Recently in Girls Category

by Rachel Rawlings

Bookkeeper, medical secretary, computer technician, college tutor, pizza delivery driver, copy editor. Sometimes I think my resume is the craziest in existence... except for Barbie's.

Last week at Toy Fair, the nearly 51-year-old icon revealed her 125th and 126th career choices. One, based on what young girls said they wanted to be when they grew up, is news anchor. But the other is much closer to my heart: computer engineer. By popular vote (last month on barbie.com, the valley girl has gone geek chic, with a sparkly Bluetooth headset, cubicle-shaped packaging, and a bubblegum pink netbook that spells out:

01000010 01100001 01110010 01100010 01101001 01100101

over and over.

You guessed it: That’s the binary representation of "Barbie" in ASCII code . Mattel consulted the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to outfit the doll, which, says the toymaker, will encourage “a new generation of girls to explore this important high-tech industry which continues to grow and need future leaders.”

They got that right. According to a recent special report by the San Jose Mercury News, women’s employment in Silicon Valley’s largest companies slipped to 33 % in 2005 from 37 % in 1999, with a similar drop in the number of women in management jobs. Even at eBay—whose former CEO Meg Whitman is running for California's Republican gubernatorial nomination—women's representation dropped from 44% to 37% in that time, and women in management slots fell from 36% to 30%. Employment for African-American and Hispanic engineers also dropped.

That's frightening in a place where, when I worked there in 1995-2000, the most common Spanish word I saw in dot-com offices was basura —trash—to indicate that the night cleaning staff could throw something out. Perhaps that’s why Barbie’s three-quarter-sleeve t-shirt, decorated with circuit-board patterns, is the sort of thing that was selling on ThinkGeek.com back before the 1990s tech bubble burst. Barbie needs to help recapture women’s tech-industry glory days from a decade ago—back when the only attention (read: flack) she caught from Silicon Valley was for her 1992 statement that “math class is tough.”

To read the rest, click here .

Recently, my cousin frantically posted on Facebook looking for input about how to talk to her daughter, who, if I recall correctly, is in second grade, so about seven years old. To quote her "What age is best to start talking to your daughter about ''girly'' changes that she will go thru? Some minimal changes are already starting to take place and I am also unsure how to start the conversation when it is to happen. HEEELLLLLLPPPP!!" What kind of resources can I point her toward? Thanks for any help here.

I almost don't have words for this.

An 11-year-old in Bulgaria just gave birth to a baby. Her husband is 19 and faces criminal charges. The article says she became pregnant two weeks after her eleventh birthday and had the baby on her wedding day.

I haven't had sex education classes and I didn't know how to get pregnant. I'd never had a boyfriend and I'd never heard of condoms," she said" "I didn't know I was pregnant until my grandmother saw I had put on weight. I just thought I'd eaten too many burgers.

The article doesn't mention either of their parents or families, which makes me curious. But thing that really jumps out at me is that they mention her by name. Granted it's U.S. policy (not law) that prohibits reporting rape victim's names, and this is in Bulgaria, but it still bothers me.

This girl is both a child AND a rape victim.

Also, the friend that showed me this article and I agreed that unfortunately, these stories are not all that uncommon. It's a fact of life for girls around the world, we all know that.

But articles like this don't talk about the larger issue, just the fact that she's 11 years old. In a way, I feel like they're just sensationalizing the story and in fact taking advantage of her yet again. On the other hand, informing the public of situations like hers are a step toward fixing the problem.

What do you think? Am I way off?

On a side note, this whole thing really reminds me of what the Girl Effect is trying to do.

Some quick background: I've had bad experiences with friends - relationships in general - in the past. My role has always either been doormat or caretaker, so I have been treated as such. Two years ago was when I ended my first (and only) serious romantic relationship (it lasted four years), and thus lost the last friend I had. I had some friends after that, but they fall more into the "I'm a doormat and you're a moocher" category. Not real friends. Unfortunately, that is where the majority of my friendships have gone. I don't know if I've ever had a good, equal relationship with another person.

Fast forward to now. Two years later. I'm in college, studying something I love, and busy all the time. It's awesome. What free time I do have is given over to the things that I love but, because of my previous "doormat" status earlier in life, was never allowed to partake of. (Hint: I'm not a doormat anymore.) So now I can read comics to my hearts content without someone telling me how stupid they are. I can listen to whatever kind of music I want and not worry whether anyone else will like it. Whenever I go shopping - for anything - the questions list not as, "Will they like it?" but "Do I like it? Can I afford it? Do I need it? What will I do with it?" "They" never seem to come up anymore. It's wonderfully liberating.

