Happy Birthday Gloria Steinem!

76 and still going strong.

Apologies for the shaky quality of this video, shot during a speech Gloria Steinem gave last year at the 2009 William K. Rashbaum, MD, Abortion Provider Award Ceremony.

No apologies for her words.

How I wish that this warrior woman might have laid down her arms by now because the struggle for women's equality had been won. But we are going backwards, as we have seen both in the U.S. and Canada this week.

P.S. The comments on the YouTube site -- like many of the comments that never get posted on this blog -- are indicative of how much hatred there is for women. Consider yourself warned.

H/T I am Dr. Tiller.

The Way We Were

This first-person account by Bridget Potter, who found herself pregnant at 19 in the pre-Pill days of 1962, speaks for itself.

Here are some excerpts. But please read the whole chilling thing.

Sociologist Rickie Solinger in her book Wake Up Little Susie, describes what it was like to have an unwanted pregnancy in 1962. The woman might be “futilely appealing to a hospital abortion committee; being diagnosed as neurotic, even psychotic by a mental health professional; expelled from school (by law until 1972); unemployed; in a Salvation Army or some other maternity home; poor, alone, ashamed, threatened by the law.” There was also an acute social stigma attached to an unwed mother with an illegitimate child; maternity homes were frequently frightening and far away. All counseled adoption. The only alternatives were a shotgun wedding or an illegal abortion.

According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies. Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the Guttmacher Institute, a respected international organization dedicated to sexual and reproductive health, estimates that during the pre-Roe vs. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In 1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher, since the majority went unreported.

<SNIP>

Emily Perl knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been taken care of by a woman in an apartment on West 86th Street. When Michael and I arrived, she put the chain on the inside of the door and peeped through the crack. She let me in but demanded that Michael wait in the lobby. The room was dark, overheated, and smelled of boiled cabbage. I glimpsed a big Victorian wood-framed, red velvet couch and a round, oak pedestal table through the dinge. In her fifties, the woman had an Eastern European accent, suspiciously black hair, and smeary scarlet lipstick. She was curt.

She would “pack” my uterus and send me home where I must rest. For a day or two. When I started to bleed I must return and she would take care of it. What would she put inside me, I asked clumsily. “Stoff,” she replied. Where would she “take care” of it, I asked. She pointed to a door. “In ze udder room.” I must “svear” not go to a doctor or a hospital. I understood the chilling threat. “It’s nowting,” she said. “If you wanna now is fine. Five hunnerd dollars. Cash.”

My rent was sixty dollars a month. I earned sixty dollars a week, forty-seven dollars after taxes. I could barely make it Friday to Friday. I thanked her and fled. There had to be a cheaper, safer way.

<SNIP>

Written in pencil was a name and an address. My dress was wet, my tarmacked shoes stuck to the ground as I walked. I had proud long hair then that I ironed straight. It frizzed in the humidity. I handed a cab driver the paper. He spoke no English but I could tell that he  thought I was mistaken, that I didn’t want to go there. That it was far. Yes, yes. I nodded emphatically at the paper, taking it back from him and pointing with my finger at the address. Finally I understood his words: twenty dollars. I handed him money and off we went, out of San Juan, on dirt roads for what seemed like hours, to a small village built around a grassy square. The square was still, empty save for a few mangy looking dogs, a couple of chickens, and two old men sitting on a bench playing a board game. He dropped me in front of an open building, which appeared to be someone’s house.

A small man glanced at me from inside, and pointed to the whitewashed stairs that rose along the wall. At the top stood a second man, dressed in white pants and an undershirt. His massive shoulders and arms were those of a wrestler. He must be a bodyguard, I thought. But he immediately started talking about the money in fluent, barely accented English. He could take care of me but traveler’s checks were no good to him. I didn’t have enough money for the cab fair to the hotel and back again on top of the two hundred and fifty dollars that he was demanding. Are you alone, he asked? Yes, I said. We agreed on two hundred dollars. He would wait. I returned in the twilight with the cash.

