In response to Katka’s request, while I don’t yet have pix of Friday’s event, I DO have this one of my friend Andrea’s little girl Grace reading a book, taken at my apartment yesterday. A girl-write-now of the future!
girls
On Dec. 5, the Centers for Disease Control reported that, after 14 years of decline, the birthrate for women between the ages of 15 and 19 had increased. In 2006, there were 41.9 births for every 1,000 girls in that age range, a 3% rise from 2005.
Why has the teenage birthrate increased after years of decline? Experts are trying to figure it out (experts–please post?) but in the meantime, check out Saturday’s op-ed from Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times. Writes Daum, after some interesting meditations (which I related to) on being in high school in the 1980s,
Some experts say it’s because condoms are not quite the must-have item they once were now that AIDS is increasingly being perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. But I also have to wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, pregnancy is just not as frightening to the current crop of teens as it was to past generations. Considering that kids have been forced to think in a very real way about things that can actually kill you, like terrorist attacks and school shootings and, yes, HIV infection, getting pregnant — and even raising a child — might seem like a lesser inconvenience. As for embarrassment, these are kids who post their diaries on MySpace. Do we really expect them to abstain because they’re afraid of gossip?
Thoughts?
My piece on the Disney movie “Enchanted” is now up over at the Women’s Media Center. Here’s a little addendum to that piece, to leave with you with this weekend:
Everyone’s singing the praises of Amy Adams, who plays the fluttery protagonist, Giselle. I loved her performance in Junebug (where, as Roger Ebert reminds us, she tells her snake of a husband: “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.”) And while Adams herself is entirely enchanting in Enchanted, truth be told, what enchanted me more was the two-minute JC Penney commercial from Saatchi & Saatchi that ran just before the film.
The Penney spot is called “Aviator.†John Lennon’s “Real Love†plays in the background as a bespectacled, determined little girl gets the ultimate revenge on the neighborhood bullies by transforming herself from local outcast to local hero by using her imagination and ingenuity. As AdWeek aptly describes it, the spot opens with her quietly drawing a picture about traveling to the North Pole on her porch when the boys of the ‘hood pelt her with water balloons. She runs inside to dry her picture with a blow dryer and then begins on a construction project. Riding her Big Wheel back and forth from a neighbor who supplies her with materials, she begins to build her “secret” project. The boys are soon intrigued and serve as her bodyguards. When she is finally ready to debut her creation, the entire neighborhood has gathered for the unveiling. She’s built a rocket-like “North Pole Voyager.” And the boys end up saluting her. The spot ends with the on-screen tagline, “Today’s the day to believe.” Ok, so it’s a gosh darn Christmas ad from JC Penney. But I’m telling you, it made me teary. See for yourself, above.
So I’ll be posting in this space as an official part of the Daring Book for Girls blogtour on Sunday, but I’ve been thinking a lot, as I read the book and saw Enchanted this weekend and subsequently checked out Disney’s new site for the movie, about the digital playground available to girls. For an astounding contrast, check this out:
Kikistrike and the Irregulars v. Princess Nation.
The Kiki Strike site is based on a book series created by Kirsten Miller. In the series (according to the LJ review), Ananka Fishbein, a seventh grader at an expensive New York City school, wakes up one Saturday morning and finds that the small park across the street has become a sinkhole, and her decision to explore it transforms her existence. She meets the mysterious Kiki Strike, and subsequently the group of girls (each with a particular talent) who call themselves the Irregulars, and they embark on an adventure that involves exploring the Shadow City, a series of tunnels under Manhattan. The series is filled with international politics and intrigue, and chapter endings are punctuated with selections from Ananka’s guidebook on essential skills. Says LJ, “Kiki Strike celebrates the courage and daring of seemingly ordinary girls, and it will thrill those who long for adventure and excitement while they impatiently await the next installment.”
And then there’s Princess Nation, sponsored by wedding dress designer site Vera Wang. And a sponsor, in turn, of Disney’s Enchanted. I’ll leave it to you to explore, but I’m sure you can guess what the site’s goal is. Sigh.
(Thanks to Marco for the heads up on Kiki.)
I’m not a mom of a girl, so perhaps my take on this is off. But I really dig The Daring Book for Girls. Though that’s just the point, argues Judith Warner at Domestic Disturbances (and, echoing her, Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet). What’s cool to Gen Xers is too cool for school to their progeny. But I’m voting girls will dig it. Has anyone test-driven the book with girls yet? I’d be eager to hear the results!
