sexism

Thanks to University of Wisconsin – Madison researchers for another study that says girls can do math!

We’ve been here before. I’m not blaming them. This research needed to be done. I wish it didn’t. But it does. This study does not only address if girls can do math or not, but it also addresses the frequent “solution” to helping girls do well in math and science — single-gender education.

From the conclusions of the paper:

[W]e conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses.

In other words, the gap we see between girls and boys math ability is due to society and culture. “[T]hese major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries – and that these factors can be changed.”

It is not due to some mystery math gene on the Y-chromosome (greater male variability), not due to more boys having access to math classes (inequity), not due to separating boys from girls nor is it due to some mystery about Muslim culture. The last one is the most odd theory some people cling in order to not see that gender equity in society has an effect on girls and math performance. It was in Freakanomics. Essentially it goes like this: Since girls in Muslim societies have little equity, but they do awesome in math, feminism/gender equity has nothing to do with girls doing math.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population. [cite]

The Muslim society theory depends on the strength of single-gender classroom theory. Kane and Mertz also debunks this beloved theory on how to combat the lack of girls in math and science. Other studies have tried to debunk the single-gender classroom/school theory by pointing out that most single-gender schools have smaller classrooms. I only say “try” because some people have ignored them.

Last month my office co-sponsored a Girls and Computer Science Day for high school girls. During the lunch Q&A panel where some of our undergraduate and graduate women in CS talked about how awesome our CS department is, I chimed in. I told the girls that our quest to see more girls in CS is not merely a pro-girl movement, rather it is a movement to ensure that we have as many heads at that table as possible when solving problems our world is facing. I don’t do my job just to get girls and women into science and engineering to get the numbers up. Rather women and girls add something to the process of how science and engineering is done. It is not that women do better science, but with women at the table, science is better. Kane and Mertz sum it up pretty well in their concluding remarks:

Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology.

Now that we’ve settled these questions, let’s get back in the lab and get some science done, shall we?

I respect that some of you are anti-vaccines–or just anti-Gardasil—but I hope that some Girl with Pen readers will join me in cheering what I consider a better-late-than-never decision by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It has officially recommended that boys and men ages 13-to-21 be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted disease HPV (human papillomavirus) to protect from anal and throat cancers.

There are many reasons this makes good sense. As I wrote in the Winter 2010 issue of Ms., there’s overwhelming evidence that HPV can lead to deadly oral, anal and penile cancers–all of which affect men and all of which are collectively responsible for twice as many deaths in the U.S. each year as cervical cancer. However, vaccines are a touchy topic, and I want to be clear that I’m not advocating in favor of or against anyone’s decision to get an HPV vaccination. I do strongly advocate for boys and girls, men and women, to have equal access to Gardasil and any other FDA-approved vaccine. Private insurers are required to cover HPV vaccines for girls and young women with no co-pay under the 2010 health reform legislation, and with this decision, that coverage requirement will extend to boys and young men, effective one year after the date of the recommendation. And, whether or not you or your loved ones get vaccinated against HPV, we will all benefit from more vaccinations, considering the extent of this sexually transmitted epidemic/pandemic, which affects as many as 75 percent of adult Americans and can be spread by skin-to-skin genital or oral contact (yes, that includes “French kissing”).

However, the media coverage of the recommendation includes a line of reasoning that I, as a sexual health educator and researcher, find offensive, ignorant, and inaccurate. The New York Times wrote: “Many of the cancers in men result from homosexual sex.” Really? What counts as “homosexual sex”? Most public health experts and HIV/AIDS researchers view “homosexuality” primarily as a sexual orientation, sometimes as a social or political identity, but not as a type of intercourse. Anyone who studies U.S. sexual norms knows that oral sex and anal sex–the behaviors cited as increasing risks of HPV-related oral and anal cancers–are not restricted to men who have sex with men. In fact, the NYT article itself asserts, “A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex” –so you don’t have to identify as a “homosexual” man to be at risk; you don’t even have to be a man.

Nevertheless, the New York Times goes on to muse that “vaccinating homosexual boys would be far more cost effective than vaccinating all boys, since the burden of disease is far higher in homosexuals.” Thankfully, the author also thought to check this idea with a member of the CDC committee, who seemed to grasp the ethical and practical challenges of making a recommendation based on a boy’s or man’s “homosexuality.” Kristen R. Ehresmann, Minnesota Department of Health and ACIP member, is quoted as cautioning, “But it’s not necessarily effective or perhaps even appropriate to be making those determinations at the 11- to 12-year-old age.”

Still stuck on the question of sexual orientation, that NYT author seeks to console potentially “uncomfortable” parents of boys by reassuring them that “vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.” So, is the message, if you don’t want to imagine your son having oral or anal sex with a male partner, then you can focus on the public health service you are providing for girls and women who have male partners?

Instead of contributing to a homophobic panic, I thought it might be helpful to field a few frequently-asked-questions:

Q: Do you have to have a cervix to benefit from the “cervical cancer” vaccine? A: No. Despite its early branding, Gardasil has always been an HPV vaccine. Physiologically speaking, boys and men could have been benefiting from the vaccine since its initial FDA approval.

Q: Why are they recommending vaccinations for girls and boys as young as 11? A: Vaccines only work if given before contact with the virus. Reliable data on age of first “French” kiss is not available, but recent surveys show that about 25 percent of girls and boys in the U.S. have had penile-vaginal intercourse before their 15th birthdays.

Q: Are you too old to benefit? A: If you have not yet been exposed to all four of the HPV strains covered by Gardasil, then you can still gain protection. The more challenging question is: How would you know? The only ways to test for HPV (and then HPV type) is by tissue samples being sent to a lab. Most HPV infections are asymptomatic.

Q: What’s the risk of not getting vaccinated? A: We know that U.S. cervical cancer rates have dramatically decreased in recent decades due to improvements in screening, such as the Pap smear, and better treatment options. However, rates of HPV-related oral and anal cancers are reported to be increasing–and our screening options for these types of cancers are not as effective, affordable or accessible as those for cervical cancer.

Q: So, what can an unvaccinated person do to protect him/herself from a cancer-causing strain of HPV? A: Abstain from behaviors that can transmit the virus, such as deep/open-mouthed kissing, and use barrier methods when engaging in vaginal, anal or oral sex.

If this last answer strikes you as unreasonable, then mobilize your political energies to advocate for increased funding for HPV research. We need and deserve better ways to be tested and treated for the types of HPV that have been linked to serious and potentially fatal cancers. And, as my own research has shown, we have to get rid of the harmful stigma surrounding HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. We need to stop linking STDs to immorality. You can help by making sure your community supports medically accurate, age-appropriate sexuality education. And if you or a loved one wants more information about sexual health, then check out these free online resources.

(Originally posted on Ms. blog, cross-posted at AdinaNack.com)

I loved doing dot-to-dots as a child. There was something grand about linking all the tiny dots together to reveal a bigger picture. As an adult, I still love dot-to-dot, but now I attempt to link various “dots” into larger pictures that reveal cultural trends and ideologies.

This week, a number of “dots” sat scattered across my computer screen, in the form of various posts and podcasts, waiting for me to have time to more thoroughly connect them – the wonderful “Letter to Bella” post from Ms. Blog, Are Boys Natural Born Killers?, a podcast about war and gender, the “Born to Breed” interview with author Vyckie Garrison, news about JC Penney’s t-shirt “Too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me” t-shirt, and, as I am about to head off to Forks, Washington to speak at Stephenie Meyer Day, a number of Twilight related posts.

When the metaphorical dots between all these pieces are connected, the picture I am left with is one of a world that has definitely not gone “beyond pink and blue” (to borrow the title of another Girl with Pen column).

As Melissa Wardy points out in one “dot”, her post to the young Bella, “grown ups try to fit kids into little boxes that are labeled ‘Boy’ or ‘Girl’, and then they only let certain colors or ideas into each box.” As Wardy further points out, four year olds are sadly more likely to “know that girls can like or do anything boys can” than their grown up counterparts.

This claim was confirmed by heated comments in my War Literature class last evening. I had students listen to one of the dots coloring my desktop, the podcast Are Boys Natural Born Killers?, which includes Professor Joshua Goldstein, author of War and Gender, talking about the fact that boys are not “natural warriors” and that the only biological claim that seems to hold up this widely held cultural view is their propensity for more upper body strength. Though the entire podcast emphasized that gender is constructed and downplayed biological essentialism, the one comment made by Goldstein about upper body strength was latched onto. One student, for example, insisted men are built to fight whereas women are not. In this “Me Strong, You Weak” debate, I found myself thinking back to yet another dot, to the “Born to Breed” piece I had read earlier in the week.

In the piece, Vyckie Garrison, a former member of the Quiverfull movement, talks about the growing religious movement and its grounding in the belief that “the husband is the head of the household and the wife is the submissive ‘helpmeet.’” As Garrison documents, “A Quiverfull daughter is taught from a young age that her purpose in life is to serve the man whom God has placed in authority over her,” as well as to have as many children as possible. As such, “Her education is geared toward developing domestic skills–college is generally considered unnecessary and even dangerous for her spiritual well-being.”

And this brings me to Twilight, that oh-so-popular saga that has the heroine Bella (who shares no resemblance to the blue-shoe-wearing four year old feminist Bella above), giving up college to marry Edward and bear his vampire/human baby.

As I argued in my piece Wed, Bed and Bruised but Certainly Not Equal, the romanticization of sexual violence that texts like Twilight entail is part and parcel of the continuing inequality of our society. But, as lamented in “In Defense of Twilight,” this type of criticism is, like, a major bummer. The author writes: “Have you noticed Twilight gets attacked a lot? It gets attacked by men & feminists all the time & also by other fandoms. The latest thing I’ve heard is how Twilight romanticizes “domestic violence” & supports “inequality.” What a downer!” What a downer indeed. Far better to take the view enthusiastically supported by the author of the post that “It’s a love story and nothing more.”

Supportive of this enthusiastic love of love is the tendency to frame females and males as entirely opposite species, as in the post “Julia Jones Calls ‘Twilight’ Wolf Pack a Boys’ Club.” Author Brooke Tarnoff starts her gender essentialist piece with the following: “You might think you understand the plight of a woman in traditionally male-dominated fields — but none of them have anything on Julia Jones.” Suggesting that being an actress playing the lone female werewolf in an otherwise all male pack is far more heinous, say, than being the only female soldier in your regiment or than a lifetime of butting your head against the glass ceiling, Tarnoff’s piece not only brushes off male domination as something to joke about, but is also grounded in the “opposites attract” type of mentality that keeps heterosexism firmly in place.

The actress Jones, discussing her time working with the “ wolf boys club” notes “I kind of got to a place where I felt like I… know how to think like a guy,” which, Tarnoff suggests, entails learning “how gross they really are.” While admittedly this is a light piece joking about having to deal with “male talk” when one is the only female on the job, it nevertheless reflects a deeper issue – the still widely held belief that men and women naturally think, talk, and act differently – a belief that belies the social construction of gender and acts as if other markers of difference – race, class, sexuality, and so on, don’t matter.

This belief is echoed in the last weekly news story in my dot-to-dot puzzle – the JC Penny t-shirt that reads “Too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.”

Like four-year-old Bella who is told blue shoes are not for her, like the Quiverfull movement that claims men are meant to lead and women to breed, like the male student that suggested women are weak, like the Twilight texts and the surrounding fan culture that tends to frame males as “wolfish boys” and females as selfless romantics, this t-shirt echoes our continuing entrenchment in the gender binary.

Strung together, all these dots show one big, ugly patriarchal picture.

Thankfully, some of the dots – for example, the stories about the feminist actions that resulted in the JC Penney shirt being pulled, muddle this patriarchal image, making it less stable.

Let’s hope we can keep connecting the dots in order to show how everything from the gendering of children to the upswing in religious fundamentalism is colored by the sexism of our culture. Further, let’s not forget how important it is to forge our own dots — our own points of connection — so as to create a new, more inclusive societal picture for the benefit of us all.

Choices, not discrimination, deter women scientists

So read the headline that summed up a few weeks of articles, blog posts and opinion pieces on Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams’ article, Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science. And that’s the conclusion I would come to as well if I didn’t understand that you can’t examine the issue of underrepresentation of women in the sciences by comparing women and men with equal resources to each other. Because part of the issue with the lack of women in the sciences is that resources are not distributed equally.

It’s Women’s History Month and for the past few years women in the sciences has received a lot of attention during this month. First Lady Michelle Obama mentioned the shortage of women in the sciences and the Smithsonian Channel included comic books to their Women in Science programming this year. After 15 years of studying and working on this issue, if it were that easy, I’d pack it up and move on to a new puzzle to solve.

But let’s look at the “choices” Ceci and Williams claim are at the real root of the issue:

If not discrimination, what is the cause of women’s underrepresentation? Today, the dearth of women in math-based fields is related to three factors, one of which (fertility/lifestyle choices) hinders women in all fields, not just mathematical ones, whereas the others (career preferences and ability differences) impact women in math-based fields. [1] Regarding the role of math-related career preferences, adolescent girls often prefer careers focusing on people as opposed to things, and this preference accounts for their burgeoning numbers in such fields as medicine and biology, and their smaller presence in math-intensive fields such as computer science, physics, engineering, chemistry, and mathematics, even when math ability is equated. [2] Regarding the role of math-ability differences, potentially influenced by both socialization and biology, twice as many men as women are found in the top 1% of the math score distribution (e.g., SAT-M, GRE-Q). [3] The third factor influencing underrepresentation affects women in all fields: fertility choices and work-home balance issues. However, this challenge is exacerbated in math-intensive fields because the number of women is smaller to begin with. [Numbers in brackets were added by me.]

Let’s take these one at a time:

1] Career choice. Girls just like working with people better. I’ve wrestled with this issue for years. I almost bought into it too at one point, but I came to a different conclusion. Parents, educators and career/college counselors are terrible at teaching kids, boy and girls, what “good” comes from math-based careers such as computer science and engineering. For the most part, I would agree that women are attracted to careers that appear to benefit humanity. It’s easy to see that connection when one looks at medicine and biology, especially with the abundance of shows about doctors saving lives on TV almost every night. The CSI franchise is moving that view towards chemistry. Now to work on computer science! Which is why I love that my campus has a good number of women faculty members in the computer science department.

2] Are we really going to revisit the Larry Summers debate? Really? Do I really need to state again that one does not need to be a genius to be a rocket scientist? Yes, smart…but if we restricted math-based careers to just the top 1%, I think we’d have a shortage of computer scientists. Oh, wait, WE DO!

3] The fact that fertility coincides with the tenure clock is discrimination. It impacts women far greater than it does men. The fact that the academy has dragged its feet to alter the tenure system to retain intelligent women in all fields is at bare minimum biased towards a masculine way of promoting workers and thus smells like discrimination.

We can no longer hide behind the idea that women choose to do X when all the social forces in her life is choosing for her. When we settle the question of inequality with “but women choose” we let ourselves off the hook and place the entire burden on individual women. When we don’t encourage our girls to embrace their intelligence, we choose for them. When we tell them that being an engineer isn’t helping humanity, we choose for them. When a woman faces the “choice” between buckling down to get tenure versus starting her long awaited family, we choose for them.

Until women and girls can truly make free choices, we must look hard at the system we operate in and ask, “What is wrong? Where can we help women make the choice they really want versus the choice that seems to fit best?” Now that’s a choice I can stand behind.

Ask me five years ago and I’d have told you I’d be first in line to challenge gender stereotypes if ever I had kids myself.  I minored in feminist cultural studies!  I believe boys and girls are made, not just born!  But sixteen months into parenting my boy/girl twins, I’m starting to wonder how I’ll ever ensure that my boy grows up sensitive and my girl stays, as one of my favorite organizations has trained me to say, strong, brave, and bold.

It’s an unfortunate moment for complacency.  Children are boxed into hyper-gendered categories at ages younger than ever before.  Just last month, Disney infiltrated the delivery room.  New research shows that girls as young as three are internalizing the thin ideal.  As blogger Pigtail Pals reports, a study by Dr. Jennifer Harriger, published in 2010 finds that preschoolers are attributing stereotypes to others because of their weight.  The news is distressing.  Gender-aware parents can cleanse our daughters’ bedrooms of pale pink and defend a love for Tinkerbelle in our sons, yet the clutch of our pink-vs.-blue culture seems only to tighten its hold.  Why, we’re all asking, is this so?

There’s ample proof that since the utopian hope of “Free to Be You and Me” in the 1970s, as a culture we’ve slid backwards. As Peggy Orenstein documents so thoroughly and well in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie Girl Culture (reviewed here this week by Elline!), things are far worse than they were when we grew up.  The hyper-marketing of gendered purchases target kids at an increasingly vulnerable age, and it’s enough to make any parent tired.

We can blame Disney and we can fight the princesses, but perhaps two additional reasons that a generation of parents raised on feminism feels like we’re losing the war is that 1) we’re confused and 2) we’re alone.

We’re confused by “science.” Fighting gender-based discrimination has morphed into dealing with science, which carries boldfaced authority—and many feminist scientists themselves are now fighting this fight too.  Sometimes I wonder about the effects.  Have Gen X parents grown convinced of children’s innate gender sensibilities?  Decades of media stories hawking the latest in neuroscience have emphasized the nature side of the nurture debate that second-wave feminism famously upstaged.  Have the things we’ve heard about gender affected a new generation’s parenting behavior?  “The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences,” suggests neuroscientist Lise Eliot in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, (which argues, by the way, that social expectations—not biological differences—have the upper hand in shaping who our children become.)  Sensational, whiplash-inducing headlines tell us gender is inborn—no, wait, made—no, born.  Unless you’re steeped in this research, it’s often hard to know what’s what anymore.

But our biggest problem, I fear, is that when it comes to resisting the hyper-genderfication of childhood, we’re largely fighting it alone.

Over the past sixteen months, as my babies have progressed from a crawl to a walk and now to words, it’s slowly dawned on me how much the premise of my previous book, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, applies to my new situation: As parents, and especially as new parents, we don’t always feel plugged into a movement to change the larger culture in which we raise our kids.  Instead, we’re left to focus on ourselves—in this case, our familial microcosms—on our own.

To be sure, there’s a burgeoning movement out there. I’m a huge fan of initiatives like SPARK and the Geena Davis Institute and efforts to redefine girly like Pigtail Pals and of course the longstanding work of Girls Inc.  I voraciously consume every new book by educators like Lyn Mikel Brown to learn what we can do to resist (See Packaging Girlhood, Packaging Boyhood, and also the resource page at the wonderful Peggy Orenstein’s site.) But these initiatives aren’t as mainstreamed as they might be.  I can control my growing babies’ media consumption and control what comes in the house, but control only goes so far.  I fear that as a new mother, I’m long on feminist parenting ideals, short on ways to make them stick in the world outside my home.

I hear that change feels more possible once your kids hit kindergarten.  My friends there tell me that they feel successful in their attempts to provide a larger context in which it’s natural for their girl to love Star Wars and their boy to take ballet.  They feel effective.  They feel their actions span far.

In the meantime, we mothers of babes continue our preparations for the good fight by lining our children’s bookshelves with The Sissy Duckling and No I Will NOT Wear a Dress and painting our nurseries sage.  But short of a massive and visible movement—you know, like the political ones we see right now on tv—sometimes I worry.  Are we all just focusing on the equivalent of wardrobes and walls?

What do YOU think?  Do you see a new generation of parents taking on the battle against the hyper-genderfication of childhood in spades?  Is there a movement?  Or are we all basically out here on our own?  If you have strong thoughts on this either way, for a writing/blogging/thinking project I’m working on (The Pink and Blue Diaries), I’d love to hear from you.  Please email me at deborah@shewrites.com

This is the second in a series this week from Girlw/Pen writers on Stephanie Coontz‘s new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, which is a biography of Betty Friedan’s iconic book, The Feminine Mystique.

The reviews are out (more on that coming soon!).  While some give an apt assessment of this rich new look at a classic feminist text, some lapse into cliche about both Coontz’s book and Friedan’s.  Here are four myths–cliches, really–about The Feminine Mystique, and feminism the movement, as cleared up in Coontz’s book:

1.  MYTH: Betty Friedan was a man-hater, and The Feminine Mystique was anti-marriage.

REALITY: Friedan hated housework (and her willingness to say that was considered shocking in the early 1960s), but she loved men and greatly enjoyed flirting with them. She even suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Friedan believed that marriages would be more harmonious and loving when wives were free to find meaning in their own work or community activities rather than seeking fulfillment through their husbands’ accomplishments. When wives have interests and skills of their own, she argued, they will stop nagging or belittling their husbands. Their daughters, seeing their mothers fulfilled instead of discontented, will grow up “sure that they want to be women.” And in fact, I interviewed many women who told me they had developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by seeing how unhappy their own mothers were. They were able to commit to family life only after they were sure they would not be trapped the way their mothers had been.

2.  MYTH: Friedan encouraged women to put their personal gratification and career ambitions ahead of family or community concerns, leading directly to a “sex-in-the-city” individualism.

REALITY: Friedan told women it was a mistake to think that better sex or a new man would meet their need to grow. She argued that only an un-liberated woman would believe that more money or a bigger house would fill the hole inside her. She also said it was better to do volunteer work, if possible, than to take a job just for the money, insisting that women, like men, could find themselves only by developing their individual capacities in the framework of socially useful work, whether paid or unpaid. She would have hated “Sex in the City.”

3.  MYTH:  The entry of women into the workforce and their growing educational advantage over men destabilized marriage and doomed many women to a life of loneliness.

REALITY: Divorce rates initially rose as more wives went to work, but this trend reversed as people adjusted to women’s new rights. Today the states with the highest percentage of working wives generally have the lowest divorce rates. And marriages where one spouse specializes in housework and the other in paid work are now more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses share domestic and paid work.

Divorce rates have fallen sharply over the past 30 years for college graduates and for women who delay marriage while they establish themselves in careers. In fact, every year a woman delays marriage, up into her 30s, lowers her chance of divorce.

Marriage rates have been going down for all Americans, but women with Ph.D.s are the only group with a higher marriage rate today than in 1950. And while a highly-educated woman is slightly more likely to reach age 40 without ever marrying than a woman with less education, she is also much less likely to divorce. As a result, educated women are now more likely to be married at age 40 than their less-educated counterparts.

Three-quarters of female college graduates aged 40 are married at age 40, compared to two-thirds of women that age with some college education, 63 percent of high school graduates, and only 56 percent of women with less than a high school degree. And 88 percent of women aged 30 to 44 who earn more than $100,000 per year are married, compared to 82 percent of other women in that age group.

And here’s a win-win scenario for women who can take advantage of the new educational options for women: Educated couples with egalitarian views have the highest marital quality. Educated women who remain single and enjoy their jobs report nearly equal levels of happiness as married women. And a never-married college-educated woman in her 40s who wants to marry has twice the chance of doing so as a never-married high school graduate.

4.  MYTH: The feminist movement has hurt homemakers.

REALITY: In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, only eight states gave stay-at-home wives any claim on their husband’s earnings, even if they had put their husband through school and then devoted themselves to raising the children for 40 years. The husband got to determine what was an “adequate” level of support, and if they divorced, the wife had no right to a fair division of the property. She could not even get alimony unless she could prove “fault” by a very stringent standard. Feminism has improved the security of homemakers as well as of employed women.

What are the cliches that come to mind when you think about The Feminine Mystique or any other classic second-wave feminist text–and more importantly, are they, or aren’t they true?

*Spoiler Alert: in order to critique this show, I need to reveal some plot points.

Zombies do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or ability…people do. This sad truth played out in the short but compelling 6-episode first season of AMC’s new show The Walking Dead. Zombies eat any living thing they come across – scary but not evil creatures because they don’t have a functioning brain which would allow them to be human, to distinguish right from wrong.

 Admittedly, I haven’t read the graphic novels of Robert Kirkman, on which this series is based. So, I’m not 100% sure who to credit for the plot twists that portrayed the violent racism of a white supremacist, the vulnerability of daughter and wife to a physically-abusive man, and the terror of a woman fighting off a former lover who is trying to rape her. When the hospital is invaded by “walkers” (a.k.a. zombies), the living soldiers choose to execute ill and disabled patients rather than try to rescue them. [Mind you, the zombies do not seem to move fast enough to cause problems for someone armed with a semiautomatic weapon, but the choice is still made to sacrifice these lower status people.]

 If a common enemy should unite, then social scripts of bigotry and bias should disappear. As one character notes in the season finale, human beings may have reached their point of extinction. The question is whether the zombies or our own human failings are to blame.

With record ratings, the Wall Street Journal and other sources report that this Sunday night’s finale attracted 6 million viewers.  I may not be the typical fan of this show, so I wonder: will most viewers remain focused on the horror of a gruesome, fictitious zombie epidemic? Or, are there others like me, who despite flinching every time a zombie lunged for a bite of human flesh, left the season finale feeling acutely aware of the very real pandemic that plagues almost all societies: that potent combination of bigotry and selfishness which manifests as one of the many ‘isms. I’ve yet to see a ‘walker’ lurching down a street, but I have encountered far too many living human beings who lack empathy, respect, and compassion for each other and for the diversity of life on this planet.

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I had the pleasure of spending last weekend in the presence of Isla, a four-year-old who LOVES Toy Story Two and LOVES Jessie even more. When the scene highlighting Jessie’s back story came on, she jumped off the couch and ran towards the television with a look of rapture on her face. Once the song finished and the main narrative resumed, she chanted “More Jessie, more Jessie!!!”

Sadly, if her parents bring home Toy Story 3 for her to enjoy (released on DVD November 2^nd), she will find there is not more Jessie. Rather, the male toys are still front and center. Meanwhile, the female toys have gone missing (Bo), fallen in love with Ken (Barbie) or gone soft for Latino Buzz (Jessie).

Though Toy Story 3 opens on a female-empowerment high, with Mrs. Potato-Head displaying mad train-robbing skills and Jessie skillfully steering Bullseye in the ensuing chase, from there, the bottom drops out of the film’s female quotient. Out of seven new toy characters, only one is female – the purple octopus. This is far worse than the one female to every three males ratio documented in children’s media by The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media.

When I first viewed the 3^rd film, I was almost giddy as Mrs. Potato-Head and Jessie chased a train in the opening scene. Alas, after this first scene, the movie went back to its male focus, throwing in rather sexist and homophobic banter along the way. For example, Mr. Potato Head says at one point “No one touches my wife, except for me!” while another character suggests she needs her mouth taken off. As for Ken, he is depicted as a closeted gay fashionista with a fondness for writing in sparkly purple ink. Played for adult in-jokes, Ken huffily insists “I am not a girl toy, I am not!” when an uber-masculine robot toy suggests as much during a heated poker match. In the typical way homophobia is paired with misogyny, the jokes about Ken suggest how funny and scary it is for a man to be either feminine or queer. Admittedly, Barbie ultimately rejects Ken and is instrumental in Woody and Co’s escape, but her hyper-feminine presentation coupled with Ken’s not-yet-out-of-the-toy-cupboard homophobia make this yet another family movie that perpetuates damaging gender and sexuality norms.

Though the film ends with young Bonnie as the happy new owner of the toys, Woody would have to become Wanda and Buzz become Betty in order for the series to break Pixar’s male-only protagonist tradition. Finally a female-helmed film is on the horizon though – Brave – too bad the protagonist is a princess (how original!) and Pixar recently fired the female director (it’s first ever).

This is not to say that Pixar’s films are not funny and clever. And I would agree that in many regards Pixar films are an improvement on Disney. But need we settle for “better than Disney”? Can’t we ask they also make films with female protagonists, with racial and class diversity, without homophobic jokes, and, ahem, with FEMALE DIRECTORS?

Some 43 years after Mowgli’s love interest in The Jungle Book sings of her future daughter, “I’ll send her to fetch the water, I’ll be cooking in the home” her metaphorical daughters populate not only Disney films, but also those of Dream Works and Pixar. Alas, not only do these animated daughters still accord to gender norms for the most part, so too do their creators – most animators, screenwriters, directors, and producers are still men, completing Mowgli type adventures in the Hollywood jungle, adventures that still place boys front and center while keeping their female counterparts as figurative water fetchers.

Brenda Chapman, the female director who seemingly broke away from the sticky Cinderella floor to slipper through the glass ceiling into what is reportedly the Pixar boys club was sadly turned back into a non-directing pumpkin– no fairy tale ending for her as the director heroine of Brave, a film she wrote and has been developing for several years. Instead, Mark Andrews has reportedly taken over director duties. The title of his Pixar Short, One Man Band, is a fitting way to describe what seems to have become Pixar’s one-note ode to male helmed and focused films.

While changes in directors are common in the film world, Chapman’s firing caused quite the stir as she was Pixar’s first woman director – all eleven previous films were directed by (and featured) men. Pixar is not unique in this regard: As Sharon Waxman & Jeff Sneider write, “The animation industry is not known as a warm and fuzzy place for women.”

And, it was only this year that a woman finally won Best Director at the Academy Awards, despite the fact women have been involved in filmmaking since its beginnings in 1896.

Tracy L., a former film development executive with 12 years experience in the industry, responded to Chapman’s dismissal as follows:

“The bigger issue here is not the firing but why Pixar has never had a female director to begin with. The bigger story to my way of thinking is the utter lack of female input behind the scenes and the lack of female protagonists on screen.”

In films, this lack of women behind the scenes seems to translate to a certain type of woman character on screen–one who is less heroic, adventuresome, independent and important than the male robots, toys, cars and humans that surround her.

With Disney figuratively cutting Rapunzel’s powerful locks by making Tangled more boy-focused, and now Pixar taking away Chapman’s directorial wand, what’s next–a film about a female warrior who suddenly becomes a gooey-eyed animal lover? Oh, that’s already been done (Pocahontas). How about taking a you-go-girl patriarchy-defier and stealing her voice? Oh, that one is taken too (Little Mermaid).Wait, I know: a movie about a matriarchal society filled with female power-players that have to be saved by a tremulous boy. (Oops, that’s Bug’s Life).

So, I want to add my virtual voice and echo four-year-old Isla “I want more Jessie!” Come on, Pixar, get with the Bigelow effect already: encourage more women directors and more female friendly story-lines! Really, now, let some women lead your (or at least play in) your one-man band, would you?

The things that become viral are unpredictable. Earlier this month a few friends on Facebook posted a link to a Fermilab webpage that showcased 31 seventh graders drawings of scientists before and after a visit with actual scientists. I re-posted it and then a few others did as well. I saw others on Twitter tweeting it. It wasn’t the double rainbow guy viral, but it certainly seemed to be spreading.

All the children learned something about who a scientist is. Sometimes their drawings didn’t change much, but their description did. The biggest difference I noticed was that the myth of a lab coat died that day. All the scientists the kids met that day seemed to wear jeans and sweaters or button down shirts. Which is pretty much what most of the scientists I know do wear.

A few of the drawings really touched me, especially Sandra‘s. Not only did she start off already picturing a woman as a scientist, but after meeting some scientists she tossed the lab coat and commented about all the fun things that scientists do in their lives. Plus her drew a woman and a man holding hands. Awww…

But wait…I started to notice that some of the girls (I tallied 4) started off with a white male scientist and then evolved to a woman scientist. One girl might have gone from woman to man. So what about the boys? All of them stayed with a male scientist drawing. Eric seems to be the only student to change from a white scientist to a non-white scientist. That is a bit unclear as crayon skin tones are hard to decipher in some of the drawings.

Does this mean that boys only met male scientists? Or did they simply draw scientists who they connected with? Did the boys leave Fermilab that day with the idea that girls can be scientists too? Will they support their girlfriends who want to take AP Computer Science? Support their wives who need to embark for three-weeks in the field? Yes, I know I’m being totally heteronormative, but this is where some tension develops.

My job is to ensure that the women majoring in science and engineering on my campus have a supportive community. But you know what, we have a few awesome men who attend our events and request mentors. I like to think it’s because our office is delivering a great service and some men could care less that the program they are attending is run by women, for women and featuring women because in the end, it’s still all science and engineering. And for me, that’s progress.

So while I’m all “Go Girl!” I also know that if we ignore our boys, the revolution will never be complete.

By the way…this drawing experiment? It’s ten years old.

Last week, the NYT reported “Merck: Studies Boost Gardasil for New Uses“; this week the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met to discuss these new results. It will be interesting to see what, if any, changes result from new clinical evidence that (1) the vaccine is effective in preventing anal precancers in males and (2) the vaccine is effective in women 27-45 years old.

Those who’ve followed HPV research for the past decade were not surprised by the findings of either study. What has surprised me is how little attention ‘male’ Gardasil has attracted since receiving FDA approval last October. Writing a feature article for the Winter 2010 Ms. magazine gave me the opportunity to more deeply explore this topic and hopefully raise awareness — not only about Gardasil, a.k.a. the “cervical cancer” vaccine, but also about the full range of male HPV-related cancers that it might also prevent. 

So, this month’s column is inspired by my desire to respond to some of the interesting questions, comments and accusations that I’ve received via the blogosphere (like WashingtonCityPaper and HugoSchwyzer) in these first days following the publication of my article. I’ll start by acknowledging that my article’s title seems to have pushed more than a few buttons: apparently not everyone wants to know “Why Men’s Health is a Feminist Issue.” One comment asked “Why does the burden for sexual health need to fall, yet again, to women?” My response: It’s a burden for only girls/women to be responsible for sexual health, so prioritizing equal access to STI/STD vaccines results in a more fair sharing of this ‘burden.’ From the opposite side, a comment criticized this angle as being self-interested: “…when feminists speak of male health issues, it is usually in the context of the way they affect women.” To that, I reply: if you read the full article, you’ll see that boys/men have plenty of reasons to care about having access to this vaccine that have to do with protecting their own health, regardless of whether or not they ever have a female sexual partner.

This leads to another trend in responses: What’s in it for men?  Or, as one comment put it, “The only reason for males to get the vaccine would be to prevent HPV in women.” Really? How about the variety of serious HPV-related male cancers (oral, penile, anal, and others) that are (1) on the rise, (2) often fatal due to lack of accurate testing/screening, and (3) in the U.S. likely result in more combined deaths in men than cervical cancers in women? (See my Ms. article for an overview of these stat’s or, if you love charts check out p. 4 of the American Cancer Society’s 2009 report).

And, media coverage of Gardasil would not be complete without questions/concerns focused on whether or not Gardasil does more harm than good. For the record: I have not taken a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine stance on Gardasil or any other vaccine. But, I speak in favor of equal access to vaccines, support the conducting and media coverage of medical studies that reveal the full range of potential health costs and health benefits of any vaccine,  and argue for funding public health campaigns about HPV and other sexually transmitted epidemics. And, though some blog comments reveal confusion over the possibility of being “required” to get the Gardasil vaccine, I’m not aware of any current U.S. vaccination policy that does not allow for ‘opting out.’ (Note: as of December 14, 2009 Gardasil was no longer required for female green card applicants.)

A less popular theme, though one that intrigues me, came from those who took the angle of “What’s in it for big pharma?” One comment hypothesized, “…you can’t help but suspect Merck’s money motive is playing a role in the push for expansion to men.”  And, I reply, what PUSH? If money was their motive, then wouldn’t they have updated the Gardasil.com website to encourage male consumers? Visit that site prior to March 1, and you’d think that it was still only approved for girls/women.

I’ll end this post by expressing my thanks to all of the journalists and blog authors who are raising awareness about this topic, including Ms.‘s own Executive Editor Katherine Spillar on the Huffington Post. I also send out my gratitude to blog readers who add insightful, thoughtful, sociological, and truly feminist comments like Annie‘s. In my opinion, to be feminist is not to be pro-women, it is to be pro-equality and pro-justice (not to mention anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-ageism…you get my drift). I don’t know if the pro- and anti-vaccine folks will ever see eye to eye, but there’s absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by being pro-HPV-education.