A wooden table, no anesthesia, a scraping sound, and a newspaper-lined metal bucket. I moaned. Be quiet, he demanded. Or did I want him to stop? No, no. Go on. Please. Go on.

<SNIP>

In the New York Times in June 2008, Waldo Fielding, a retired gynecologist, described his experience with incomplete abortion complications.

“The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous ‘coat hanger’—which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in—perhaps the patient herself—found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it… Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion—darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.”

Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S. It is speculated that the actual number was likely much higher.

Today, about sixty-seven thousand women worldwide still die each year from abortions, mostly in countries where the procedure is illegal.

Did I happen to mention that PM Stephen Harper doesn't think that contraception, never mind abortion, has anything to do with maternal health?

Why we need Women's Studies

Awesome video -- despite its historical shortcoming at the end  -- done on ordinary notepads and with ballpoint pens by an art student, I'm guessing somewhere in the UK.

But something's missing.

Can you guess what it is?

Memento Mori

Some links, comments and thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre...

The guys who don't get it: The Blogging Tories, brought to you by the ever-watchful Canadian Cynic who notes that none of the drooling Con fans care a whit about violence against women. Only one (at the time of my posting) has even noted the massacre, but just to knock down any links to the long-gun registry.

Guys aside from Cynic who get it include POGGE, Matt and Dr. Dawg. 

Dawg raises a number of points worth further exploration.

First, how, in post 9/11 Canada, so much is being made of the Dec. 6 shooter's paternity.

There's a gaggle of xenophobic yokels who call him Gamil Gharbi these days, as though to score some kind of point. The Montreal Massacre as a narrative about Islam? Perhaps for those whose politics are little more than a slobber of prejudice.

Even in the Globe and Mail.

It's almost as if these people, who are harping on the fact that his birth name was Arab/Muslim, are suggesting that his targeting of women students was ''honour killing'' on a massive scale. I won't stoop to providing links to some of the more hateful examples.

Second, and also from Dawg, there continues to be denial that the massacre had anything to do with woman-hatred.

(T)here will be those who argue that the women's movement, too, has long hitched its political wagon to this rotten star. Some certainly made claims of that kind at the time. They insisted that it was "opportunistic" for a movement dedicated to advocating for the rights of women to speak out about the Montreal femicide. I continue to find this very odd. What on earth was the women's movement supposed to do about this horrific condensation of social misogyny? Be silent?

If a man had entered that polytechnic twenty years ago and ordered all the Gentiles to leave, and proceeded to murder fourteen Jews, would anyone seriously criticize the Canadian Jewish Congress for speaking out about anti-Semitism?

Strangely, while some continue to live in denial, others -- as I pointed out in yesterday's post  -- think the killer was a hero. Just read the first comment here, which I found via JJ. (I swiped the rose image from her as well.)

Marc Lepine was a MARTYR in the war against feminism.  

As Dawg reminds us, members of Canada's Airborne once held a mess dinner to honour the killer. As this moving short film by Ling Chiu recalls, in the aftermath, at least two men treated the massacre like a joke, publicly pranking people into thinking another one was underway. Then, there's this. And this. And this.

Why am I posting links to these woman-haters again? Because some readers of this blog think I exaggerate when I say there is real and frightening misogyny in this world. Just read the hatefest compiled by Ruth.

Note that many of the haters just LOVE their guns.

On a different note, you might want to catch up with Pale, Brebis and, especially, Hysperia's thoughts on this how far women have come, or haven't come, in Steven Harper's Canada.

I, for one, want to make it hurt.  I want to keep sorting out the links between these rightwing policies and liberal betrayals and putting them out there.  I want to defeat the HarpyCons but I also want to make it dead clear that, as a woman, I can’t find a blessed party that truly represents me and my sisters and others for whom I care.  I reject a “headlong retreat into fantasy”.  I’ll not sit around waiting for this culture to die.  That might all sound a little melodramatic but there it is and it suits me just fine.

On this day, December 6th, 2009, when I want to reflect and grieve the women’s lives lost in Montreal in 1989 and all the women of this country who died before or since as a result of intimate partner violence and public violence against women – all those whose names we don’t know – I’ve actually had to time defending my right to define, with my sisters, the meaning of the event and the meaning of those lives and deaths.  When women are murdered because they are women, we still have to fight to say so.  We are so far away, still, twenty years later, from doing those things that must be done to begin the end of male violence against women that we still struggle for the definition itself.

I wish no person physical harm.  But I do want to make that hurt by defeating this government and any other government that thinks it can lead a country while ignoring the needs of half its population.

Indeed.

 

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Sharon Fraser has some interesting memories.

At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go, buddy.”

FED-UP WOMAN DATE: Sister Sage brings it on home.

Brand X Chromosome

Just a quick blogging of today's treeware, with some linkage for the record:

Feminism is back in the news, south of the border anyway.

As for sexism, that never really went away – not if you monitor how women, left and right, are treated by the media.

Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin? Both still get "bitch-slapped'' around in the most virulent sexist terms. Women's looks, their clothing, even their voices – all are not-so-fair game, no matter how accomplished they may be.

Still, somehow, "the feminists'' remain the enemy in the endless battle to protect women's rights.

That's what's happening in seven states, where there are attempts to define personhood as beginning at conception. In Oklahoma, the legislature recently approved a move that would compel doctors to fill out 10-page forms on each abortion they perform – complete with questions about the woman's relationship with the sperminator – and then post all the details on a public website.

This vociferous anti-choice push is growing both in the U.S. and in Canada, where groups that would limit women's rights have a direct line to the Conservative government.

Also putting feminism in the spotlight are two new publications. There's Maria Shriver's report, A Woman's Nation Changes Everything, co-written with the liberal Center for American Progress. And there's When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, a book by Gail Collins, the first female editor of The New York Times' editorial page.

The Shriver report is a 400-plus page effort that examines how far women have come in a society that has yet to catch up with the changes the second wave, '60s and '70s feminists, fought to bring about.

Know that, here in the Great Pink North, where we have socialized health care and legally mandated maternity leaves, we are ahead of our U.S. sisters. That said, despite our greater numbers in the workforce and halls of academia, Canadian women still lag behind on everything from how many seats we fill in Parliament to how many corner offices we occupy.

And, of course, there's the persistent wage gap which is not just because "women's work" is undervalued but also because women bear the greater burden of child-rearing, elder care and housework. That means our paycheques and pensions are lower and more of us, especially in our "golden'' years, end up impoverished.

As for Collins' book, well, it is a masterpiece of little stories of huge significance. The woman who couldn't get a lease unless it was signed by her institutionalized mental patient husband. The woman who was shouted out of traffic court by the judge for showing up in slacks.

Oh yes, it really was like that. Mad Men is not made up, not at all.

As Collins writes in an open letter to young women on CNN's website, "Back then, if you wanted a career that involved travel, you'd have to have become a flight attendant ...''

"Coffee, tea ... or me?'' was the line for "stewardesses."

In fact, the back of the line is where you usually found women.

Now, despite the efforts of some hard-fighting young feminists with websites such as feministing.com and shamelessmag.com, many young women reject the F-word because it's been stigmatized as representing a hairy-legs-and- Birkenstocks pack of man-haters.

What a way to keep women in their place: with the "feminazi" lie. And, as we all know, young people are oh so label-conscious.

As my Twitter pal Cristina Simonetto – an ad copywriter, so she's the expert – wrote the other day, "Feminism needs to rebrand.''

Trouble is, too many misogynists control both the media and the message.

So, while feminism may be back in the news, women still have yet to move closer to the head of the lines.

Hit or Ms.

Via Ted Pease:

As part of its package on Maria Shriver's A Woman's Nation, which I blogged about last week, Time Magazine's Nancy Gibbs recalls a time when women were identified by their marital status.

It's an object lesson in the systemic sexism that used to exist.

