girls’ studies

In the New York Times op-ed, “Google, Tell Me, Is My Son a Genius?” (Jan 18, 2014), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz points to new research suggesting that parental concerns about boys differ from parental concerns about girls in some surprising and troubling ways.  Searches show that parents–across the board–are more worried about the appearance of their daughters, and the intelligence of their sons.

Stephens-Davidowitz writes, “Liberal readers may imagine that these biases are more common in conservative parts of the country. Not so. I did not find a significant relationship between any of the biases mentioned and the political or cultural makeup of a state. These biases appear to cut across ideological divisions. In fact, I was unable to find any demographics that significantly reduced the biases. Nor is there evidence that these biases have decreased since 2004, the year for which Google search data is first available.”

Reading this made me want to cry. It also made me want to ask all the smart and savvy girls’ advocates I know: Tell Me Ladies, What Did You Think of This Piece?

Turns out, the conversation was already happening, of course, over at Rebecca Hains’ Facebook page (where many great conversations begin!). We all agreed this is a conversation we need bigtime and would love to continue it, both here and at Rebecca’s page. Our responses are below. Please join us in sharing what you think.

Q: What do you make of these findings?

Rebecca Hains, author of The Princess Problem (forthcoming) and Growing Up with Girl Power and “[S]tudies show that when parents worry about their daughters’ appearances, it negatively impacts the girls’ body images–even if the parents never speak a word about the matter. Kids pick up on our attitudes much more than we realize. So how much do the search patterns revealed in this article explain widespread patterns in kids’ own self-images–boys and girls alike?”

Melissa Atkins Wardy, author of Redefining Girly: “[T]he difference shown in this article feels like a canyon in my heart right now. And how are we supposed to teach parents to do better when it comes to the media when they are such a huge part of the problem themselves?”

Marci Warhaft-Nadler, author of The Body Image Survival Guide: “This is really disappointing. It’s like these outdated gender roles and expectations are so deeply engrained in our psyches that we don’t even recognize it anymore.”

Lori Day, Lori Day Consulting, and author of Her Next Chapter: “This was counter-intuitive to me as an educational psychologist because girls develop more quickly than boys in terms of literacy, language development, social skills, self-help skills, etc. When it comes to two-year-olds, girls are often more mature, and appear more “gifted” (Lake Wobegon issues aside), than their male peers. I have had way more parents of young girls tell me they think their child is gifted than parents of young boys. Maybe the Google searches are picking up data related to kids in elementary school and beyond, when many of the developmental academic advantages for girls relative to boys have washed out. Certainly, it is picking up on parental concern about daughters’ appearance, not something my consulting clients usually talk to me about, but something that does not surprise me as an author who writes about today’s girl culture.”

Deborah Siegel, author of The Gender Years (a graphic memoir-in-progress) and Sisterhood, Interrupted: “That piece made me want to cry. Interesting note, though, the author ends with: ‘we might examine whether these gender preferences change after a woman is elected to run a country.’ Wondering, like the rest of you, what else might change the painful imbalance in parental expectation, from within. This shit goes so deep.”

Rebecca Hains: “We know that media portrayals of boys and girls mirror and then reinforce cultural attitudes. It’s cyclical. Other studies show that to kids, it’s really important that boy characters in the media be smart and that girl characters be pretty: girls identify with female characters they consider attractive, whereas boys identify with male characters they consider intelligent. This is probably because of these biases they pick up on, both in the home and at school, as well as in other media. I think effecting change requires both consciousness-raising (helping us all to see our own biases, so that we can overcome them) and media literacy work (to help parents and kids break down and resist the biases they see on screen). And of course it also requires activism, to hold media producers accountable when they perpetuate these biases. There’s so much work to be done, it’s overwhelming. But it’s important, and it’s time.”

Girl w/Pen readers, your thoughts?