Meanwhile, judge for yourself. There’s an excerpt from the book and a video of the authors’ Today Show appearance here. And a listing of other upcoming appearances and events here.
(I’ll be posting more fully on my response to the book in December, as part of the book’s blog tour.)
Check it out! The Daring Book for Girls now has an accompanying must-see video.
CONGRATS and heartfelt kudos to Miriam and Andi, the ingenius authors, who are also the women behind the ingenius blog tour community known as MotherTalk. This book is going to kill. In fact, already is, at #132 on Amazon, and it’s not even out yet! I’ll be blogging about it in December, as part of their blog tour. And I’m dreaming up other ways to help them get ink too–because they so deserve it. Well done, ladies.
For anyone remotely skeptical, here’s the book description, straight from their website:
THE DARING BOOK FOR GIRLS is the manual for everything that girls need to know –– and that doesn’t mean sewing buttonholes! Whether it’s female heroes in history, secret note–passing skills, science projects, friendship bracelets, double dutch, cats cradle, the perfect cartwheel or the eternal mystery of what boys are thinking, this book has it all. But it’s not just a guide to giggling at sleepovers –– although that’s included, of course! Whether readers consider themselves tomboys, girly–girls, or a little bit of both, this book is every girl’s invitation to adventure.
The authors’ appearances–including a spot on The Today Show on Oct. 31–are posted here. Spread the word!
I love it when all things converge. New York Times columnist and writing teacher extraordinaire Verlyn Klinkenborg recently wrote a rather poignant reflection on young women writers and authority. Tonight I’m headed to the Girls Write Now friendraiser. And this week the Woodhull Institute has online modules up on “Your Authentic Voice and Advocacy” over at the Dove Real Women, Real Success Stories site. To honor said convergences, I’m posting a long expert from the dear ole Verlyn here:
I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is …â€
Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?
Another young woman at the table asked — this is a bald translation — won’t that make us seem too tough, too masculine? I could see the subtext in her face: who will love us if we’re like that? I’ve heard other young women, with more experience, ask this question in a way that means, Won’t the world punish us for being too sure of ourselves?….
These are poignant questions, and they always give me pause, because they allow me to see, as nothing else does, the cultural frame these young women have grown up in. I can hear them questioning the very nature of their perceptions, doubting the evidence of their senses, distrusting the clarity of their thoughts….I’m always struck by how well fitted these young women are to be writers, if only there weren’t also something within them saying, Who cares what you notice? Who authorized you? Don’t you owe someone an apology?….But whenever I see this transformation — a young woman suddenly understanding the power of her perceptions, ready to look at the world unapologetically — I realize how much has been lost because of the culture of polite, self-negating silence in which they were raised.
(Thank you, Lori, for the heads up.)
As Marco noted below, I was slated to speak on MSNBC this afternoon and got bumped. So instead, I’m posting some of my thoughts about the YouTube video of two middle-school girls fighting in a school locker room here and will just pretend that I said them on tv. (Sorry Mom, false alarm!)
As an astute observer noted in response to a previous girl fight also posted on YouTube, meanness and occasional violence among teenage girls is nothing new. The voyeurism around it is. American culture is obsessed with the girlfight—-think about the popular obsession with female mud-wrestling. Images of grown women fighting are often sexualized, staged, and designed to scintillate. Like porn. The girls are getting younger. And the fights are getting real.
But what’s really new (again, with homage to said astute observer) is the speed with which actual bad behavior is becoming entertainment. All it takes is a click of a phone. Notice that the girl who shot the clip with the camera on her cell phone made no attempt to break the fight or run to get adult help. Maybe she thought she was watching reality tv. Whatever the case, she was a spectator. Just like the thousands of spectators who then viewed the clip on YouTube. And the tv viewers (like me) who stared in awe as FOX News rolled the clip over and over again this morning on the air.
The YouTube clip is part of a trend. There are entire sites now, like www.girlfightsdump.com and www.fightdump.com, virtual repositories of girls behaving badly. I’m terrified at the way this has become entertainment. The violence in the video is scary. And so is the Cleveland school shooting for which I got bumped.
(An early plug for my friend Jessie Klein’s excellent book on school shootings, coming from Rutgers UP. The book, The Gender Police, focuses on boys. But Jessie has a chapter on girl fighting, too. Thank you, Jessie, for prepping me today. This post’s for you.)