Because words shape our world. Ms. is not some trendy modern social contraption. It was first spotted on the tombstone of Ms. Sarah Spooner in 1767, the handiwork, perhaps, of a frugal stone carver. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Mrs. and Miss were deployed to signal age, not marital status. Both were derived from Mistress, a word that, before it put on its feather boa and fishnet stockings, was the title for any woman with authority over a household.

As a handy form of address, Ms. found a foothold in the 1952 guidelines of the National Office Management Association: they suggested using it to avoid any confusion over a woman's marital state. Twenty years later, when Ms. magazine was born, the editors explained, "Ms. is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than being identified by their relationship with a man." That same year, the U.S. Government Printing Office approved using Ms. in official government documents.

Such developments left the New York Times — which that year ran a story headlined IN SMALL TOWN, U.S.A., WOMEN'S LIBERATION IS EITHER A JOKE OR A BORE — in the awkward position of identifying Gloria Steinem as "Miss Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine." At that point, even the late language guru William Safire called for surrender. The Times refused on the grounds that the title had not passed into common usage. "We reconsider it from time to time," the editors mused, but "to our ear, it still sounds too contrived for news writing." Only in 1986 did the Times relent; the editors at Ms. sent flowers.

It's true that not all that many women passed on the Mrs. form of address once they married -- a move that seems to be making a comeback.

I doubt many Broadsides readers would be surprised to learn that I was one of the earliest Ms. adopters. Despite two marriages, I never played Mrs. Anybody except when dealing with the phone company because the bills were always addressed to the husbands' names -- plus their names were simpler than mine.

Some women went the hyphenated route. This was not an option for me, even if I had chosen it. Too many freaking letters!

The irony, of course, is that Zerbisias was my Dad's name, not my Mom's. Now, in Quebec, women are legally called by their birth names, so, when she is addressed by the name she gave up when she married in 1938, my mother thinks there's been some mistake.

Incidentally, when my Canadian-born mom married my father, who was not yet a naturalized "British subject'' (Canadian), she lost her citizenship because that's what happened to women who married foreigners. But not vice versa.

Just a reminder of the not-so-golden olden days.

Prize fighters

Five women won Nobel prizes this year, making it ''a record year'' for women.

On Monday, Elinor Ostrom of the United States became the first woman to win the Economics Prize.

How sad is that? Not that she won but that, well into the 21st Century, we're still saying ''the first woman to ..."

And, to think we still have. ''the first woman president'' and ''the first woman vice-president'' of the US ahead of us -- although I would gladly pass on both as long as it keeps Sarah Palin from winning either office.

Anyway, last week, Romanian-born German author Herta Mueller won the Nobel Literature Prize, while Israel's Ada Yonath was one of three scientists recognised for chemistry.

Two other women, Australian-American Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider of the United States, were both awarded the Nobel Medicine Prize.

Since the life of the prize, women have managed to win 40 times -- and that includes two-time winner Marie Curie.

That's out of some 820+ awards.

Note that most women have won since we feminazis have taken over the world and forced our sisters into the workplace and the abortion abattoirs.

(That's a joke, kids.)

We're just crowding out deserving men from the prize race.

Yeah. Right.

Oh, and by the way? While on the subject of herstory, I am pleased to note that ''The Famous Five,'' the women who fought to get women recognized as actual ''persons'' in Canada, were made honourary senators.

Posthumously, of course. Wouldn't want them getting too big for their bustles or anything.

Here's Pale Cold on the subject.

 

You know what I like best about these stories?

They allow me to post photos of unBotoxed women who don't look like they've been put through the Photoshop of Horrors.

Fringe Benefits

What started out a flippant tweet inspired by my Tweep @impolitical on Thursday, morphed into a column, then an avalanche of email, a Facebook group, a blogburst and maybe, just in time for the expected federal election, a movement!

So far, we have 700 members ... and counting.

Here's the column, published on Friday, with annotations and links.

I'm thinking of making T-shirts: "Proud to be a member of that `left-wing fringe group' called `Women.'"

They'd be pink, of course, for socialism – and also for the pink triangle, the badge the Nazis made gays and lesbians wear before shipping them off to the camps.