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The other week, Girl w/Pen bloggers and masculinity studies scholars Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe called us to pause the war on pink and take a look at boys’ toys, prompting a response from media studies scholar Rebecca Hains (author of the forthcoming The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years) and a reflection from me on feminist history and popular feminist debate.

This week, I invited Rebecca to dialogue with me. Here is our exchange. And keep an eye out for some thoughts on it all coming soon from Girl w/Pen blogger Susan Bailey, too! You can learn more about Rebecca’s work here.

Deborah: In my post the other week (“Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink?”) I looked back at the history of arguing “enough about girls, let’s focus on boys,” to mixed effect. You make the thoughtful point that the ploy is not merely a harmless rhetorical effect. Can you elaborate?

Rebecca: In all honesty, the argument that we need to stop (“or at least pause”) the war on pink didn’t even come off as a rhetorical device to me. I’m sad to say that it just came across as ill-informed. There isn’t a war on pink; there’s a thoughtful, measured argument that while pink isn’t inherently bad, it’s limiting the play worlds and imaginations of boys and girls alike. So “Who’s Afraid of the War on Pink” reads, to me and my colleagues, like a straw man argument. The authors were conjuring up a nonexistent epidemic of myopic thinking, instead of engaging with anyone’s actual writing on the subject of girl culture and the rise of pink. I expect better from our esteemed colleagues in masculinity studies: if they would like to engage with those of us working in girlhood studies, and perhaps learn from our successes (we’re happy to share what we’ve learned), that would be terrific–they just need to demonstrate that they’ve read at least some of our work so that we can have a meaningful conversation.

Besides, straw-man arguments strike me as more problematic coming from a feminist academic blog like Girl w/Pen than, say, an anti-feminist source like Christina Hoff Sommers. (A case of “the medium is the message,” perhaps?)

Deborah: Tell us a bit about your book that’s coming out next fall, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (Source Books, 2014). Is there any way in which you think girls can be active agents in princess play? In what ways do you hope your book will steer popular debate? And what do you most want to change?

Rebecca: Thanks for asking. The Princess Problem is really a handbook for parents to raise media-literate daughters–girls who are able to think critically about marketing, the beauty ideal, gender stereotypes, and race representation. This is an important task for 21st-century parents: We must coach our children, guiding them to become critical viewers of media culture in general. And yet media literacy is not something that’s a mainstream concept yet in the U.S.; many other countries include media literacy in their K-12 curricula, but that’s not the case here. I’d like that to change.

I focus in my book on princess culture in particular because “princess” is so pervasive–it’s THE defining pop culture phenomenon in early girlhood. And it’s the perfect example to use in a text on raising media literate girls because the issues we need to discuss with our daughters so often differ from than the issues we would discuss with our sons. (For example, body image issues are a very different beast when it comes to girls and boys.) But the principles I teach in The Princess Problem could easily be extrapolated to raising media-literate sons, too.

And yes, I absolutely believe girls can be active agents in princess play. Kids are not passive victims of media and toys; they’re active consumers who regularly defy our assumptions. That’s a position I’ve espoused in some of my earlier work–for example, my study of girls and Bratz dolls.

It’s important to note, then, that in The Princess Problem, my goal is not to persuade girls that princesses are bad or to “de-princess” them; rather, it is to help parents help their girls reason become critical viewers who can see that there are many, many ways to be a girl.

Deborah: I loved your recent post at Sociological Images (“When Cowboys Wore Pink”), where you concluded, “Monochromatic girlhood drives a wedge between boys and girls — separating their spheres during a time when cross-sex play is healthy and desirable, and when their imaginations should run free.” Some of our Brave Girls Alliance colleagues have created incredible alternatives. From where you stand, what do you see as some of the most exciting challenges to the children’s industrial complex as we know it?