Suggestion: for a quick, deep glimpse into the heart of the beast, go for half-hour treadmill workout at your local gym where you can gaze at a battery of overhead flatscreen TVs, each tuned to a different channel.
A random sequence of images from this morning’s visit:
—an endlessly repeated video clip of a vicious girl fight in a high school locker room
—a promo for the Bionic Woman (much running, jumping, drop-kicking of bad-guys)
—a music video of Jennifer Lopez beating the crap out of more bad-guys in a brothel or something, setting an example for the oppressed sistahs
—a Hummer barrels menacingly towards the viewer through a nighttime wilderness, scaring off would-be attackers (wolves, scorpions); in a second ad the Hummer is shown from a gamer’s POV, barreling into a morphing sequence of rough terrains (desert, arctic, tundra).
— yet another news story on a private “security” firm killing more civilians in Iraq, two women shot dead in their car
What seems to be the signal cutting through all the media noise? Is it that it’s OK now for women to be violent, because, hey, we all get to watch, while men have ramped up to the next level and gone invisible (and unaccountable), inside our all-terrain, obstacle-and-reality-proof paramilitary vehicles? We can’t be sure. But let wolves, scorpions, the environment and helpless civilians beware.
[UPDATE: Deborah Siegel was originally slated to appear on MSNBC this afternoon to comment on the Ohio middle school girl fight video mentioned above, but the story was preempted by the tragic school shooting in Cleveland. With shock and sadness we recognize that the two events are part of a broader ongoing crisis — rage and violence amidst our children — which seems to compound itself day by day. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims in Cleveland and their families.]
Now I know the good folks of Ratify ERA Florida are well intentioned. But the description of this “Hillary” doll that appears on their website is a bit…much:
This is the exclusive, celebrated President doll with the shirt that thrills us all, seen enlarged. You will not find “Hillary†anywhere else. She is 15 inches tall, finely-made, soft and completely undressable.
Meanwhile, the not-so-good folks at Walmart had a different objection:
“Hillary†announces that “Someday a Woman will be President” on her shirt that Wal-Mart banned from its shelves. They claim that having a woman in the White House “is against ‘Family Values’ “. We think it is most timely and just perfect.
Yeah, ok, I’ll give it to them there.
On Dec. 5, the Centers for Disease Control reported that, after 14 years of decline, the birthrate for women between the ages of 15 and 19 had increased. In 2006, there were 41.9 births for every 1,000 girls in that age range, a 3% rise from 2005.
Why has the teenage birthrate increased after years of decline? Experts are trying to figure it out (experts–please post?) but in the meantime, check out Saturday’s op-ed from Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times. Writes Daum, after some interesting meditations (which I related to) on being in high school in the 1980s,
Some experts say it’s because condoms are not quite the must-have item they once were now that AIDS is increasingly being perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. But I also have to wonder if, in the grand scheme of things, pregnancy is just not as frightening to the current crop of teens as it was to past generations. Considering that kids have been forced to think in a very real way about things that can actually kill you, like terrorist attacks and school shootings and, yes, HIV infection, getting pregnant — and even raising a child — might seem like a lesser inconvenience. As for embarrassment, these are kids who post their diaries on MySpace. Do we really expect them to abstain because they’re afraid of gossip?
Thoughts?
My piece on the Disney movie “Enchanted” is now up over at the Women’s Media Center. Here’s a little addendum to that piece, to leave with you with this weekend:
Everyone’s singing the praises of Amy Adams, who plays the fluttery protagonist, Giselle. I loved her performance in Junebug (where, as Roger Ebert reminds us, she tells her snake of a husband: “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.”) And while Adams herself is entirely enchanting in Enchanted, truth be told, what enchanted me more was the two-minute JC Penney commercial from Saatchi & Saatchi that ran just before the film.
The Penney spot is called “Aviator.†John Lennon’s “Real Love†plays in the background as a bespectacled, determined little girl gets the ultimate revenge on the neighborhood bullies by transforming herself from local outcast to local hero by using her imagination and ingenuity. As AdWeek aptly describes it, the spot opens with her quietly drawing a picture about traveling to the North Pole on her porch when the boys of the ‘hood pelt her with water balloons. She runs inside to dry her picture with a blow dryer and then begins on a construction project. Riding her Big Wheel back and forth from a neighbor who supplies her with materials, she begins to build her “secret” project. The boys are soon intrigued and serve as her bodyguards. When she is finally ready to debut her creation, the entire neighborhood has gathered for the unveiling. She’s built a rocket-like “North Pole Voyager.” And the boys end up saluting her. The spot ends with the on-screen tagline, “Today’s the day to believe.” Ok, so it’s a gosh darn Christmas ad from JC Penney. But I’m telling you, it made me teary. See for yourself, above.
