The misogyny of becoming a wife

I saw this beautiful piece of misogyny today: http://www.etsy.com/listing/60630739/father-of-the-bride-gift-father-of-bride?ref=v1_other_1

It reads: Today a bride, tomorrow a wife, forever your little girl. I love you Dad!

It may be touching to some at first, but think about the underlying message.  Here is a woman getting married and she is telling her father, don't worry, I'm still "your little girl".  The message behind this is extremely irritating.  Why would you have to reassure your father of this, especially on your wedding day if there wasn't an underlying message of "I once belonged to you, but now I belong to this man."  If this is not the case, then why would you give it to your father on your wedding day!!??  Of course, this goes so perfectly with a father "giving away" their daughter.  This archaic practice really needs to stop.

Ladybug Larva

I am starting to see these in my garden. You may know them better during their adult stage, as your friendly neighborhood ladybug.  Here they are as larva:

Very Large Chrysalis

While gardening this past week, we stumbled upon this very large chrysalis.  I'm raising it inside and am very excited to see what comes out of it! I'll post an update when something finally does.

Edit: This lovely creature past away about 1.5 weeks after this post was written.  I was deeply disappointed with I noticed it stopped wiggling.  I wanted to make sure it was dead, so I waited a little bit, but eventually it did get a slight odor and I decided to dissect it, hoping to gain some insight as to a formal identification.  Unfortunately, it was already badly decomposed (and much stinkier once it was opened up), so I was unable to identify it.  Hopefully I can find another one soon and raise it with more care.  

I'm not sure why anywhere along the lines, what happened in Steubenville was not told to be wrong... in our culture or in the lives of these teenagers. This is clearly a rape issue, but I think there is another issue at play as well. Many people in our society think that being an athlete makes you a better person. Think about it... would you view someone different if you knew they were a "star athlete" rather than a non-athlete? It may be that athletic heroes are so ingrained in us as children, but this is just one example of how pervasive it is. What happened here and during the aftermath was mind-boggling. I think I need an evolutionary psychologist to weigh in on it. Is it that the "strong and athletic" will lead you during warfare, protect you, and be better at getting food... thus it is better to have them around? Does this still apply subconsciously today and is therefore why star players are held in such high esteem?

Please read more about this issue here at: Rant Against the Random

Broken Glass

Beware of Broken Glass: the Media's Double Standard for Women at the Top.

Quote from the article:
"Through the lens of gender, it’s the soft skills that are the most egregiously distorted, and the same behaviors get translated very differently: the cold woman is the stoic man. A woman who makes a gut-based decision is acting on emotion; a man doing the same thing is acting on instinct. There is no equivalent of the word hysterical that can be applied to men — but irrational, emotional behavior that betrays a lack of impulse control is often celebrated when it’s men talking about other men."
Great Article: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4070338/beware-of-broken-glass-the-medias-double-standard-for-women-at-the-top

Curve Campaign

I understand the sentiment behind "Real Women Have Curves".  It is meant to empower women and let them know that their body is normal and that what they see in magazines isn't necessarily something to dream of.  I get that it is meant to impart self-esteem and confidence of women with all body types.  However, I think the images and catch phrases that go along with it are missing the point on two major levels.

1) The alienation and associated self-esteem issues that curvier women feel is a universal feeling among women.  By choosing to market "curvy" as real is essentially doing exactly what was done to you to women of other body types: alienating them and making them feel like crap about their body.  In the same way that you can't control how hippy you are or how big your butt is (well, to some degree we can!), skinny women can not control how flat-chested they are or how bony their butts are.  Why market yourself as "real" and make them feel like shit about their body in the mean time?  Why can't everyone be "real"?  Being curvy doesn't make you any more real.

2) Much of this campaign screams to me that curvy women actually want rebrand themselves... not for themselves, but for men! It's quite mind-boggling.  I thought the whole idea of moving away from images of "sexy women in magazines" was to show society that a woman's body is mostly different from that airbrushed outcome we often see in the media.  However, it's turned into "oh no, don't make them the sex object... make me the sex object!!! See, you can put your hands on me in better places cause I have more!!! Pick me, pick me!!" It's ridiculous.  Our bodies do not exist to please men, so why are you rebranding yourself as a sex object?

The image below is a perfect example. It's basically saying "don't go for me for what I offer as a person. Pick me based on my body! You can't possibly like that skinny girl you are with for anything other than a preconceived notion and media-construed subconscious implanted in you as to what makes a woman sexy.  If you were a real man you would be superficial and pick only women who would be fun to have sex with!"

Pocket Guide to Girl and Boy Stuff

Someone uploaded the contents of these books on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/tES7p.  These are The Pocket Guide to Girl Stuff and The Pocket Guide to Boy Stuff, both by Bart King.

I've been wanting to make a post about this for a while because you see these books all the time.  Now let's discuss the contents of the two books.  "Stuff" that pertains to boys: Activities, Experiments, Fireworks and Explosives (we'll get to that later), flying things, gadgets, tools, and toys, gross stuff, riddles, sland, and weapons.  "Stuff" that pertains to girls: Boys, Friends, Cliques, Secrets, and Gossip, Fun stuff to do, Nicknames, Handwriting, words, and doodles, Beauty, Hair, and Shopping.

