Category: Society and Gender

“But there’s only girl stuff…”

Great article in reply to some New York Times freakout or another: http://saundramitchell.com/blog/2011/08/20/the-problem-is-not-the-books/.

I’ve stopped reading the big newspapers lamenting about how women are bad for books or books for women are bad for the world or whatever. I get the feeling they’re just ramping up publishing those things because they’ve figure female readers are the only people who will flock to talk about their newspaper if outraged, yet are unlikely to send a pipe bomb, or a lawsuit.

I am amazed by this whole “but there’s only stuff for girls” attitude. It pops up pretty regularly, in the most amazing places, phrased so you might miss the inherent wtf of the argument on first perusal. It’s everywhere from the complaints about breast cancer awareness getting more attention than prostate cancer to complaining about the selection of car seat covers in Target.

(Not that I think better prostate cancer awareness is a bad thing, but really, the solution to improve it isn’t to bitch about breast cancer awareness.)

 

Dogs and smurfs

Important point boiled down to simple, easy to understand concepts: Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously, by Max Barry

 

Gender roles for men

Charlie Glickman has an excellent post on his blog about gender roles for men: http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/05/the-performance-of-masculinty/

It gives some great insight into how harmful for men, even heterosexual cisgender men, gender roles can be. In the end, strong “rules” about sexuality and gender hurt everyone. Yeah, the rules hurt some groups more than others, but in the end, they hurt everyone at least some.