Little Feminists – Sabrina the Teenage Witch

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Feminism, Good Role Models, Little Feminists, Media, Melissa Joan Hart, Real Women, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Television

Little Feminists is back! For all of you out there who wonder what the hell they can show their kids without completely embedding unhealthy gender roles into them, there is Little Feminists.  But hey – they need more than Pepper Ann and The Paper Bag Princess.  What about their pre-teen years?  Enter Sabrina. 

Sabrina the Teenage Witch ran from 1996 – 2003 and focused on a girl who had to balance being a normal teenage and being a witch.  Pretty simple, right?  But this show sets a great example because all of the main characters were female.  Not only that, but they were strong, powerful women.  Though this might seem like it’s barely enough to qualify a show as being feminist, just take a look at all the other shows and movies out there.  Though they exist there just aren’t that many that focus solely on women and women’s lives.  While all of the other characters on Sabrina (especially the men) are kind of hapless and innocent, Sabrina and her Aunts Hilda and Zelda use their powers unapologetically.  The control and direct their own lives, as well as the lives of those around them.  They see no problem in using their powers to take control of any situation.

Throughout the series Sabrina dates a couple of different men, who are admittedly important to the storyline. But what’s often more important is what she is doing in her life.  In high school, she actually breaks up with her boyfriend in order to focus more on her studies.  We watch as she goes to college and even enters the working world.  Funnily enough, Sabrina’s life is pretty realistic, other than the magic of course.  She learns who she is, grows a lot as a character, and sees many people come and go through her life.  Her life isn’t over the top glamourous – it’s actually pretty much what you’d expect from the average middle-class teenager.

Why else is this show a good example? Check out that non-traditional family unit.  Sabrina’s two aunts serve as her parents, and they frequently refer to themselves as co-parents.  The three women form a family that seems stronger than most, and the bond between the two sisters is extremely strong.  Though they often clash, the show emphasizes that Hilda and Zelda have lived together for 600 years.  It’s implied that theirs is the true partnership; while both date a series of men, the relationship between Hilda and Zelda is the primary one for each.  Sabrina becomes a part of this bond, and she is able to learn from both women.  And by the way, Zelda is an extremely gifted scientist while Hilda becomes a successful business owner.

And you know what else?  The show never gives Sabrina an eating disorder episode or anything like that.  It’s just unnecessary – sometimes I think those ‘very special episodes’ only normalize and feed those feelings.  But Sabrina stays confident about her looks throughout the show, even as they change.  In fact, Melissa Joan Hart rocks a hot normal body throughout the entire series.

So when your pre-teens feel they’ve grown out of Pepper-Ann (though, really, who would?) give them Sabrina! She’s actually a pretty awesome role model.

When I grow up, I want to be a Raging Granny!

Tags

Activism, Feminism, Raging Grannies, social justice, Stephen Harper

Happy Monday everyone! Not that it’s happy for students – it’s the last week of classes and that means that every spot in the library is taken.  It means that we’re all existing on coffee, fast food and granola bars.  I personally have eaten at least 50 mini-eggs in the last 3 days.  I’m writing my last few essays furiously – only 13 pages to go – but I thought I’d take a break to chat about some really cool feminist activists.  Last week, I saw a presentation from The Raging Grannies.  They’re an awesome group of older women who use humour, satire and theatre to gain attention for their causes.  They dress in over the top old lady outfits and they sing these amazing protest songs.  They’re a non-violent group that advocates for peace, the environment and women’s issues.   

There are Gaggles of Grannies all over the world, though they originated in Victoria, British Columbia.  Older women are often marginalized and ignored in our society.  We expect them to retire to a life that is based around home and family.  Political issues and social justice are just not a part of that picture.  But not for these ladies – the Grannies play on that stereotype and kick ass dressed in old lady skirts and shawls.  They tell it like it is, and their songs are full of sharp satire and witty reflections.  Canadian Grannies have been extremely clear about their dislike for Stephen Harper.  They’ve been arrested, they’ve been detained and they come back like champs.  

The Grannies are so inspirational – I can’t wait to be old enough to join! I actually saw one of them on the bus the other day, and was much too starstruck to go up to her.  I giggled and whispered like Ryan Gosling was sitting in front on me.  As feminists, we tend to separate ourselves into waves – as third wave feminists we often feel we don’t have very much in common with those who came before us.  But the Raging Grannies show us we have a lot in common – and we should work together.  So get in touch with your local gaggle next time you’re working on a cause.  You’ll be inspired and reinvigorated! Go Grannies!

Rest In Peace, Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Rich, Deaths, Feminism, In Memoriam, Influential Women, Lesbianism, Poetry

Be A Feminist wants to take a moment to note the passing of Adrienne Rich.  She was an amazing poet, essayist and feminist thinker.  She contributed so much to women’s movement and was extremely influential.  She brought her politics into her poetry, including statements on women’s and lesbian’s oppression.  She was brave, she was outspoken and she was an inspiration.  The feminist and poetic communities that she helped to build will sorely miss her voice.  As part of the new generation of feminists, we thank you for all of of your hard work.  Many thanks and much love to Adrienne Rich.

Happy International Women’s Day!

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Activism, Cultivating Culture, Feminism, International Women's Day, Ottawa, Public Service Alliance of Canada, Stephen Harper, Vagina Monologues, Vaginas Against Violence, women

Happy Women’s Day everyone 🙂  I love Women’s Day.  We get to reach out to other women and embrace each other and ourselves.  We get to reflect on how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.  I feel like it’s the one day a year that we can really embrace the idea of sisterhood.  So, in light of that, instead of my usual doom and gloom that tries to convince you to be a feminist, I’m going to celebrate all the awesome women that I know who are working on a local level for change.  And they’re doing it right now!

A campus group called Vaginas Against Violence are working hard on their presentation of the Vagina Monologues.  The show is on this weekend, and they’re donating all proceeds to the Ottawa Sexual Assault Centre.  I’ve seen the show before, and personally know some of the women involved,  and they are all around awesome. Campus and Ottawa feminists alike are proud of you!

The PSAC Ottawa Regional Women’s Committee is holding a rally today to protest the Harper government’s treatment of women.  They are especially concerned with how all the cuts to different programs and budgets have affected women specifically.  They are meeting on the corner of Elgin and Wellington at noon today if anybody is interested!  Check out their website for more info or just good IWD 2012 Ottawa.

A whole group of activists are using this week to draw attention to issues of violence against women, radicalized women, poor women, women and labour issues and much more.  There are coffee houses, bake sales, movie nights, demonstrations, human libraries, sex positivity shows and round table discussions.  I can’t believe how hard they are all working!

As for me, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working with a great group of women to write and develop a media literacy presentation for high school aged girls.  We want to show young women and girls that the media portrayals of women they see are absolutely constructed.  We want to expose how absolutely fake portrayals of women in the media are, and how deeply they really affect our society.  We’re actually giving the presentation tomorrow, and I have to say I have high hopes.  I hope we’ll actually reach a couple of them, or at the least, that none of them will throw tomatoes at us!

Happy Women’s Day everyone! Enjoy it!

 

You Could Win A Mail Order Bride!

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Contests, Czech women, Feminism, International Women's Day, Mail-order Brides, Q104 FM Halifax, The Male is in the Czech

Guess what? If you’re a lucky, lonely Haligonian (that means you’re from Halifax, for all you non-Canadians!) you can enter Q104 FM’s contest to win a Czech mail order bride!  Yup.  That’s right.  You lucky bachelors out there get an all expenses paid trip to the Czech republic and a membership with a company that sets you up with Czech women
looking to marry foreign men. Mail order bride systems are absolutely ridiculous and generally pretty exploitative.  Most of the women in these systems are from developing countries and are looking to marry men in developed nations.  They often want to escape economic conditions that are less than ideal – especially in eastern european nations.  While most women are in the workforce, they still earn considerably lower wages than men do.  In fact, in Russia women only make 43% of what men earn.  And of course, these brides are often pretty young because unmarried women are considered old maids around 22 years old.  Once these marriages do occurs, women are often alone in their new country without any family or friends other than those of their husband.

Now, I’m not going to take away any women’s right to choose to arrange a marriage and improve her economic situation.  And maybe find love all in the same go.  And I’m not going to say these never work.  There are probably lots of examples for both really great and really awful results.  But the whole system is a little problematic in that it creates a sense that the woman should be forever grateful that the man choose her, and helped her to start a whole new life.

But the worse part is for Q104 to offer this as a prize in one of their contests.  Whoever thought this up should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.  Making a woman a prize to be won might be the worst case of objectifying I have ever heard of.  And look at that poster – she’s in a bikini! They’re pandering to the idea that this Czech woman is going to be young, extremely hot, sexually available and totally into any bachelor they throw her way.  And let me tell you…I checked out the bachelors.  They all seem like pretty average, normal people but I can’t see a woman who looks like that being into any of them.  This whole thing is creating a male fantasy and women are the losers for it.

And here’s the kicker – the contest ends tomorrow which just so happens to be International Women’s Day.  I hope you all object to this as much s I do – sign the petition to stop this at http://www.change.org/petitions/q104-end-the-czech-contest-now

Who still asks why we need Feminism? Disgusting crap like this is why.

Oscar Fails

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2012, Academy Awards, Angelina Jolie, Feminism, gender, Oscars, The Help, women's stories

Last night was the Oscars, and I’m sure there have already been a million blog posts about them.  They were the same as usual for me – had only seen about half of the movies nominated, skipped the beginning, chatted about the dresses and made a crap load of predictions.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but I always feel like the Oscar nominated movies in the Best Picture catagory really lack female-driven stories.  It’s gotten a bit better since they expanded the list and allowed more than 5 movies to be nominated but it’s still pretty bad.  These films are considered the absolute best movies of the year, and all too often they lack narratives that seriously examine and expose the realities of women’s lives.  This year we had nine nominated films, and The Help is the only movie that does this.  Really? Only one out of nine is a film about women?  I mean, I saw The Artist and Midnight in Paris and they were amazing and I’m sure Moneyball was good but they’re all about men.  They all speak about men’s experiences and women only stand in as secondary characters.

And Best Director? Not a single woman nominated.  In fact, other than the actress categories, the only places where more women were nominated than men was in Costume Design and Documentary Short.  That’s only two, people.  I’m not saying the Academy is intentionally sexist or that they don’t respect women’s work. All I’m saying is that when it comes to film, we still seem to be the secondary players.  Women’s lives make for amazing stories – just look at the wide variety of films in the best actress nominations.  Yet only one of those films (The Help) was nominated for Best Picture, while three of the films nominated for Best Actor were also up for Best Picture.

I think it reflects the position of women in society today; we are the dreaded “other”, not the norm.  Men’s stories are the norm and women’s are an aberration.  Maybe next year the film industry will realize that we make up half the population and start making great films about us.  And this is only when looking at women – I could write a whole other blog about racism and the oscars.

On a side note, I want to point out that Angelina Jolie is should no longer be held up as a standard of beauty in North America.  She is completely emaciated; when she was presenting, all I could picture was a skeleton.  This photo only slightly shows it, but her arms had literally zero fat or muscle.  They were just bone.  Yes, her face is beautiful but she is not presenting a healthy body image to women.  As a humanitarian and UN representative, Jolie is a smart woman and I know she’s smart enough to understand how many women out there hold her up as their standard.  She should know better than to give them this to live up to.  Bad show, Jolie.

Film Review: Albert Nobbs

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Albert Nobbs, Feminism, Film Review, Glenn Close, Lesbianism, Oscar Movies, Transgender, women and work

Last night I went to the movies (you see, now that my grad school applications are in the mail I now have time to both update my blog and socialize) with my girlfriends, and we just picked a random movie.  It was Albert Nobbs, directed by Rodrigo Garcia and I would definitely recommend it to anyone. It was just about two hours long, and none of us were ready for it to end; we were all so invested in the story and especially the main character. Glenn Close play the Albert Nobbs, a woman who lives as a man in 1850’s Dublin in order to work as a waiter.  She was absolutely amazing – with very few lines, Close manages to convey such a sense of desperation and loneliness.  

The loneliness factor is important, and is what brings me to my comparison today.  I found the storyline of this movie very similar to that of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well Of Loneliness.  The novel has been hotly debated; it has either been called ‘the bible of lesbianism’ and lauded for examining the lesbian experience, or criticized for showing only the unhappy side of homosexuality.  I actually felt the same way when watching this movie.  It was a story about a fragile man who seemed quite simple, but had a wealth of rich feeling buried beneath the surface.  Without giving away the ending, it is a story full of sadness, and portrays a very lonely life.  Whether or not Albert would have identified as transgendered in today’s world was the subject of debate after the movie, but in the end it doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is how many issues this movie touches on.  It touches on issues of women and work, as well as gender based violence.  As well, we see a character who completely identifies as a member of the opposite sex, and has taken steps to live that way.  We also see Albert dream of a nuclear family, where he has a wife and children.  While I’m not sure that we needed another heartbreaking story about someone who doesn’t identify as cisgendered, it can be argued that these stories of loneliness need to be told, so that we can learn from them.   Either way, if you’re thinking about seeing it, go for it.  It’ll make you think, and Albert Nobb’s face will stick with you for a couple of days.

TED Talks: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

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business, female entrepreneurs, Feminism, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, small business, TED Talks, war zones, women

This video was referred to me by a friend who is really into http://www.ted.com and I wanted to re-post it for your viewing pleasure.  I absolutely love watching women discuss subjects that are typically masculine in nature, such as business and economics, and Gayle Tzemach Lemmon does it here beautifully.  This video is only about 15 minutes long, but it says a whole lot.  Discussing female entrepreneurs in war zones, she points out that women really are the economy after a conflict because the majority of the population is now female.  The main message here is that female entrepreneurs are amazing, and they aren’t the aberration or exception we tend to think they are.  What comes to mind for me is the idea of female killers or assailants.  Whenever a man kills, he is just called the murderer or the suspect, yet when a women kills her gender is emphasized over and over.  This is because we don’t expect women (supposed nurturers) to be violent.  It works the same with female entrepreneurs…we have to point out that they’re women because we really just don’t expect it.  As social sciences is my main area of study, I can’t really comment on the business side of this talk, but I love her main message: Women entrepreneurs aren’t the exception, they’re the majority.

5 Reasons Canadian Feminists Hate Stephen Harper

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abortion, Canadian Government, childcare, Conservatives, Feminism, Long form census, Politics, Stephen Harper

It’s no secret that many within the Canadian women’s movement are extremely unhappy with our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.  The neo-conservatives would have you unconsciously believe that we’re all screaming harpy man-hating bitches who just need to calm down.  While I have been known to rant (see below post about childcare and women and work) I have extremely good reasons for being unhappy with our current leadership.  So, for anyone who needed a clear and easy list that outlines how Stephen Harper and his government have hurt the Canadian women’s movement, here it is!

1.    He eliminated the long form census.  While this may not seem like a huge deal, it actually really is.  This is where we get all of our information about women and how they live their lives in Canada.  It’s because of the long form census that we know women are still doing the majority of childcare and domestic duties, and that they’re making less money than their male counterparts.  The long form census points out the differences that race and social class make in women’s lives.  Though it costs money, the long form census gives us valuable insight into the lives of Canadians that we no longer have.  If we don’t know about the problems, how can we fix them?

2.     He thinks childcare has nothing to do with the state.  If you’ve read some of my other posts, you know that I’m a big proponent of publicly-funded childcare.  There are numerous benefits to women and to families, and these advantages have been proven in countries where such a system exists.  This system had been on the table in Canada before Harper was elected, but his government opted for the Childcare Tax Benefit, which gives families $100 dollars a month for children under six.  In what universe is that enough for childcare?  It’s just not, and it leaves women in the exact same position that they were before.  It’s not a real solution at all.  And for some women, it even pushed them into the next tax bracket because guess what?  That money is counted as income, and you have to pay tax on it!

3.     He’s pro-life.  While Mr. Harper has assured us that he won’t put the abortion issue on the table while he’s in power, his policies in foreign countries show that he is decidedly pro-life.  He has cut funding to all programs that provide contraception or abortion services in developing nations.  You have to read between the lines, but he says it’s all for the health and welfare of women.  While I believe that Harper won’t push the abortion issue in Canada, his actions are a precursor for future Conservative governments.  As citizens, if we continue to support this kind of thing, I’m sure that we will be voting on this issue again in the next 20 – 30 years.

4.     He cut funding to women’s advocacy groups.  Status of Women in Canada is a government funded group that promotes equality.  After coming into office the first time, he slashed their budget by 50 percent.  They were forced to shut down 12 of their 16 locations.  Why are people not more outraged by this? It’s been years since this happened, and I personally don’t remember any of it at the time.  If this isn’t a clear message, I don’t know what it.

5.     He declared women equal.  When he was elected, he declared that women were equal.  This is when we knew we were in trouble, and Stephen Harper showed his true colours.  While women have made great strides, we still have a long way to go and we need a leader that recognizes that.

And to sum it all up, all of these things show that Harper and his conservative government are slowly and quietly bringing Canadian society back to a separate-spheres model.  I’m not sure about you, but I’m not ready to give up a life in which I am allowed to inhabit both the home and the workplace.

Little Feminists – The Paper Bag Princess

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Fairy Tales, Feminism, Little Feminists, Media, Parenting, Princess, Princess Elizabeth, Robert Munsch, The Paper Bag Princess

It’s almost the New Year, and since I posted last I’ve written finals, flown across the country, and had two entirely separate Christmas days.  So it’s been a big couple of weeks, but I’ve really missed writing.  Since I’m at home for the holidays, I was out and about with my mom the other day, and saw one of my favourite childhood books on sale at Costco: The Paper Bag Princess By Robert Munsch.  Now, I’m sure you’ve seen the Halloween costumes – I personally have two friends who have made their own paper bag outfits over the past couple of years, but remember the story? It’s got an excellent female character in Elizabeth and sends a pretty awesome message to little kids.  At the beginning of the story, we see that Elizabeth is a fancy princess who wears really expensive clothes, and her fiancee is the equally snobby Prince Robert.  But when a dragon burns all of her clothes and steals Prince Robert for his afternoon snack, Elizabeth kicks it into high gear.  She makes herself an outfit out of a paper bag and bravely travels all the way to the dragon.  She then outwits and outsmarts him in order to save her fiancee.  She does this all on her own, and with great confidence.  At this point she’s already a great role model, but it gets even better! When Robert criticizes Elizabeth’s paper bag outfit and says she doesn’t look pretty enough, she kicks him to the curb.  I personally tend to hope that the dragon did, in fact, enjoy Prince Robert as a lovely dessert.

The Paper Bag Princess is a counter point to so many of the traditional fairy tales about Princes and Princesses.  In Munsch’s tale, we get a smart, cool girl who values herself and knows what she wants.  It’s my personal fear, as a feminist, that I’ll have a daughter who goes through a princess phase; I’ll be so torn between letting her be herself and be happy, and banning all of those awful Disney princesses outright.  Who knows which way I’ll choose, but I know for sure that I will counter her love for Cinderella with Princess Elizabeth.