So I bet you're wondering why I'm complaining about my awesome freedom, right? Well, apparently I'm not supposed to be so excited about my "loner" status. Nope. I need friends, and I need friends pronto. My mom tells me we're "social creatures." My sister tells me that healthy, normal people have friends, and that's all there is to it. Even though I don't want friends, I feel like I should want friends. Like, the only reason I'm not actively pursuing a social life is not because I'm just too damn busy (I am) but because I'm scared of being hurt, or I'm scared of being a doormat, or I'm scared of something else that I can't think of right now. So what's the deal? Am I perfectly normal in my desire to not want friends, or am I in denial?

Disclaimer: I know that the people here aren't my therapists, and I'm not asking anyone to analyze me and assure me that I'm healthy. I'm just looking for alternative thoughts and opinions.

Up front, I must apologize for the length of this post. It is a lot of back-story, but I feel that this information is relevant to the question that I pose.

I discovered Feministing recently with StumbleUpon. I have since come back regularly, both on my own and with SU. Coming from an extremely rural background (raised in the deep south, with deeply misogynistic family members and having been of the brainwashed boy-crazy teenager variety myself) I am a fairly recent discoverer of feminism, but feel as though it is something I have been trying my entire life to attach words to the sentiments I see expressed here. This said, I never gave too much thought to how these things applied to my life, personally. I always thought I was fairly tolerant and progressive, considering the background I have been working my whole life to escape (more on that in a moment). Two things have recently changed my mind. They have brought perspective as well as a sense of urgency, particularly to the latter.

1. I am in the position of possibly having to seek an abortion. I am twenty years old, not at all financially stable and have no desire to have children at the moment. I am more alarmed personally at the financial and family consequences of this choice, but I can deal with that. It is not what is keeping me awake.

2. I recently came across an article condemning the sale of "bralettes" to very young girls, and have been aware of the phenomenon of oversexualizing young girls for a long time. The reason? I have a sister. Two, actually. Both have children. My oldest sister has one girl, aged two, and another on the way. These children will be absolutely cared for, and I know this without a doubt. My oldest sister has always acted as a mother to me, and has been the impetus for any rational thought that I have. Were it not for her, I would be in a very different place in my life and in my mind right now, and if I have the desire to make anyone in the world proud of me, it is her.

A little background:

Growing up in my household could be considered the definition of turbulent. My father was an alcoholic for most of my childhood (he still is, he just doesn't drink anymore). Despite this I have many fond memories of my dad, and as I have grown older I have come to understand him more. I still don't forgive him for all of the misdirected anger and abuse that came to all of us, but I am growing to understand him better and trying to put it behind me and reconcile it with the only universal truth I have discovered: We are All messed up.  

The Shanghaiist picked up on a local Chinese newspaper report about a man who posted a baby girl as an online auction item with a starting bid of 1 yuan (US$0.15). The seller was the girl's uncle. Under China's one-child policy families are restricted to one baby, and apparently the girl's family was hoping for a male child to carry on the family name. While sad, it's true that this bias still runs very deep in Chinese society. But where was the mother in all this?

Thankfully the auction was shut down as soon as the e-commerce platform, Taobao (China's largest & most popular), caught sight of it. But the fact that someone thought it appropriate to sell a four-month old baby still triggers feelings of disgust and anger.

Elaine at Shanghaiist sums it up well:

The article wasn't clear about what the family was going to do next, but we're frankly quite horrified. Yes, we know this isn't anything really new for China - the traditional affinity for men over women plus the one child policy has managed to increase the gender gap to 32 million more boys than girls under the age of 20 with no signs of slowing. We also get that this is probably one of the slightly less sad stories of what happens to female infants - at least she wasn't sold into sexual slavery (though we guess that would come after she's able to walk) or abandoned altogether.

At the same time, if all that propaganda and "women hold up half the sky" and economic opportunity can't change the minds of a good chunk of paternalistic misogynist parents, we're beginning to wonder what will.

What needs to happen in China for kids to not be put up on Taobao because they happened to be born with a vagina? We honestly don't know.

Sigh.

By Mie Lewis, Staff Attorney, ACLU Women's Rights Project

Yesterday, the Justice Department released a damning new report (PDF) about the horrible conditions in juvenile prisons in upstate New York. The story made the front page of the New York Times , and in a related op-ed called "New York's Disgrace," the Times writes:

Unfortunately, the abuses that occurred in these prisons have been going on for years, despite having been exposed before.

Back in the winter of 2005, I was a novice researcher at Human Rights Watch, trying to find out what life was like for girls held in youth prisons in upstate New York. Getting information was almost impossible. The New York juvenile justice agency — called the Office of Children and Family Services, or OCFS — was one of the most secretive and defensive that Human Rights Watch had ever encountered, even compared with agencies in places like Bulgaria, Guatemala, Kenya, and Brazil.

