replaced by flip-flops, a handbag and a hairdryer, houses and hotels becoming boutiques and malls, and utilities turned into beauty salons. In at least one major supermarket chain you can now buy slices of bright pink ham, cut into heart shapes and called Fairy Hearts.

Something, plainly, has changed. "There's been," says Abi Moore, a 38-year-old freelance television producer, "a wholesale pinkification of girls. It's everywhere; you can't escape it. And it needs to change. It sells children a lie – that there's only one way to be a 'proper girl' – and it sets them on a journey, at a very, very early age. It's a signpost, telling them that beauty is more valued than brains; it limits horizons, and it restricts ambitions."

Oh come on. For real?

As the Guardian explains, it used to be that pink was  for boys, way back when. Blue was seen as more appropriate for girls, ''because of its associations, in art, with the Virgin Mary.''

It wasn't until after the second world war that the colour code was reversed. In 1948, as the author of an authoritative item in the Chicago Reader notes, "royal watchers reported that Princess Elizabeth was obviously expecting a boy, because a temporary nursery in Buckingham Palace was gaily decked out with blue satin bows".

Some claim the tide turned for innate biological reasons. Research into colour preferences in monkeys have apparently shown that females prefer warm colours such as pink or red, perhaps because the pink face of a baby primate brings out the mother's maternal instincts. A widely reported study at the University of Newcastle in 2007 asked 200 men and women to choose their preferred colour from rectangles on a computer screen. It found that women showed a distinct preference for reddish colours. The researchers speculated that the gender d ifferences may be genetically determined: "Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – red, ripe fruits, healthy, reddish faces".

But the study failed to take full account of cultural factors: the enormous combined impact, for example, of parental preference, peer pressure and, above all, consumer marketing.

Now I will not for a minute disagree that little girls are targeted by marketers in many more ways than boys. There's no doubt that, today, despite the fad for pink dress shirts some years ago, no guy would be in the pink, at least not clothing-wise. 

But should pink be such a concern to feminists? Does ''pinkification'' determine gender roles and careers, futures and psyches?

Why, though, does pointing this out, as Abi and Emma have done, strike such a raw nerve? "Guilt," says Sue Palmer, education writer and broadcaster and author of Toxic Childhood. "The obvious reaction is denial. When you don't buy into the whole competitive consumerist status quo, you have to be dealt with – and that's done by either bullying you or mocking you into submission: you're either mad, or a lesbian."

Commercial marketing, Palmer insists, is behind pinkification. "When you're two and a half or three,' she says, "you have two key instincts. The first is towards inclusion: the overpowering need to be part of the group. And at the same age, children become aware of gender. So there's this deep emotional need to be part of a group, and the group you want to be part of is your gender group – so that's how you capture them. Quite simply, the medium for catching girls is pink. The marketers have been at it, driving gender stereotypes, for 20 years; it's immensely insidious and it's mostly gone on under parents' radar."

The only reason our ''Proud Member of that Left-Wing Fringe Group called Women'' tees turned out black was because black is more flattering and goes with more colours. Based on the feedback, all of us define ourselves as feminist. Pink didn't screw us up.

After all, the colour has many positive associations. "In the pink'' is to be happy and healthy. ''Rose-coloured glasses'' denotes optimism, although perhaps naively so. The opposite? ''The blues.'' ''Black and blue.'' Okay, I am stretching it a bit. But I loved how Canada was always coloured pink on our classroom wall maps, and that public healthcare was ''a pinko'' concept, somewhat socialist but not quite ''Red.'' This is why I like to call our home and native land The Great Pink North.

The real problem is not pink, or lilac which is another little girl fave. It's the insidious way that corporations make girls become women wracked with with insecurity and self-loathing over body image -- and PinkStinks.com does recognize that.

It took a lot more than pink to convert us from the Our Bodies, Ourselves confident women of the feminist movement of the 1970s to a culture where botox and fake boobs have become a $15 billion a year industry.