So I’ll be posting in this space as an official part of the Daring Book for Girls blogtour on Sunday, but I’ve been thinking a lot, as I read the book and saw Enchanted this weekend and subsequently checked out Disney’s new site for the movie, about the digital playground available to girls. For an astounding contrast, check this out:
Kikistrike and the Irregulars v. Princess Nation.
The Kiki Strike site is based on a book series created by Kirsten Miller. In the series (according to the LJ review), Ananka Fishbein, a seventh grader at an expensive New York City school, wakes up one Saturday morning and finds that the small park across the street has become a sinkhole, and her decision to explore it transforms her existence. She meets the mysterious Kiki Strike, and subsequently the group of girls (each with a particular talent) who call themselves the Irregulars, and they embark on an adventure that involves exploring the Shadow City, a series of tunnels under Manhattan. The series is filled with international politics and intrigue, and chapter endings are punctuated with selections from Ananka’s guidebook on essential skills. Says LJ, “Kiki Strike celebrates the courage and daring of seemingly ordinary girls, and it will thrill those who long for adventure and excitement while they impatiently await the next installment.”
And then there’s Princess Nation, sponsored by wedding dress designer site Vera Wang. And a sponsor, in turn, of Disney’s Enchanted. I’ll leave it to you to explore, but I’m sure you can guess what the site’s goal is. Sigh.
(Thanks to Marco for the heads up on Kiki.)
I’m not a mom of a girl, so perhaps my take on this is off. But I really dig The Daring Book for Girls. Though that’s just the point, argues Judith Warner at Domestic Disturbances (and, echoing her, Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet). What’s cool to Gen Xers is too cool for school to their progeny. But I’m voting girls will dig it. Has anyone test-driven the book with girls yet? I’d be eager to hear the results!
Meanwhile, judge for yourself. There’s an excerpt from the book and a video of the authors’ Today Show appearance here. And a listing of other upcoming appearances and events here.
(I’ll be posting more fully on my response to the book in December, as part of the book’s blog tour.)
Check it out! The Daring Book for Girls now has an accompanying must-see video.
CONGRATS and heartfelt kudos to Miriam and Andi, the ingenius authors, who are also the women behind the ingenius blog tour community known as MotherTalk. This book is going to kill. In fact, already is, at #132 on Amazon, and it’s not even out yet! I’ll be blogging about it in December, as part of their blog tour. And I’m dreaming up other ways to help them get ink too–because they so deserve it. Well done, ladies.
For anyone remotely skeptical, here’s the book description, straight from their website:
THE DARING BOOK FOR GIRLS is the manual for everything that girls need to know –– and that doesn’t mean sewing buttonholes! Whether it’s female heroes in history, secret note–passing skills, science projects, friendship bracelets, double dutch, cats cradle, the perfect cartwheel or the eternal mystery of what boys are thinking, this book has it all. But it’s not just a guide to giggling at sleepovers –– although that’s included, of course! Whether readers consider themselves tomboys, girly–girls, or a little bit of both, this book is every girl’s invitation to adventure.
The authors’ appearances–including a spot on The Today Show on Oct. 31–are posted here. Spread the word!
I love it when all things converge. New York Times columnist and writing teacher extraordinaire Verlyn Klinkenborg recently wrote a rather poignant reflection on young women writers and authority. Tonight I’m headed to the Girls Write Now friendraiser. And this week the Woodhull Institute has online modules up on “Your Authentic Voice and Advocacy” over at the Dove Real Women, Real Success Stories site. To honor said convergences, I’m posting a long expert from the dear ole Verlyn here:
I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is …â€
Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?
Another young woman at the table asked — this is a bald translation — won’t that make us seem too tough, too masculine? I could see the subtext in her face: who will love us if we’re like that? I’ve heard other young women, with more experience, ask this question in a way that means, Won’t the world punish us for being too sure of ourselves?….
