Tag Archive for "gender roles"

Posts Tagged gender roles

Blast from the Past: Liberate Barbie and GI Joe

Happy April Fools’ Day! This past year has brought us some great feminist pranks, including Pink Loves Consent and a neighborly protest of the always terrible Westboro Baptist Church. However, feminist humor certainly isn’t anything new. One of our Twitter followers (I see you, @SujathaBaliga) alerted us to a great feminist prank covered in the New York Times in 1993:

For the last several months, a group of performance artists based in the East Village of Manhattan has been buying Talking Dukes and “Teen Talk” Barbies, which cost $40 to $50 each, painstakingly swapping their voice boxes and then, with the aid of cohorts, replacing dolls on the shelves of toy stores in at ...

By Syreeta McFadden • 11 years ago

Quick Hit: McKenna Pope’s crusade for gender neutral advertising of Easy Bake Ovens

13 -year-old McKenna Pope is seeking to break the gender paradigm in advertising, starting a petition to get Hasbro, the maker of the Easy Bake Oven to redesign its product packaging and advertising to include boys. Sparked by her little brother’s love to “cook,” Pope responded to her brother’s questioning why the commercial only features girls playing with the oven.

In Pope’s video appeal to support her petition to Hasbro, she asks: “Is this really the message we want to send to our youth? I thought as a society, that we have moved far past that. But no, we continue to force the stereotype that men don’t cook, they work.”

Pope’s petition has over just under 24,000 supporters.

If men can ...

By Chloe Angyal • 11 years ago

Ellen Degeneres endorses Bic For Her pens

You probably saw the Amazon reviews of Bic For Her pens, which went viral a few weeks back. Ellen Degeneres is a bit late to the party, but oh, am I glad she showed up. “They come in both lady colours: pink and purple, and they’re just like regular pens except they’re pink, so they cost twice as much.” It’s moments like this I remember that Degeneres is a really good at stand up, and here, she really brings the gender politics. “So, when we’re taking down dictation from our bosses, we’ll feel comfortable, and we’ll forget we’re not getting paid as much?”

It’s solid gold. “When you have an opinion, write it down on a piece of paper, and ...

You probably saw the Amazon reviews of Bic For Her pens, which went viral a few weeks back. Ellen Degeneres is a bit late to the party, but oh, am I glad she showed up. “They ...

By Lori Adelman • 11 years ago

More than an “aw” moment: German dad supports gender non-conforming son

You may have seen this image making the rounds on the internet: a father and son, wearing a skirt and a dress, respectively, walking hand-in-hand down a public street.

It’s an adorable image depicting an even more heartwarming story about a father who started wearing skirts to support his son, because his son liked to do so. But even more than “adorable” and “heartwarming,” it’s a potential blueprint for how all of us, cis and trans, straight and queer, parents and friends, can do more to be supportive of the gender non-conforming folks in our lives.

The story was popularized on Gawker but was able to break into mainstream American media via steegeschnoeber, who took the liberty to translate the text of the ...

You may have seen this image making the rounds on the internet: a father and son, wearing a skirt and a dress, respectively, walking hand-in-hand down a public street.

It’s an adorable image depicting an even more heartwarming ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 12 years ago

Michele Bachmann’s daughters aren’t allowed to ask boys out

Michele Bachmann didn’t go to her senior prom and she’s determined to ensure that her daughters won’t either. Or, at least, that’s what I gathered from this interview with Sean Hannity about Bachman’s new book. (Listen to the audio here.)

BACHMANN: People do find out [in my book] that I did not get asked to my senior prom.

HANNITY: Well, neither did I. And nobody would go with me.

BACHMANN: Well, in my time, girls didn’t ask boys to prom. If you didn’t get asked, you didn’t go.

HANNITY: Yeah, well let me tell you, I have a 13-year-old son. Those days have changed big time.

BACHMANN: And our girls are not allowed to do that in our house. They have to wait ...

By Chloe Angyal • 13 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Welcome to My World

At the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, figure skater Johnny Weir performed a short program that he titled “I Love You I Hate You.” In his new memoir, Welcome to My World, Weir writes that the name of the program “was a fairly accurate description of my relationship with the skating world.” It’s also a fairly accurate description of how I felt about Weir when I finished his book. For his refusal to conform to gender norms, for his insistence on expressing himself on the ice however he damn well pleases, I really admire the guy. For his lack of sportsmanship, and for behavior that is sometimes downright bratty, I really dislike him.

From the start of the book, Weir ...

By Chloe Angyal • 13 years ago

The Feministing Five: CJ Pascoe

CJ Pascoe is the author of the book Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School and the forthcoming Mias and Wannas: Identity and Community in a Pro-ana Subculture. Pascoe, who is an assistant professor of Sociology at Colorado College, has been studying youth culture for many years, beginning, as she told me, with an informal period of observation when she hung out with a friend and his frat brothers as an undergraduate. Dude, You’re a Fag is about how high school boys express and police gender identity and sexuality, a topic that has garnered national attention in the wake of the recent spate of LGBT bullying suicides. To research the book, Pascoe spent eighteen months ...

By goddessjaz • 13 years ago

The Women of the GOP & Warped Gender Identity

There is a heavy focus by the mainstream news media on the large(r) number of women candidates running in this year’s midterm elections. Many of the women running are Republican, conservatives and/or Tea Party fools nominees. One of the main newsmakers and agitators is Sharon Angle, the Republican nominee for Senate who recently told her opponent, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, to “man up.” At first, it made me laugh because I associate that as a hip-hop term. But besides that, it’s the latest in this “Mama Grizzly” movement to promote themselves as tough, no-nonsense badass women fit to rule.