Rebecca: The Let Toys Be Toys movement is doing terrific work challenging the status quo in the UK. By calling for toys to be desegregated–grouped by theme or interest type, rather than by gender—they’re empowering parents and children to think outside of the pink and blue boxes that marketers have been placing children into. I’d really love to see a comparable movement here in the U.S. and Canada. With folks like Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals, Michele Yulo of Princess Free Zone, and Ines Almeida of Toward the Stars raising so much consciousness about the limitations that today’s marketing foists upon kids of both sexes, it’s the right time.

I’d like to see a movement that goes one step further, too, and challenges marketers to put an end to the incessant pink-washing. By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink–it’s a perfectly nice color–but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors.

Pink-washing is unfair to our boys, as well: I just heard from a mom the other day whose two-year-old son wanted a toy shopping cart for his third birthday.  All she could find at her local Toys R Us was a pink cart. She bought it anyway–but she knows that the adult men in her family are likely to think it’s weird (which is a shame). But, come on; have you ever seen a real shopping cart in pink? I haven’t. I doubt they exist. Pink-washing toys that have no good reason to be pink–that would be considered gender-neutral if they were not–perpetuates so many retrograde stereotypes about sex roles, it’s offensive.

Deborah: When GoldieBlox, a company initially celebrated for its creation of a toy designed to foster girls’ interest in engineering, ultimately disappointed many of us by slapping a princess narrative on it, it seemed challenging, at the time, to articulate a position that both acknowledged the step in the right direction and pushed for more.  (My feeble attempt posted here.) In the war between industry and better alternatives, is it always necessary, do you think, to choose sides? How do we measure progress in a world half-transformed?

Rebecca: I prefer to think of it as a dialogue rather than a war. I don’t want to fight companies; I want to hold them accountable and ask them to do better. Companies have so many stakeholders to work with that they often don’t realize that they are perpetuating gender biases. If they receive constructive criticism from enough parents and advocates, though, they can create better offerings.

Unfortunately, the world is indeed half-transformed in these matters, and it’s often a case of one step forward, two steps back. For example, we can look at Disney’s films and see that slowly but surely, their representations of race and gender have been improving with time. I believe that their efforts at racial inclusivity and empowered female characters signal that they’ve been paying attention to their critics over the years. The problem is that in a behemoth company like Disney, change comes very slowly; and their own Consumer Products Division isn’t keeping pace with the positive changes within the Studios division.

So when it comes to the toys, we’re seeing the same old stale ideas about what’s “princessly,” or stereotypically feminine–even when the products are based on innovative new on-screen characters. That was certainly the case with Disney’s Consumer Products Division’s horrible redesign of Merida last year: she was strong on screen, per Pixar’s wishes; but as her look didn’t “fit” with the existing high-glamour Disney Princess brand, Disney’s Consumer Products Division made several changes to Merida’s looks (see posts here, here and here), undercutting everything parents and kids loved about Merida. What a conundrum.

Deborah: It’s a conundrum indeed. Frozen, anyone? I’m already wondering how princessly those Anna and Elsa action figures will be.

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I’ve been struck lately by the polarities that sometimes infuse popular feminist debate around gender, childhood, and toys. On multiple fronts.

CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges’ post here last week, controversially titled “Stop the War on Pink—Let’s Take a Look at Boys’ Toys,” sparked a minor bruhaha in popular feminist circles. In their title, and in their post, Pascoe and Bridges used a rhetorical technique that my colleagues at The OpEd Project call “the refocus.” While it seemed to me that their stance of “enough about pink already” could be read as a foil, and a way into their argument, others, like media studies professor and author Rebecca Hains, rightly took issue.  “Does the ‘War on Pink’ Need to Stop for Boys’ Sakes? No, and Here’s Why,” the title of a post by Hains, in response, stated.

Ultimately, as a brief exchange over at Facebook made clear, all parties stand on the same side of the issues here and believe boys and girls all deserve a wider rainbow of options. We agreed a forum didn’t make sense, since it would consist primarily of head nodding. We may disagree on the effective use of certain rhetorical tactics. But we all agree on a similar flavor of change.

Still, it stayed with me. As someone obsessed by the way feminist history repeats, it got me thinking about the past.

There’s a long history to the so-called boy versus girl advocacy in the popular realm. When conservative critic Christina Hoff Sommers came out with The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men in 2001, the very title made me cringe. While willing to be persuaded that boys, in fact, had problems, I saw zero correlation between their issues and “misguided feminism,” however one defined that phrase. Sommers maintained that the so-called “girl crisis” (her term) had led to changes in schools, politics, and parenting that had a horrible cost for boys, who allegedly became even more at risk, as a result.  Interestingly, the book was reissued in 2013 with the “Feminism” of the subtitle changed to “Policies” instead.

But back in 2001, egged on by Sommers’ barb, feminists took the bait. Many responded with what seemed to me the wise yet obvious retort that the war for healthier childhood was not about the girls versus the boys, and that feminists (doh) were not to blame.  I was as indignant as the rest that Sommers, who registered as a scholar, had stooped to such a ploy. I remember thinking, did she really believe some of the things she wrote and said? Whether she did or whether she was using rhetoric to magnify her point, for all the attention given her book, it was an effective, if maddening, ruse.

Much has changed in the 13 years since Sommers’ controversial title first made waves. The field of girls studies has grown exponentially, built on an incredible foundation laid down by the field’s early architects (Girl w/Pen’s own Susan Bailey among them). The field of masculinity studies has deepened and widened, too.  In 2014, those advocating for boys and those advocating for girls are no longer in opposition.  Or at least, we shouldn’t be. Right?

As is often the case on the Internets, a forum as enriching as it can be problematic, when I find myself agreeing with both “sides” of an alleged debate, nodding “yes” to parties who somehow find themselves on opposing divides, my instinct is to bring them together.

Watch for a dialogue between me and Rebecca Hains–-as well as more Manly Musings from CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges–all coming to this space very soon.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @deborahgirlwpen, join me on Facebook, and subscribe to my quarterly newsletter to keep posted on my coaching workshops and offerings, writings, and talks.

I just returned from the National Women’s Studies Association Conference feeling inspired and energized. (There’s so much amazing work that I can barely stand it!) Two panels in particular spoke to an issue that I think about a great deal: how can we bridge the various kinds of feminist work going on in different places?

Ileana Jiménez spoke about how to bridge women’s and gender studies in high school and university classrooms at a visionary session moderated by Patti Provance and featuring an amazing lineup: Stephanie Troutman (Berea College), Rachel Seidman (whose Duke University undergraduate students in her Women in the Public Sphere class started the Who Needs Feminism? campaign), and Jiménez, who has been publicly sharing her work as a high school feminist teacher and advocating for social justice education for over fifteen years.

Jiménez talked about “breaking down the silos” of K-12 and university classrooms, which really resonated with me on multiple levels. As a women’s and gender studies professor and a former high school teacher, I’ve felt for a long time that we should collectively think about social justice education in middle and high school, a focus of the recent AAUW Gender Studies Symposium. I’ve been following Jiménez’s work for a while, and it was inspiring to hear her as well as Seidman and Troutman, all of whom are working in innovative ways to break down educational borders.

To move to the boundaries of geography: I had the honor of presenting on a panel with Alicia Catharine Decker (Purdue University), who talked about the development of women’s and gender studies in Morocco and Uganda. Decker’s close analysis of the histories of these two programs suggested some interesting differences in disciplinary focus, a theme that emerged in my own comparison of women’s and gender studies in Africa and North America. (A third panelist, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, was unfortunately unable to present her research on women’s and gender studies in Uganda.) Our panel suggested the possibility of mutually beneficial collaborations that might come out of future conversations between women’s and gender studies teacher-activists based in Africa and the U.S.

As Jiménez put it so eloquently: feminists must break out of our individual silos in order to create a larger movement for social change. I’d only add that we must understand the larger landscape—both our own location as well as others’—in order to cross borders and figure out how each of us can work best with one another.