We already have a draft design, compliments of Francesca Dobbyn, who describes herself as ''Executive Director of the United Way of Bruce Grey, activist, feminist, artist, mother, child and most importantly: a work in progress.'' We also have plenty of offers from other graphically-gifted grrrls (and boys).

Oh, and we decided black would be more flattering -- but the graphics and writing would be pink.

Thanks to Prime Minster Stephen Harper, those T-shirts will make me rich!

Well, no actually -- although I have received something like 1,000 requests. Hence the Facebook group. It is just too much!

Also, I am stepping away from this, as it would not really be appropriate for me to get into the t-shirt business, or to be actively involved. So I have handed it off to others, and we're lining up a charity for fundraising. More on that below, and later -- when there is news.

So props to you, P.M., for letting down your hair, and your guard, last week at that not-so-closed-door speech in Sault Ste. Marie.

Thank you for finally admitting that your government shut down the Court Challenges program in 2006 not just because, as then-Heritage Minister Bev Oda claimed in Parliament, you "recognize the importance of women" but because you believe that that women's rights are "left-wing fringe" rights.

Truth is, you only "recognize the importance" of some of the women some of the time. Members of fringe groups such as R.E.A.L. Women, which opposes women's rights and same-sex rights, plus just about everything that doesn't hew to the "family values" one-man, one-stay-at-home-woman and lots-of-babies fantasy.

But they are not "fringe" to you, Prime Minister. At least not judging from how everything your government attempts to do comes right out of R.E.A.L. Women's playbook. So thank you for, once again, opening that not-so-hidden agenda, the one that you would impose if you ever won a majority government.

The agenda that thinks women's work is not as valuable as men's.

The agenda that would treat lesbians and gays as less than equal.

The agenda that would curb the rights of people with disabilities.

The agenda that would discriminate on the basis of race and religion.

The agenda that would leave women without reproductive freedom.

That's because that Court Challenges program your government deemed "wasteful," was, according to its website, "a national non-profit organization which was set up in 1994 to provide financial assistance for important court cases that advance language and equality rights guaranteed under Canada's Constitution."

Not just "important" cases, but landmark cases, many fought by LEAF, the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund – a group clearly overrun by rabid fringe feminists.

They intervened in "left-wing fringe" court cases such as Torres v. Minto Management (2002), which prevented a landlord from increasing a single mother's rent by 41 per cent just because her husband had left the building.

Then there was the "left-wing fringe" case The Queen v. Keegstra (1990), which kept a Holocaust denier from teaching his anti- Semitic ideas to Alberta schoolchildren.

Or how about that "left-wing fringe" case Brooks v. Safeway (1989), which forced employers not to discriminate against pregnant staffers.

And here you are, Mr. Harper, such a champion of "childcare choices" that, last week, you boasted of your government's failure to create a single daycare space.

"We need to win a majority," you told your enthusiastic audience. "If we do not win a majority, this government will have a Liberal government propped up by the socialists and the separatists."

And later, you added: "Imagine how many left-wing ideologues they would be putting in the courts."

Frankly, I think more Canadians would find the alternative a scarier proposition.

Finally, thank you for revealing your nasty, petty and vindictive side, the one that you batten down when you know the cameras are on you.

Maybe, while you're scrapping the gun registry, you could start one for cellphone cameras so, next time, nobody in your audience can tape you, and then leak the videos to CBC.

So, anyway, I'm thinking of adding shimmy-shimmy-shake fringe to the T-shirts.

Rich! Rich I tell ya!

(Marketing types can contact me at my email address below.)

As I mentioned, I have passed the torch to others. If you're on Facebook, join us. (Supportive men are welcome. Trolls will be banned.) If you can help, let us know.

And stay tuned for the name of the cause and where you can buy that t-shirt.

(A hat tip to Scott Tribe for sending me the Hollywoodized edited version of Harper's speech. (A full-length version is here.))

UPPITY WOMEN DATE: For some reason, I am suddenly reminded of this...