Because OCFS refused to let human rights monitors into its facilities, we scraped together information from every place we could, tracking down girls who had recently been released, finding sources inside the agency and even lurking in prison parking lots in mid-winter to talk to the parents of incarcerated girls.

my daughters came back from a month of visiting family overseas today, and they are enormous, overgrown children, smallish adults. talking different, walking different, but also the same.

they are exiting kid and entering the amorphous zone in which a lot of things feel uncomfortable, including me. their body is changing already - bumps sprouting and all, and it is so scary, and also great. 

this week a man killed three women in pittsburgh in a premeditated murderous spree that he outlined on his blog, a morbid pathways to his mind, and a source of endless fascination for the sensationalist media in the past couple of days. he opened fire because he hated women. simple as that.

he hated women because they would not sleep with him or have a relationship with him. a relationship he felt entitled to have , an entitlement that brought him to believe that women were at fault from holding back what was righteously his.

this was going through my mind as i sat across the dinner table from my daughter today. not a kid anymore really, not protected by the lack of sexualization of childhood, but a very soon woman to be. a target.

thinking that i moved across an ocean to give them more space, to let them and me become more than just what an overly sexist society was allowing us to be. now i look at them, and i am not so sure that we are safer here, or have more choices, or freedom. 

maybe the acceptable roles are different, but american society is not one were equality exists, not for women, not for people of color, or poor people or queer folks. but sexism is what seems to be so pervasive that it becomes invisible. it is ridiculed and trivialized, co-opted by ad companies, ignored by the media, even though a man living in such society felt it was ok to kill women, because he hated them. he is dismissed as a maniac, a deranged individual, no matter the fact that gender violence is happening all the time. 

i want to take my daughters and find somewhere safe, somewhere i know no one will cause them harm, but it's impossible. i know that the only way for them to be safer is to change the conditions that would bring someone to have a sense that women are less then, that they are disposable, and that they exist to fulfill men's needs or else they deserve to be hurt.

i feel engulfed by it sometimes, i see it all around me, and i have to force myself to remember that so many people are doing so many things to create a less fucked up world. they just don't often make the news, unfortunately.

I'm not around kids a lot, and don't know too much about this, but i think something that should be a bigger part of the feminist discourse is how to empower young girls to resist sexism, and how to do it using the most simple terminology possible.

Can people give examples of a time when they pointed out sexism to a kid, and it got through to them?

"Very Young Girls" is a harrowing film about a growing yet neglected problem in the US: child prostitution.  This film focuses on child prostitutes in New York but this is a problem throughout the United States and sadly not one that most people know about.

There are estimates that about 300,000 to 800,000 are children involved in child prostitution each year.  There are quite a lot of reasons that children get trapped in prostitution by brutal pimps. Some youth are street children and have been abandoned or run away from the foster care system. There are other cases of kids that had homes but were forced to run away because of abuse or violence at home. There are other cases of young gay or transgender prostitutes that are kicked out of their normal homes because of their identity and have no where else to turn. Some children are even betrayed into prostitution by parents, guardians or even babysitters.

Regardless of where these young people come from they face a live of depravity and brutality. They face violence and pressure from relentless pimps who see them as a source of income rather than vulnerable children. These pimps can sometimes be very manipulative and reel the children in with a sense of home and well being , only to ask them to work on the streets in exchange for that love. Other pimps may use drugs to entice drug addicted youth, and keep them in prostitution. These pimps often put very demanding prostitution schedules on their victims: one expected his child prostitute to have sex with 30 men over 4 or 5 days.

Beyond just this brutality from their pimps, these young prostitutes, male and female, face problems with the criminal justice system as well. Some child prostitutes have been tried as adults for crimes when they instead should be treated as victims .

There are many great programs out there that are working to fight child prostituion, find a safe home and rehabilitation for former child prostitutes. These programs need our support, even if it is just raising awareness about the problem and what they are doing to solve it.

TAKE ACTION:
1. You could raise awareness about these crimes by hosting one of these films at your high school or college. "Very Young Girls" documents the lives of child prostitutes in New York City and the film  "Carissa" documents the life of a former child prostitute who found a way off the streets to tell about it.
2. Support GEMS- which is Girls Education and Mentoring Services which was founded by a former prostitute from the United Kingdom. This organization works with child prostitutes and girls at risk to stop this scourge. They  have an online community called the Council of Daughters which you can join and make a difference through hosting events and other acitivities.
3. Support the Children of the Night which is another organization that has a residence to rehabilitate former child prostitutes.
4. Read more about the child prostitution problem in the US through this New York Times article, this USA Today article and this other Huffington Post article
5. Check out this PBS series about Child Prostitution in the US 
6. Read an empirical research paper on the Child Prostitution problem in the United States

I was searching the Internet when I found this:

A new program developed by the U.S. government is tackling the obesity epidemic by helping "tween" girls and their parents make small but important changes to build a healthier lifestyle. The Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office on Women's Health launched BodyWorks in 2006 by training instructors in the hopes that they would bring the program home to their communities. All materials are provided free, but communities must find the resources to pay trainers and a place to offer the program...

Girls 9 to 13 years old who are overweight or obese are referred to BodyWorks through their pediatrician, or by word of mouth. Parents and caregivers attend 10 weekly 90-minute sessions, and girls are expected to show up for at least three. The goal is to give parents and caregivers "hands-on tools to make small behavior changes to prevent obesity and help maintain a healthier weight"...