As Ed Mayo of Co-operatives UK, former head of the National Consumer Council and co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit, tells The Guardian: "It's as if the women's movement had never existed.''

Being pretty in pink is the symptom, not the cause.

Batteries not included

Found this on Facebook friend Peter Vickers' page:

So many gifts you can buy to improve the lives of women and children. Gifts that make a difference. Gifts that empower, enrich, enable. Gifts that can change the world.

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

Charities are in desperate straits this holiday season as Canadians struggle to pay the mortgage when so many have lost their jobs.But, for all the talk of what's happening in the automotive and media industries, to name two troubled sectors, we never hear about how the non-profit side of the economy is faring.

Make no mistake, non-profits are not unimportant -- and they employ a lot of women.

Which is why I liked this oped by Jill Wyatt, CEO of Calgary's YWCA, brought to my attention by pal Francesca Dobbyn, executive director of the United Way in Bruce Grey.

One of the sectors in which women dominate is the not-for-profit or third sector. Almost 75 per cent of the employees in this third sector are women. But this sector is receiving considerably less media attention than other sectors during this recession, even as our community's needs increase.

<SNIP>

Far from not-for-profit, I believe there is great profit from what we do, but our bottom line is different. We save lives. We make a difference by building human capital. And we try to do more with less and less every single day.

<SNIP>

Believe me when I say you would miss us if we disappeared overnight. There are 161,000 charities in Canada with revenues of $112 billion. We employ 1.2 million people representing 7.2 per cent of the paid workforce--we have 11 times more workers than the automotive sector and two-and-a-half times the number of workers in the construction industry. We contribute 8.5 per cent of Canada's GDP, which is more than the retail, mining, and oil and gas industries combined.

Seems pretty straight-forward to me.

You know what you have to do.

No country for old-world men

Two weeks ago, Maria Shriver, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, put out The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything.

According to the CAP release, it is

a groundbreaking examination of how "women's changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities." For the first time in American history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967, women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, "not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities." Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means. "This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change," Shriver said on NBC's Meet The Press yesterday. "Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past," writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. "This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses."

Now, while the report deals with mostly US issues -- they have neither the healthcare nor paid maternity leaves we Canadian pinkos do -- there is some relevance to us here. For example, just like in the States, male-dominated jobs have been more affected by the recession than female-oriented jobs. 

That doesn't mean that women have escaped unscathed by the downturn. It's just that they didn't have as far to fall as do men. Except if they are in top executive jobs. There, women are crash landing

But, over all, women still suffer from ''shockingly high rates of poverty.''

Men still have many advantages and way better paycheques.

Men never get discriminated against for being fathers the way women do for being mothers, or having the potential to be mothers. While women may be graduating from law schools in equal or greater numbers than men, men have the major share of legal firm partnerships, for example. Although you'd never know that from the media.

Consider these words by The Nation's Katha Pollitt:

The gains of the last forty years--in political representation, reproductive rights, education, combating violence against women--would never have happened without the steady and massive increase in the number of working women and the transformative effects of all those paychecks. Some might be tempted to spin the magic 50 percent to suggest that feminism's job is done. First it was dead because it was a failure; now it's dead because it was such a success.

Maybe too much of a success. As Reihan Salam worries in his article "The Death of Macho," "The problem of macho run amok and excessively compensated is now giving way to macho unemployed and undirected--a different but possibly just as destructive phenomenon." If 78 percent of those who have lost their jobs in this recession are men, that must mean women's gains are coming at men's expense, right? Actually, no. Women may have a bigger slice of a shrunken pie, but because the labor force is still quite gender-segregated, mostly they are not competing with men for work. The top ten jobs for women are, in order, secretary, nurse, elementary- and middle-school teacher, cashier, retail salesperson, health aide, retail supervisor, waitress, bookkeeper and receptionist. Men have lost more jobs than women in the recession because the ax has fallen more sharply in heavily male fields like construction and manufacturing than in female ones like healthcare and clerical work. As economist Barbara Bergmann wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, "An important reason for the failure to reduce the gap between women's and men's average wages is that little progress has been made in reducing gender segregation in jobs that do not require a college degree." Interestingly, according to the Wall Street Journal, on the professional end of the workforce, where men and women are more likely to have the same or similar jobs, as many women as men have been laid off.