Back during the big referendum battle of 1980, an insulting comment about federalist women might have made the difference between the Oui and Non sides:

It was early March 1980. René Lévesque’s separatist government had just tabled in the Québec National Assembly its long, muddled up, deliberately ambiguous referendum question. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had been re-elected in February following Jos Clark’s defeat. Claude Ryan was the Leader of the Opposition in Québec. Unfortunetely, the federalist forces were nowhere to be seen or heard. All what one could see or hear was about voting “Yes” to the question and to separation. The “No” camp was a complete vacuum. It was just terrible to watch.

On March 9, the péquiste Minister of the Status of Women (Lise Payette), formerly a well-known TV personality, while attacking in the Assemblée nationale the sexism of schoolbooks – the nice and docile little “Yvette” who always helps at home – concluded that the Leader of the Opposition in charge of the “No” forces loved women who were “Yvettes”, submissive women, as was his wife, Madeleine. Those in favour of separation applauded, while women in the “No” camp, insulted, took note. Still nothing was happening in the fight against separation.

It is then that a small group of unknown grassroot Liberal women organizers from Québec City decided, without a word, “to take over”, using to the federalist advantage this unbelievable political gaffe against women. The “Yvettes” were born.

All by themselves, with no money and no paid publicity, they organized on March 30 a first brunch in Québec City; 1,700 women of all walks of life came. The initiative caught women’s imagination like a bush fire. On April 7, they were 14,000 at the Montreal Forum. Everywhere in the province, they started expressing in their own words their passion for Canada. Many had never participated in anything political.

Here's the report from CBC's archives.

More here. And here.

Just saying.

Of Oil and Women

Iranian-American artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat on the Green Revolution:

Below, the trailer for her first feature, Women Without Men, about the 1953 CIA-led coup which brought in the Shahs. As you might guess, it was all about the oil.

But first, this from the Huffington Post:

Women Without Men describes the lives and fates of four women who belong to different social classes: a prostitute, an upper-class married woman, an activist, and a devout woman whose only dream is to get married and have children. All four live an exiled life in their own country, where they struggle for an identity in 1950's deeply patriarchal Iran. It was an era in which growing up female meant deference to authority and power, and being trapped in limited gender roles. These women form their own utopia in a garden, where they try to reconstruct their lives. As Neshat keenly remarks, "these women go into a second self-imposed exile to get a new start."

It used to be all about oil, and maybe is again.

But one thing's sure, it is still about the women.

Fantasia

As a kid, I was a sucker for fairy tales. I had the complete set of Classics Illustrated comics (including the ''adult'' ones), all the Read-aloud paperbacks plus some beautifully illustrated hardcover collections of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson stories. Unfortunately, all were lost when our family cottage burned to the ground.

When we saw Disney's Cinderella, my sister Irene and I got those plastic ''glass slippers'' with the elastic holders -- and it's a wonder we didn't break our necks in them. Since then, I have taken my nieces to most of the other ''princess' movies, and to this day one of them still lists The Princess Bride, which is not quite in the genre, as one of her favourite movies of all time. (On my list you will find Ladyhawke, a sentimental fave highly recommended if you haven't seen it.)

Anyway, the princess thing has been big for little girls for a couple of generations now. One of the girls in Father Knows Best was called ''princess'' by her dad Jim Anderson. All sorts of princess toys and accessories have been made and marketed. And of course, every Halloween, there's a parade of little princesses up my walk looking for treats.

As of every little girl knows, princesses always have it made in the end. They kiss their prince, mount his white charger and ride off into the happily ever after horizon. 

As if that's what life is all about.

Vancouver artist Dina Goldstein decided to look beyond the fairy tale ending  with her gallery of ''Fallen Princesses,'' a collection focusing on what happens to Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and the rest of the girls in real life land.

Here's an example:

Says Goldstein:

I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

More here.

Now, I hate to shatter a little girl's dreams, because goodness knows I had many fantasies of my own, so I wouldn't show this to your daughters.

That said, as a wicked stepmother myself, I must say I resent how these guys all portrayed women as either totally evil or as pure as Snow White.