The goal is not for girls to lose weight, Jones and Richter say, but for families as a whole to begin making healthier choices at the grocery store, to become more active and to spend less time in sedentary activities like watching TV or playing computer games...

Sounds ok, right? Not so.

Just a little background: I'm 14. I'm a girl who when she was in fourth grade did a report on Gloria Steinem, and often challenged her gym teachers, science teachers, classmates sexist remarks, even in elementary school.

When I learned the word "feminist", I knew it was for me. At age 12, I told my mom that I decided I was a feminist.

So what does being a feminist have to deal with me? Very much.

You see, I'm recovering from an eating disorder. To be exact, purging bulimia. It started out the way many eating disorders do - as a way to lose weight. Of course it becomes more than that, but its always a part.

Being a feminist has helped my recovery greatly. It made me realize that I did not need to conform to what the media thought I should look like. I think reading Full Frontal Feminism and reading that, helped so much too.

I never thought that being a feminist would affect my life as much as it has. I convinced my dad to vote for Obama, and my staunchly anti-choice parents finally gave up on trying to change my mind.

I've informed many of my friends, who were unaware of many of the statistics. Some of them even helped me confront the abstinence-only teacher who tried to tell us condoms cause cancer. I brought in a paper the next day from the FDA about the effectiveness against pregnancy and STDs for condoms. The look on her face was very funny.

In 7th grade my best friend and I did a report on feminism - changing many of the majority anti choice minds in my class.

To sum it all up, thank you feminism.

Last week the New York Times reported on how young girls of color in metropolitan public schools don't have the same access to participating in sports as young boys. This is in part because public schools that are low on funding cannot afford to support after-school sports and physical education programs, nor can their students necessarily pay for the cost of sports gear and uniforms.

But the disparity in girls' participation in sports is also due in part to low-income or immigrant families who rely on their girls to be at home and baby-sit, or help with chores. These families are unable to see sports participation as anything other than a luxury. The article reports on girls who are eager to be involved in school sports but are prohibited from attending away games or regularly attending practice.

Young girls are caught in the midst of both poorly funded educational programs as well as the realities of gender roles and socio-economic-based decisions. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive Survey , about half of all girls and boys living in the suburbs consider themselves to be "moderately involved" in sports, compared to 36 percent of girls and 56 percent of boys in cities. This disparity does more than merely stifle young girls who are interested in sports; failure to provide adequate physical education programs and properly encourage models of well-being can lead to health issues later on in life.

I recently wrote about a study that shows women of color are disproportionately affected by heart disease, obesity, and high cholesterol. These findings correlate with a study published in October by the Women's Sports Foundation , which reports that girls of color are doubly affected by race and gender discrimination in the pursuit of athletics (PDF ) and are less involved in school sports than any other youth group.

It's important that along with Title IX reinforcement, legislation is created that forces high schools to report gender breakdowns with regards to funding allocation and sports participation. Young girls of color need to be introduced to sports at an ealier age to prevent dropping out of physical education activities later on in life. Changing public education institutions and providing community outreach will help to provide young girls of color with the resources and opportunities they need to be involved in something that they might really enjoy.

Hey community...

I have recently decided that I want to focus my energy outside of my job on girl's education and am hoping to find an organization to volunteer with. When I look around online, most of what I find is individual mentoring programs, which are awesome, but I'm thinking a little more broadly than one kid at a time.

I was hoping some of you smarty-pants would have some great ideas of organizations that could use some free, over educated help. Any and all ideas are welcome, I am in the NW, but would work remotely if necessary.

Thanks!

Crossposted from Yes Means Yes Blog.

This is a parenting rant; this is more conceptual than particular, and directed to more than one person.

"But she doesn't know about that yet" is not an answer. That's when she needs to know it: before she needs to know it. If she already knew it, she wouldn't need you to tell her. So tell her now, when she doesn't need to know it.

The time to tell her is when it's a strange rumor about someone's friend's cousin at another school. She's fishing for information. If you dodge the question, she'll let you. And she'll know not to ask again. "You can talk to me about anything" is a platitude. She's not stupid; she knows it's a platitude. She knows it's a platitude because she sees that you don't want to deal with the questions when she raises them. When you dodge, she knows she can't talk to you about anything; only things you're ready to talk about. That's why you shouldn't dodge it.

Even in what passes for comprehensive sex ed, they won't cover it. Popular culture won't teach her, they just pitch jokes that assume knowledge. So that leaves her friends, who are all 14. I didn't have much access to accurate information then and neither did you. Do you think they are much better?

If you wait long enough, you can avoid the conversation entirely. She'll get inaccurate half-assed information from somewhere else. This is not the best outcome, though it may be the least embarrassing.

Nobody will do your job for you. If you don't do your job, it won't get done. Not the way it ought to be, anyway.