These are poignant questions, and they always give me pause, because they allow me to see, as nothing else does, the cultural frame these young women have grown up in. I can hear them questioning the very nature of their perceptions, doubting the evidence of their senses, distrusting the clarity of their thoughts….I’m always struck by how well fitted these young women are to be writers, if only there weren’t also something within them saying, Who cares what you notice? Who authorized you? Don’t you owe someone an apology?….But whenever I see this transformation — a young woman suddenly understanding the power of her perceptions, ready to look at the world unapologetically — I realize how much has been lost because of the culture of polite, self-negating silence in which they were raised.
(Thank you, Lori, for the heads up.)
As Marco noted below, I was slated to speak on MSNBC this afternoon and got bumped. So instead, I’m posting some of my thoughts about the YouTube video of two middle-school girls fighting in a school locker room here and will just pretend that I said them on tv. (Sorry Mom, false alarm!)
As an astute observer noted in response to a previous girl fight also posted on YouTube, meanness and occasional violence among teenage girls is nothing new. The voyeurism around it is. American culture is obsessed with the girlfight—-think about the popular obsession with female mud-wrestling. Images of grown women fighting are often sexualized, staged, and designed to scintillate. Like porn. The girls are getting younger. And the fights are getting real.
But what’s really new (again, with homage to said astute observer) is the speed with which actual bad behavior is becoming entertainment. All it takes is a click of a phone. Notice that the girl who shot the clip with the camera on her cell phone made no attempt to break the fight or run to get adult help. Maybe she thought she was watching reality tv. Whatever the case, she was a spectator. Just like the thousands of spectators who then viewed the clip on YouTube. And the tv viewers (like me) who stared in awe as FOX News rolled the clip over and over again this morning on the air.
The YouTube clip is part of a trend. There are entire sites now, like www.girlfightsdump.com and www.fightdump.com, virtual repositories of girls behaving badly. I’m terrified at the way this has become entertainment. The violence in the video is scary. And so is the Cleveland school shooting for which I got bumped.
(An early plug for my friend Jessie Klein’s excellent book on school shootings, coming from Rutgers UP. The book, The Gender Police, focuses on boys. But Jessie has a chapter on girl fighting, too. Thank you, Jessie, for prepping me today. This post’s for you.)
Suggestion: for a quick, deep glimpse into the heart of the beast, go for half-hour treadmill workout at your local gym where you can gaze at a battery of overhead flatscreen TVs, each tuned to a different channel.
A random sequence of images from this morning’s visit:
—an endlessly repeated video clip of a vicious girl fight in a high school locker room
—a promo for the Bionic Woman (much running, jumping, drop-kicking of bad-guys)
—a music video of Jennifer Lopez beating the crap out of more bad-guys in a brothel or something, setting an example for the oppressed sistahs
—a Hummer barrels menacingly towards the viewer through a nighttime wilderness, scaring off would-be attackers (wolves, scorpions); in a second ad the Hummer is shown from a gamer’s POV, barreling into a morphing sequence of rough terrains (desert, arctic, tundra).
— yet another news story on a private “security” firm killing more civilians in Iraq, two women shot dead in their car
What seems to be the signal cutting through all the media noise? Is it that it’s OK now for women to be violent, because, hey, we all get to watch, while men have ramped up to the next level and gone invisible (and unaccountable), inside our all-terrain, obstacle-and-reality-proof paramilitary vehicles? We can’t be sure. But let wolves, scorpions, the environment and helpless civilians beware.
[UPDATE: Deborah Siegel was originally slated to appear on MSNBC this afternoon to comment on the Ohio middle school girl fight video mentioned above, but the story was preempted by the tragic school shooting in Cleveland. With shock and sadness we recognize that the two events are part of a broader ongoing crisis — rage and violence amidst our children — which seems to compound itself day by day. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims in Cleveland and their families.]
Now I know the good folks of Ratify ERA Florida are well intentioned. But the description of this “Hillary” doll that appears on their website is a bit…much:
This is the exclusive, celebrated President doll with the shirt that thrills us all, seen enlarged. You will not find “Hillary†anywhere else. She is 15 inches tall, finely-made, soft and completely undressable.
Meanwhile, the not-so-good folks at Walmart had a different objection:
“Hillary†announces that “Someday a Woman will be President” on her shirt that Wal-Mart banned from its shelves. They claim that having a woman in the White House “is against ‘Family Values’ “. We think it is most timely and just perfect.
Yeah, ok, I’ll give it to them there.