The good news in all this, as Gloria Steinem points out, is that this economy-driven revolution in the workplace could result in a revolution at home.

Personally, I'm rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women's needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare. Men will still have more to say about the success of this report than women do, so I recommend the essay, "Has a Man's World Become a Woman's Nation?" by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He offers a long list of benefits to men, women and children when fathers are egalitarian. It stretches from better sex for the parents to children who get along better with their peers and have more friends because they learn cooperation by doing housework with their fathers. This alone could be worth the price of admission.

For the record, that last bit is what feminism is all about: egalitarianism of the sexes.

Someday my prince will come

From the always awesome Sociological Images:

Which gives me an excuse to post this little nugget from The Nation which I have been saving for just this sort of occasion. It's by Barbara Ehrenreich, one of my idols.

Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are. Typically, they spend much of their time in captivity or a coma, waking up only when a Prince comes along and kisses them. The most striking exception is Mulan, who dresses as a boy to fight in the army, but--like the other Princess of color, Pocahontas--she lacks full Princess status and does not warrant a line of tiaras and gowns. Otherwise the Princesses have no ambitions and no marketable skills, although both Snow White and Cinderella are good at housecleaning.

And what could they aspire to, beyond landing a Prince? In Princessland, the only career ladder leads from baby-faced adolescence to a position as an evil enchantress, stepmother or witch. Snow White's wicked stepmother is consumed with envy for her stepdaughter's beauty; the sea witch Ursula covets Ariel's lovely voice; Cinderella's stepmother exploits the girl's cheap, uncomplaining, labor. No need for complicated witch-hunting techniques--pin-prickings and dunkings--in Princessland. All you have to look for is wrinkles.

<SNIP>

Seen from the witchy end of the female life cycle, the Princesses exert their pull through a dark and undeniable eroticism. They're sexy little wenches, for one thing.

<SNIP>

It may be old-fashioned to say so, but sex--and especially some middle-aged man's twisted version thereof--doesn't belong in the pre-K playroom. Children are going to discover it soon enough, but they're got to do so on their own.

There's a reason, after all, why we're generally more disgusted by sexual abusers than adults who inflict mere violence on children: we sense that sexual abuse more deeply messes with a child's mind. One's sexual inclinations--straightforward or kinky, active or passive, heterosexual or homosexual--should be free to develop without adult intervention or manipulation. Hence our harshness toward the kind of sexual predators who leer at kids and offer candy. But Disney, which also owns ABC, Lifetime, ESPN, A&E and Miramax, is rewarded with $4 billion a year for marketing the masochistic Princess cult and its endlessly proliferating paraphernalia.

Let's face it, no parent can stand up against this alone. Try to ban the Princesses from your home, and you might as well turn yourself in to Child Protective Services before the little girls get on their Princess cell phones. No, the only way to topple royalty is through a mass uprising of the long-suffering serfs. Assemble with your neighbors and make a holiday bonfire out of all that plastic and tulle! March on Disney World with pitchforks held high! 

Which reminds me. It's the Night of the Living Mini Disney Princesses this weekend.

PS: Coming soon: Disney's The Princess and the Frog ...

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: My Tweep @evinmaria reminds me of this wry but instructive exhibit by Vancouver artist Dina Goldstein. I have blogged about this before but it is very relevant here!

The Insanctity of Marriage

Via Canadian Cynic:

What this is about is, all that hate directed at those who want same sex marriage rights in California. If the ''sanctity of marriage'' crowd really is concerned about ''the sanctity of marriage,'' they'd outlaw divorce, right?

But the truth is, they're just homophobic.

So anyway, this video:

Heh.