I’ve wanted for a while to write a post about Nancy Fletcher’s ACT NOW! organization.  Starting in 2000 Nancy took the unique approach of using improvised movies as a vehicle to help empower young women.  The girls participating in the ACT NOW! programs do everything to make their movie, writing the scenario from which the action is improvised, making sets and costuming as well as filling the roles of director and producers.  Nancy’s stated mission is “to help people, especially young girls, change their experience of themselves, so that they feel connected to their authentic power to create, see options, make healthy choices and star in their own lives.”  And she has another subversive agenda of encouraging young women to enter the film industry.

(cross posted at Oh You're A Feminist?! )

I've been thinking a lot about bullying lately, specifically bullying among girls and women. The more research i did on the topic, the more i found relating to bullying's effects on the victims, how girls bully, and the difficulty of breaking free of bullying. What i didn't find much of is WHY girls bully and how this bullying translates to adult female relationships.

Bullying among girls has been on the rise since the early 1990's. Also, the bullying isn't stereotypical physical violence you think of when "bully" comes to mind (though it can be). Bullying among girls usually takes on more subtle and calculated characteristics. The NCPC defines a female bully as a girl who "is popular, well-liked by adults, does well in school, and can even be friends with the girls she bullies. She doesn't get into fist fights, although some girls who bully do. Instead, she spreads rumors, gossips, excludes others, shares secrets, and teases girls about their hair, weight, intelligence, and athletic ability. She usually bullies in a group and others join in or pressure her to bully."

No wonder I came to the conclusion of "hating girls" in middle and high school. Obviously i didn't, because i am female myself, but it was the best way my 12 year old self knew to cope and to separate myself from the stereotypically female characteristics that were supposedly bad. You know, girls being portrayed as catty, oversensitive, and manipulative. Grown up me recognizes that not all women (and girls) are those things (though some sure can be...) but 12 year old me, who needed external validation, knew she'd get it most by identifying as little with stereotypically female traits as possible. I've heard women, again and again, note that "women (or girls) are so difficult to be friends with" or all their close friends are male because "men are easier to deal with." When i started to really think about this i realized we were being socialized to hate ourselves.

Cross-Posted from Yes Means Yes Blog.

The mainstream has started to pay attention to the abuse of child porn charges that Harper Jean Tobin and, more recently, I have been on about. This article is not perfect, but it makes two really good points: First, that this is wildly and willfully excessive.

Should Phillip be punished? Yes. Should the six teens in Pennsylvania face consequences? Yes. But let's kick them off cheerleading squads and sports teams. Make them do community service and take classes on sex crimes. Educate other teens on the dangers of sexting. Pay a price, yes, but these young people shouldn't pay for this for the rest of their lives.

The bottom line: We need to educate, not incarcerate, our teens and it has to start with parents.

Don't let the culture indoctrinate your little boy or girl about sex before their time. So strike first as a parent.

As parents, if we want to do right by our kids, we have to communicate both our values and information. I've been saying it. It starts with telling toddlers about their bodies, so that we have the foundation to tell teens about all the other stuff -- not just sexting and STIs and pregnancy, but the big thing: how to go from being a kid to being a sexual adult; how they learn to make their own decisions. It's not a bunch of separate topics. It's a unified whole.

Cross-posted at clairemysko.com.

On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. But nine months before, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for doing the same thing on a bus in the  same city. She had been learning about black history at school that month. Reflecting on the day she was handcuffed and put in jail, she remembers it was as though Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were on either side of her, holding her in her seat on that bus.

Colvin is now 69 years old and living in the Bronx. Her story is documented in a new book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Philip Hoose. Why have most people never heard of her? In an NPR  interview, Colvin says it is because she was a teen at the time, and leaders of the civil rights movement believed Rosa Parks would make a better icon: “She was an adult. They didn’t think teenagers would be reliable.”

Though we mostly see pictures of adults representing the civil rights movement, the reality is that there were many teens whose activism made a huge difference. Hoose says he wrote his book so that more young people could be inspired by Colvin’s action.

Listen: “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin”

Crossposted from Yes Means Yes Blog.

My daughter hasn't got the hang of the potty yet, but she's learning. And after she urinates, she wipes her vulva. Because that's what it's called.

Over at Feministe, Jill posted an Onion piece that is laugh-out-loud funny about the shame and embarassment people display over female genitals.

Being one of those humorless feminists, though, I can't help pointing out that there is a lot to take seriously about whether we call girls' genitals what they are or some cute nickname: this is where it starts. We either teach our kids that their bodies are normal and natural, or we teach them that we can't talk about them without stammering and blushing. And in this, so many people fail their girls.

I know lots of parents who can call a boy's penis a penis without stiffling a snicker. Boy parts are ordinary body parts with names. Ear, elbow, penis. Many of these same folks can't use proper terms for their daughters' genitals. Girl parts are unmentionable. They have cute names and euphemisms. That's how it starts.