In the Girls Stuff book there are 43 pages devoted to boys.  Yes, you read that correctly. A part of me think that fine.. let's teach girls about boys.  Perhaps it's understandable that each gender should be more understanding of the other. However, then wouldn't you expect the boy book to have stuff about girls?? Yeah, you would... but no, it does not.  Why would boys need to grow up to be men that understand women?  So, let's take a look at some gems. The first important thing that a girl should learn about boys is that they are actually cooler than girls and are no competition to you since you like shopping marathons and he likes science experiments (as we've already learned). Here's the text 

"Guy friends can be easier to hang out with than girls.  Even though boys may not be better listeners, you don't have to worry as much about what you say around them. That's partly because the odds are that boys are not necessarily big gossipers.  Plus, you probably won't be competing with guy friends, so there's less friction" (p. 23). 

I like how when girls talk about things, they are gossiping, but when boys talk about things they are just, well, talking.  Also, I'm sick of society pitting girls against each other. It needs to end.

Here's the next amazing bit of advice... when a guy wants more than you do, it's because YOU led him on.  

"Don't let a guy friend assume that being your friend means more than it does, though.  A guy might fall madly in love with a girl if he believes the girl is friends with him because she likes him".  (p. 24)

What in the actual fuck?  So if a guy starts to like me more than a friend it's because I let him assume it?

One part that was positive was on p. 50:

"MARRIAGE?! Hey slow down there! You should stay single and independent for another decade or so."  

Good to know that he speaks to independence, but I'm not so sure that singledom and independence are mutually exclusive.  They may be for some people, but I would have preferred some distinction there.

Bart did have many female acknowledgements at the end of the book and started out by noting that his sisters had a lot of input in the book, which is great. 

Moving on....... 

What came first?  Does the market research show these differences in interest between boys and girls because that's what they actually enjoy or because that's how the marketers have always marketed things and therefore they end up with generations of boys and girls with specifically narrowed interests?  I'm just not understanding how in modern society, we want to teach boys experiments and technology, but not girls?  People wonder why less girls are interested in science and the like.  I don't think it stems from the school.  It stems from society and how girls feel they are perceived or how they should be.  

Also, why are boys learning about explosives and weapons? Do we really need to teach them that in order to grow up to be a man, they need to be down with these things?  I would not want my child (or any child) to feel that in order for him to be a man, he needs to be associated with violence.

I wish there was a little more equality in these books. The boys should have learned about girls if the girls are learning about boys. I have not read the sections on beauty and shopping, but it sincerely annoys me that these are even things that we want to inundate our girls with.  He might actually put a positive spin on it, but I think putting these things into their mind at such a young age is never a good thing.  The things that make you female are not the beauty products and outward appearances you present or the clothes you wear.

Colin Stokes gives a great Ted talk about the roles of men and women in movies and how they can be role models for "our sons".  He get's it.

Happy Birthday

Today, we celebrate the birth of arguably one of the most intelligent people who ever lived. His ideas about the laws of the universe have permeated many aspects of our lives and our understanding of the world around us... whether we realize it or not. The seeds of the Enlightenment may have begun in the minds of people who finally understood the Universe. Thanks and Happy Birthday Isaac Newton.

My review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I come into this review as a fan of The Lord of the Rings movies.  I watched all the movies one time, but thoroughly enjoyed them and plan to watch them again shortly.  I am by no means an expert on the books or of the fantasy genre in general, so here is the take of a non-obsessed LOTR fan (you know who you are).

The movie started out slow just as in LOTR, but unlike the latter, I felt myself bored because the character development was weak, especially for the main character of Bilbo Baggins.  I was having trouble following his motives or the choices he made leading up to where he was in his life.  Additionally, we were supposed to be rallying around the entire premise of the movie, which was that the Dwarves were going to fight to get their kingdom back, however I didn't really care all that much about the fate of the 12 dwarf men.  Again, this is possibly due to the lack of character development of the dwarves... maybe there were too many for you to really care about any of them as individuals.  Maybe focusing more on one or two of them would have made it easier to rally behind them.

So, I didn't find myself rallying for the main characters of the movie, however I tried to enjoy it.  I really did.  The computer graphics were great, but oftentimes I felt that the movie was just trying to show off the skills of the CG department, rather than follow a logical series of events.  There was no reason for the group to get constantly attacked and yet we had to endure fight scene after fight scene... which seemed like a cheap way to want to put in CG.  Not to mention that they were very drawn out (not that we'd expect them not to be), but they got boring.  I don't mind fight scenes, when they fit within the context of the story, but this became painful and was teetering on becoming an action movie rather than a fantasy movie.

Another thing that kind of bugged me was the lack of female characters.  I'm not saying there needs to be a love interest (that is cliche as well), but why not have a few female dwarf soliders?  Or why not have one of the trolls be female?  In the end, the only talking role by a woman was that of Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett), who I think was an elf queen.  To top it all off... the first thing Gandolf says to her is a comment about her looks... something along the lines of (paraphrasing): "It's been so long since I've seen you, but you haven't aged a bit. You look just as beautiful as ever."  As if an elfish queen is worried about growing older.  I thought female body-image was a construction of modern culture... surely a fantasy land would not have such pettiness, but alas they do.  Perhaps female obsession with their own image is just too strong to conquer through the imagination of Peter Jackson (and the other screenplay writers).  I rolled my eyes.

In conclusion, good CG, but lack of proper character development or a captivating story-line.  Surely LOTR  FANS!!!! will go and love it, but to the casual fantasy fans, it will fall short.

Here's a picture of Galadriel being "as beautiful as ever", cause you know, that's what women want to hear: