feminist blogs

Mom, Disney is a sexist company, isn’t it.

Out of the mouths of babes, and 9 year olds, come important truths. But I like to wait it out, rather than presume, so I reply with:

Why do you say that, honey?

On Pixie Hollow I want to buy pants for my fairies. I have the credits, but Pixie Hollow won’t let fairies wear pants.

But they have pants for sale?

Only to the Sparrow Men. You can buy pants for your boy fairies but not for your fairies.  Even if you have the money.

Can the boys buy skirts?

No. So it’s even more sexist, isn’t it!

Momentarily, I congratulate my self that my own 4th grader is developing a discrimination detector.

Then, I come over to the computer to make sure she hasn’t missed something in the game. Maybe she’s just doing something wrong in the game that is preventing her from buying pants for her fairy.

Together, we go through the process — my daughter earned the game points, she went to the game store, and she can’t buy pants for her pixies.

Thanks for the friendly “reminder” of what girls can’t do, Pixie Hollow.

As designed, the game only lets players dress their fairies in dresses wings, shoes, and bows, while the Sparrow Men can have only pants, shirts, and wings.

(The name ‘Sparrow Men” comes from the book Peter Pan. Why they are not sparrowboys, or simply fairoes instead of fairies, I don’t know.)

This is what we parents call a “learning opportunity”.

Is Pixie Hollow’s “No Pants for Girls” Rule intentional sexism?

Pixie Hollow’s dress code  may well be “benevolent sexism” or “enlightened sexism”. It may even be unintentional sexism, if  the whole constraint is a technological oversight. Maybe the Sparrow Men module was developed as an add-on and they didn’t think to integrate all the pieces?

The cause of the pants prohibition for fairies may be rather benign. It’s not like we’re imagining some malevolent, Taliban-inspired product manager decreeing that girls fairies may not wear pants because it isn’t “appropriate” in Pixie Hollow. Maybe it never occurred to them that fairies might want to wear pants.

However, it doesn’t matter whether someone was overtly, consciously sexist or not. The game is sexist. It imposes its own gendered norms for what is kind of pixie appearance is appropriate. For no reason at all.

As Joe Gerstandt explains, it’s the outcome that counts. If an outcome creates a sexist or racist experience, even if not consciously intended by the creators, it is still sexist, and still needs to be changed.

My daughter and I have talked about the Fairy Dress Code issue at length now. She’s done a little research, and determined that there’s just no reason why girl fairies can’t wear pants. Although most of the books about fairies depict the fairies (mostly all female) in dresses, skirts, or flower petals (which are themselves skirt-like), there is no fairy queen or kind who has decreed that girl fairies can’t wear pants.

So there’s something wrong in the real world.

Do Pixie Dress Codes really matter?

You may think it’s silly to be concerned that in an online game, the girl fictional creatures are unable to do something so simple as wear pants, while the boy fictional creatures can. But it’s not that silly.

First, in the ‘up close an personal’ perspective, my kid has earned the points, they are her fairies, why can’t she dress them as she pleases?

Second, I don’t want my kid to have to confront sexism in her toys. Her dad and I have gone to a lot of trouble to raise her to understand that her sex, her gender performance, her race, and her other ‘categorizes’ should never be barriers to what she wants to do or who she wants to be.

Sexist Dress Codes: Real manifestations of real obstacles

Girls especially, but sometimes boys too, begin to notice that girls and boys are treated differently. They know this in their hearts, and they feel it in their experience, but they often don’t “see” gendering or discrimination in material and concrete ways that they can easily grok.

My daughters still find it hard to believe that there was no girls’ soccer team when I was in high school, that it was only in 1973 that women were ‘allowed’ to keep their names when they got married, and that I keep getting mail addressed to Mr. & Mrs. DearHusband, rather than Dr. Harquail and Mr. DearHusband. And those are only the visible, superficial manifestations… don’t even get me started on the number of girls in my 6th grader’s accelerated math class.

Yes, we know that Pixie Hollow is a completely sexist universe.

The entire Pixie Hollow game is sexist, as is the book it was based on and the Disney franchise that it extends. Just check out the list, here, of fun things you can do in Pixie Hollow.

[Note: I'm trying to balance out my kid's experience by having her play Call of Duty 2 with her dad.  Just kidding. Actually, I take solace in the Star Wars fantasy play where they all fight over who gets the red light saber and thus gets to be the Jedi "Master".]

In the grand scheme of sexism, the issue of pants being forbidden for fairies is a really small one. But on Pixie Hollow, it’s a big deal. An important element of the game revolves around “adorning” your pixie avatar. So why are choices for that adornment limited along gender lines?

June 11th is Wear The Pants Day

Today, of all days, this dress code at Pixie Hollow is annoying my daughter.

Today is Wear The Pants Day, sponsored by my daughter’s favorite magazine, New Moon Girls.

New Moon Girls, the feisty and fun feminist magazine and online community made by and for girls, wants females to observe “Wear The Pants Day” this Friday (June 11th) because girls and women around the world are still forbidden or discouraged from wearing pants. Yes, it is 2010, and yet:

Girls and women are beaten, arrested and worse for wearing pants, even loose pants covered by skirts. Just last week, Indonesian women wearing jeans had their pants confiscated and were ordered to don long skirts. Schoolgirls in Sudan were flogged last fall for wearing pants, and while international outrage helped keep flogging at bay for Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, she must pay a fee for the crime of wearing pants. Last September, some 20 Ugandan women wearing pants were stripped and left to walk home in underwear.

Right here in the US, plenty of anti-pants expectations remain. Just two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on persistent bias against pants-wearing women in many white-collar professions such as law and finance, and polled readers about whether pants or skirts were more appropriate for women. Readers approved pants, but only by a narrow margin. Female college grads are still warned to stick to skirts to grease the skids to the top in many professions. And girls and women in conservative religious communities face formal and informal proscriptions against pants-wearing.

Just when you think that wearing pants or not is trivial, you remember it isn’t trivial.

Changing the Dress Code at Pixie Hollow

We are working on our letter to the folks at Pixie Hollow. We’ve heard that Sparrow Men were added to Pixie Hollow because some boys and girls wrote to Disney and asked that boys be explicitly included in Pixie Hollow.  While the explicit inclusion of male characters fixed the previous workaround (where players created androgynous-looking avatars and gave them ambiguous names so that the characters could be boy fairies), we’d like Disney to take their inclusion/ exclusion efforts a little further.

While we work on changing Disney’s online world, my girl is making a statement in the real world. Today, on Wear the Pants day, she’s going to school in …. a skirt.

She’s been convinced, by Svea’s letter on the New Moon Girls site, that by wearing a skirt she can make a point and learn something new. As Svea writes:

I made the decision to wear a skirt on June 11.I am going to wear a skirt for two reasons. First, to celebrate my freedom of being able to wear skirts, and second to imagine what it would be like if I had to wear a skirt every single day. Also, I wear pants every single day, so for me, having a wear the pants day would have virtually no symbolic meaning. It would be like having brush your teeth day or eat dinner day.

Dear Disney,

We’d like to be able to dress our pixies however we chose, thank you very much. And, we’d like to be able to wear what we want, regardless of someone else’s expectations of what’s gender appropriate.

That freedom should exist for fairies and sparrowguys in Pixie Hollow, and girls and boys everywhere in the world.

We’re not going to be able to change all the sexism in the game, or all the sexism in the world, but we’ll do our best to make a difference where we can.

See also:
Joe Gerstandt, on Our Time To Act: Disentangling Intentions from Outcomes, and

This article, which takes the discussion of sexism on Pixie Hollow pretty far, but leaves about 10% of the work for you to continue on your own: Tinker … bill? Disney fairies get a sex change: At long last, boys come to Pixie Hollow — and that’s a win for kids of both genders, by Mary Elizabeth Williams, on Slate’s Broadsheet

That is of course shorthand for who the dominator in the family might be. But in Sudan it's a real issue:

A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan's decency laws.

The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.

Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.

Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women's rights in Sudan — to defend herself.

The whole article is worth reading, especially for this part:

It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out "God is Great."

Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.

It tells us how very important it is that women work together to change things. Sadly, it also tells us a story about the power of violence.

Trousers are not discussed in the Quran, by the way. Even literalists seem to use their holy books rather creatively when it's in their interest.

Feminism is for lovers!

Hamid Karzai was far ahead in the vote count after last week's Afghan election -- Alive in Afghanistan (via Spencer) has reports on low turnout, violence, ballot box-stuffing and other issues.

"Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in 'Acquaintance Rape' Cases."

Skepticism about marriage is a new, hot trend? I was WAY ahead of this one...

Cecile Richards asks, "Does anyone else see the irony in the U.S. bishops wanting to define universal health care as covering everything except for what they don't support?"

On the struggles of international LGBT couples.

The number of men who have been raped in Congo has taken a sharp upturn in recent months.

Maria Gunnoe fought the coal industry -- and won.

Post Bourgie questions interpretations of Mad Men as feminist-friendly. Plus, Melissa at Women & Hollywood looks at whether the women writers on the show are actually in positions of influence.

The rise of the Muslim woman's travel memoir.

Where are all the men bloggers? (I have long wondered this myself. I am glad someone finally got up the nerve to pose the question. /sarcasm)

How do famous photos like 'Afghan Girl' shape Westerners' understanding of the East?

A domestic violence survivor is lobbying for more transparency in how public anti-violence funds are allocated.

Tami asks, "What's worse: Real Housewives of Atlanta, or race-based criticism of it?"

Anti-choicers in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa promise a "shock and awe" campaign against the local Planned Parenthood affiliate. Because apparently the clinic is perpetuating the evil that is affordable contraception and basic reproductive health services.

Amanda on gun nuts and masculine insecurity.

Melissa at Shakesville writes, "No, I don't hate men. It would, however, be fair to say that I don't easily trust them."

Breastfeeding moms held a nurse-in at Chick-fil-A.

Lawrence, Kansas is considering a city ordinance banning gender-identity discrimination.

How Sephora bends the definition of "natural."

A woman presented herself as a man to compete in judo competitions, but was stripped of her medals when her gender was revealed. It's just been reinstated.

Tens of thousands of Malians --men and women -- turned out to protest a law granting women equal rights in marriage.

A call for counter-protesters to defend Dr. Carhart's clinic in Nebraska.

On coping with street harassment as a trans woman.

Frau Sally Benz is looking to start an online feminist book club.

The Carnival of Feminists has been revived!

Nation in Uproar as Michelle Obama Wears Shorts on Vacation.

A new study compares blood-clot risks of oral contraceptives.

Muslimah Media Watch critiques how the media has covered Lubna al-Hussein.

Rachel has a great post in which she thinks big on what "choice" (in just about any context) means for women as they navigate a patriarchal culture.

There is, apparently, a Streep Effect.

Just in time for back-to-school, Campus Pride has a LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index.

Circle de Luz works to support Latina teens through junior high and high school and help them pursue further education.

What have you all been reading/writing this week?

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Sudanese police fired tear gas and beat women protesting at the trial Tuesday of a female journalist who faces a flogging for wearing trousers in public.

Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein could receive 40 lashes if found guilty of violating the country’s indecency law which follows a strict interpretation of Islam. The 43-year-old says the law is un-Islamic and ”oppressive,” and she’s trying to use her trial to rally support to change it.

”I am not afraid of flogging. … It’s about changing the law,” Hussein said, speaking to The Associated Press after a hearing Tuesday.

Hussein said she would take the issue all the way to Sudan’s constitutional court if necessary, but that if the court rules against her and orders the flogging, she’s ready ”to receive (even) 40,000 lashes” if that what it takes to abolish the law.

Hussein was among 13 women arrested July 3 in a raid by the public order police on a popular cafe in Khartoum. Ten of the women were fined and flogged two days later. But Hussein and two others decided to go to trial.

In an attempt to rally support, Hussein printed invitations to diplomats, international media, and activists to attend her trial which opened last week. She also resigned from her job in the U.N.’s public information office in Khartoum, declining the immunity that went along with the job to challenge the law.

Around 100 supporters, including many women in trousers as well as others in traditional dress, protested outside the court Tuesday.

And from another article:

Police have also cracked down on another woman journalist, Amal Habbani, who published an article in Ajrass al-Horreya newspaper (Bells of Freedom) entitled: “Lubna, a case of subduing a woman’s body.”

I am awed by Ms. Hussein’s courage and determination. She’s now been banned from leaving the country, either out of pure vindictiveness, or to make it harder for her to appear in the media.

Anne of Carversville (whose blog is all over this story) has posted an English-language translation of an interview with Lubna Hussein. In the interview, Ms. Hussein claims that three of the women lashed for wearing pants were teenagers, one as young as 16.

(The photos came from this AP photo gallery. The blog title quote came from this article.)

UPDATE: More commentary on this case:

• Katha Pollitt at The Nation
• The F Word
• Earwicga
• Feministing
• Woman’s Media Center
• Cruella-Blog

SECOND UPDATE: Here’s a petition you can sign in support of Lubna Hussein.

Check out Katha Pollit's piece about UN press officer and general badass Lubna Hussein, who is standing up against the sexist Sudanese government. Hussein was one of the 13 women charged under Sudan's Article 152 Criminal Code, prohibiting "indecent" dress, on July 3rd. Their crime? Um, pants. 10 of the 13 women accepted a plea bargain, but not Hussein. Pollit reports:

Lubna Hussein and two others insisted on going to trial-- even though losing in court will mean forty lashes and a much bigger fine. In fact, Hussein resigned her UN post so as not to have immunity -- she wants to win this battle on principle, not a technicality, and have the dress-code law abolished. 'I will take my case to the upper court, even to the constitutional court,' she told The Guardian . 'And if they find me guilty, I am ready to receive not only 40 lashes, I am ready for 40,000 lashes. If all women must be flogged for what they wear, I am ready to be flogged 40,000 times.'

Support Hussein and her crew here.

Last month, my colleague Thomas discussed the story of women arrested in Khartoum for wearing trousers. Today, I want to draw attention to the protesters who have gathered in support of Lubna Hussein, who was among the women arrested and who resigned from her UN position in order to give up diplomatic immunity so that [...]