We teach girls they cannot deal openly and forthrightly with the bodies the way boys can, and then later we teach them they can't deal openly and forthrightly with their sexuality, even if boys can. Boys have penises, boys have desire, boys have sex. Girls ... the adults would rather not talk about. And so we fail. First, we can't call a vulva a vulva. Then we can't call a vagina a vagina, even when it's an award-winning play. Then we can't have these conversations, because we never laid the groundwork; never built the foundation to allow us to parent our children from kids to adults -- whole, sexual adults.

We need to get over it, the only way that works: a little at a time, starting with baby step. It's called a vulva.

(Cross-Posted from Yes Means Yes Blog.)

This morning the New York Times reports that the ACLU has joined some courageous young women in a counterattack against a recent and disturbing moral panic. More than once recently, school and criminal justice authorities have threatened to use child pornography laws against teenagers for the distribution of photographs of their friends and classmates, including even against girls depicted in these pictures. A few have even been charged. Violet Blue had a rundown for the SF Gate. Atrios picked up the ACLU story yesterday, but this trend has been on Harper Tobin's radar screen at polymorphous perversity for some time now.

(Harper is the source on this topic. While I'm a lawyer with good familiarity with these issues, I won't engage on the legal analysis because I simply can't improve on what Harper has done.)

In this case, a Pennsylvania Republican prosecutor threatened criminal charges against more than a dozen teens identified in or caught possessing sexually suggestive photos sent to students' cell phones to bully them into taking courses on sexual violence. Three of the girls decided to fight back and sued.

My first reaction to this, perhaps obviously, a simple outrage at the prosecutor's conduct. Molesting children and creating child pornography, I would hope, shocks and appalls all of us. The legal tools that have been created to deal with child pornography are draconian. They work within a narrow carveout to otherwise broad First Amendment protections -- for example, there is a right under the Constitution to privately possess even obscene pornography, but not child pornography. Child porn charges come with both long terms of imprisonment and tremendous social opprobrium, and they generally also require registration as a sex offender, which imposes limitations and restrictions on residence, and oversight, and notification requirements, that follow convicts for a lifetime. This exercise of state power is so severe and thoroughgoing that some folks on the political left are ill at ease with it, even when used on child pornographers. Even among those of us who find this regime appropriate, we generally only think so when it is applied to the people it is meant to be applied to: sexual predators whose targets are children. Obviously, these laws were never meant to be applied to conduct between teenagers and their age appropriate sexual partners.

I greatly enjoy the blog Cake Wrecks; it's one of the few sites I visit regularly that is not feminism focused. A recent post had two pictures of cakes that resemble the Playboy bunny. The rub? The cakes were for a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old. Jen, the author of the blog, puts it best:

[blowing nose] "I mean, every parent wants her little girl to grow up dreaming big dreams, padding her trainer bra, and looking to attract men as a means of personal validation, but to see it actually happening ...[sniffle] I'm sorry, it's just a dream come true.

Seriously, what was going through the parents' minds when ordering these cakes?

A nine-year old Brazilian girl was raped by her step-father and the AP (via MSNBC ) has the gall to say she was allegedly raped? Unless I am completely fucking out of touch with reality, nine years old is no where near a reasonable age of consent. And therefore, it is no great leap of logic to leave out the alleged.

What's worse is that the little girl became pregnant...with twins. Fortunately, the courts of Brazil granted permission for this child to have an abortion...and now the Catholic Church is calling her a murderer. Umm, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! She is nine years old! She was raped! Pregnant! With twins!

(Granted, Brazil has the highest population of Roman Catholics in the world but this is un fucking believable. This is an extraordinarily immature and close-minded response to the real problem.)

Playmate cakes for 12 and 16 year old girls?  I think the blogger's tongue-in-cheek monologue sums up my feelings nicely.  Via Cakewrecks(dot)blogspot(dot)com, one of my truly favorite humor blogs.

Obama's election means a lot for women -- and, of course, girls. No big surprise there.

But according to a new study conducted by the Girl Scout Research Institute, the presidential race was influencing girls across the country even before Obama won. Their survey of over 3,000 boys and girls (including non-Girl Scouts) found that the election increased girls' interest in leadership, but also heightened "their appreciation for the difficulties that women face in our society."

According to the study, 43 percent of girls today strongly believe that "girls have to work harder than boys in order to gain positions of leadership," a statement that just 25 percent of girls agreed with just a year ago. And the percentage of girls who believe that "today both men and women have an equal chance of getting a leadership position" declined from 35 percent to 24 percent between 2007 and 2008. Ouch.

Also: Ritu Sharma of Women Thrive Worldwide on what having Sasha and Malia in the White House means for girls outside the Beltway.

I was going to post this yesterday as a Thank You Thursday, but then I ran out of time; hence, it's a Friday Feminist Fave!

Last year, Courtney posted on Eleanor Roosevelt , a phenomenal activist in her own right and an important foremother of the second wave. I'm a big ER fan, too, for those reasons and for one other reason: the Girls' Leadership Workshop.

When I was fifteen, I attended the Girls' Leadership Workshop, or GLW, at the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, the place that was once Eleanor's private home. GLW is a nine-day summer feminist leadership program for teen girls entering grades ten and eleven. It's a phenomenal program, packed with workshops with incredible social justice and human rights activists, including two days in NYC to meet with women leaders at UN agencies and feminist organizations.

For me, though, the best part of GLW was becoming a part of an amazing group of feminist teens. The thirty participants at my session hailed from everywhere from Hawaii to Turkey; I've never been in a community of young women who come from such different backgrounds yet share such strong enthusiasm for social change. Through GLW, I gained several lifelong friends, a tight-knit group of fellow change-makers who can empathize better than anyone else with the struggles of a young feminist activist.

If you're a girl currently in grades nine or ten -- or know a girl who could use a community of young, kick-ass feminists -- I highly recommend checking out GLW. (Applications for summer 2009 are due February 13; 90 participants will be selected from hundreds of applicants.) My GLW friends and I all agree: GLW was the most amazing nine days of our life.

I wrote this on Margaret Cho's Facebook Wall and I thought I'd share:

I want to say something original not just "Oh hai luv ur work!!" so here goes:
You are so amazing! When my sister and i saw you live last year when you came to DC i was about to turn 14. Young, i know but you and Liam Kyle Sullivan were so great! I just pretended i didn't hear the super mature jokes that went over my head (LOL). My friend's mom who went to see it with her girlfriend joked that: "You were probably the youngest, straightest people there!" My sister (16 years old) said that seeing you was absolutely life-changing. Hopefully you realize that you have a young fan-base as well and that we are cheering on your kick-ass-ness! You are the only stand-up comedian i like and i would take watching any of your videos over "Achmed the dead terrorist" ANY day. I'm also pretty sure you are involved with my becoming a feminist so Rock On! Please bring your fucking awesomeness back to DC soon!
love, 
Me and all your under-18 fans in DC! w00t!

I am extremely excited because she just wrote back thanking me! Any other young feminists with thoughts/ rantings about Margaret Cho/ Other recomendations to related media ?

Okay. I am aware that there has already been much discussion about Beyonce's music regarding whether it is feminist or not. It seems that even though we are feminists, it is still rather hard to escape dichotomous thinking that would label it either/or rather than just accepting it as having both it's feminist qualities and its not so feminist qualities (kinda like The View) depending on your definition. Anyways, I am not going to lie, I love Single Ladies. I love driving in my car with it blaring on the radio even though I identify as a lesbian and am strongly against marriage and all it traditionally entails, and in fact, I hope Taylor Swift's Love Story will grace my ears immediately after.

It is not the music I have a problem with, it is the crap I find while youtubing for the music video. The dance in Beyonce's video is highly sexualized and by all means, she has every right to express herself in that way and I will continue to be entertained by her if she does. What upsets me is a three year old girl in a leotard imitating the dance, and then being put on youtube for everyone to see. What is wrong with this little girl's parents? She is three and already being treated and viewed as a sexual object. This kind of exploitation kills me, truly kills me. Don't get me wrong, dance is fantastic along with many other types of self expression. But this little girl is not being asked to express herself. She is being asked to imitate a sexualized dance. It makes me realize how early this indoctrination to popular sex culture happens for girls. They are trying to seem like something at such a young age that there is never any time for them to just be themselves. I could say so much more but I will spare all of you.

By the end of the year, Bratz will probably be gone.  That leaves us with Barbie, among a few other doll kinds.

Thoughts anyone?

I don't know how other parents with little girls feel about all the Princess crap that is constantly crammed down their throats in this culture, but I have had enough.

A sample exchange between the bank teller and our resident 4 y/o:
BT: "Here's a pretty Princess sticker for you sweetie"
4yo: "But I like Cars" (seeing the other stickers in the basket)
BT: "Well, Princesses are for girls. Don't you like them? They're so pretty."

I realize that most of this is well-intended, and I've tried to politely reject Princess crap, to ask our friends and family not to give them Princess (or Bratz!) toys, etc. None of this seems to work. The world is bent on turning all little girls into tiara-wearing Princess-worshippers. After getting into a number of arguments over this, I've developed a set of stock responses to all the claims people make in favor of Princesses:

Princesses are nice to everyone
1) Being nice to everyone is a female virtue that often works to disadvantage women in the real world. And anyway, one can "be nice" to those who deserve it and still kick some ass when necessary. Look at Princess Fiona (who is really an anti-princess, in many ways), for example.
2) Classic fairy tale Princesses (including the Disney variety) generally are nice. But the pop-culture notion of a princess has come to involve the idea of a materialistic, spoiled, self-centered, bossy little brat who will do anything to get her way. And we're supposed to be all indulgent of these characteristics, as long as the child displaying them is cute enough?

Princesses are beautiful and have beautiful voices
Being beautiful and having a beautiful voice is not the most important thing about a woman.

Princesses are "sweet"
What exactly does "sweet" mean here? Sexually pure? Acquiescent and passive? Tolerant of inconsiderate, rude, and/or abusive behavior?

Princess play boost a girl's self-esteem
Traditional princess mythology ties a girl's self-esteem to her appearance and her desirability from the perspective of the prince. In our culture this translates into the necessity to be thin, pretty, and white.
As for the pop-culture princess ideal, a spoiled and self-involved child may initially appear to be confident and have high self-esteem. However, there's a world of difference between being self-centered and having high self-esteem. A small amount of experience in the real world will shatter her vision of this imaginary world where she's the boss of everyone, and then she'll have no other skills or abilities to fall back on, having put all her eggs in the pretty, pretty princess basket.

I am a 14 year old feminist, and for Halloween this year i was a Choice Avenger. I live in Maryland and NARAL Pro Choice Maryland has a "thing" (I'm not sure what to call it) called Choice Avengers. They are female superheroes fighting for choice in Maryland. i dressed as one, and told all the people at the houses i trick-or-treated at that i was a pro choice super hero. I got many "good job's!" and "oh yeah's!" and some people gave me extra candy because they like my beliefs! I wanted to share this because i recently became addicted to feministing and i thought you guys might get a kick out of this!

*X-posted on Michigan Liberal

What a fantastic idea:

Take Your Daughters to the Polls Day is a national campaign, inspired by the same folks who brought you the now infamous Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Right now, with women and women's issues being at the forefront of this year's election, what more apt time in our history is there than this to expose our daughters to the importance of democracy in action? Take Your Daughters to the Polls Day is the perfect way to let them know that they, too, can exercise their right to have a say and make a difference.

Personally, when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to turn 18 so that I could have my turn at making the polls shake. I remember feeling nothing but envy when my parents took to my elementary school's gym every so often, not to lob dodgeballs at opposing team members but rather to carefully select the leaders they thought would best represent them - not to mention me and my little brother - in the world of politics.

My sex, however, never played much a part in my desire to vote, until my educational journey brought me to the stories of Seneca Falls, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Catt Chapman, and, especially, the suffragist movement of the early 1900s. To think, courageous individuals like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns endured harassment, verbal threats, physical assaults and eventual incarceration just to obtain the right to pencil in a box on a piece of paper. It is a right which, by all theoretical accounts, should be guaranteed to everyone, anyway, without the need for a long and arduous uphill battle. It boggles a mind that is not easily boggled.

I don't think that many people will disagree with me when I say that this could be one of the most important elections in our lifetime, and especially so for women, who face the pivotal moment of having their rights either turned way back or fully restored. The likelihood is extremely high that the next President of the United States will have the opportunity to choose one, perhaps even two new members of the Supreme Court, which could have a profound effect on the status of a woman's right to choose in this country. We also face the prospect of seeing our country's first female Vice President, or even President, if nature has its way with Oldie McOlderson. All these factors continue to reinforce the profound role that women play in our democracy, and what the cards will hold for our daughters as they rise to take their place in a world that has not always so warmly accepted the presence of women.

I hope that everyone with a young daughter out there will forget about buying her a Bratz doll for Christmas, and instead take her to the polls for a far more important gift. In spite of all the progress we've made - and I don't need to tell you that we've come a long way from corseted, rib-suffocating days of yore - we're still very much a society that puts a stronger value on breast implants than breast cancer awareness. When the world wants us to push our daughters to the (stripper) pole, let's push back by taking them to the polls.

When November 4 comes rolling around this year (and it's closer than you think), be sure to pick up your daughter after school and take her to vote with you. It is my sincerest hope that we'll be seeing Hillary and Chelsea, Jennifer and Kate, Barack, Malia Ann and Natasha, and yes, even Sarah, Bristol and Willow together at the polls.

Saw an ad for this when my sister turned on the TV (Cartoon Network, I think.) And...just...gods.

They're like the unholy spawn of Bratz and My Little Pony.

What the hell. Is there even a market?

(Warnings for Flash and sound.)

ABC News: Inside the Minds of Teens Who Post Sexual Images of Themselves.

"Article starts: Despite specific warnings from prosecutors, the 15-year-old Ohio girl who was arrested last week and accused of sending nude pictures of herself to classmates probably doubted that she could ultimately be forced to register as a sex offender under state law, psychologists and Internet experts say."

TIME has an article with this namesake on the sexuality of teenage girls. It's a worth-while read, so go on.

This part stood out to me:
"Like steak-house owners trying to raise vegetarians, we idealize youth and sexiness but recoil if our young want to be sexy. What has complicated things recently is that girls are literally getting older younger. Their bodies are hitting physical maturity sooner, often before they are ready to deal with the issues of sexuality that go along with it."

Exactly, folks!