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This ad is bad enough due to the disturbing, creepy and regressive gendered messages, and lots of people are talking about that. To be clear, I don’t see myself supporting the idea that having men buy things for you is some kind of grand life achievement (one to be impressed by!), no matter what the context.

But will someone please tell me what the fuck this commercial has to do with ice cream?

I’ve watched it three or four times now, trying to work out the link. And I’m absolutely convinced that there isn’t one. The “fall in love” line is extremely tenuous at best. I mean, if advertisers are going to make these kinds of shamelessly sexist ads, shouldn’t they at least try to find a way to defend it as somehow related to the product? I can’t even work this out on a “they’re selling a lifestyle” level. Is there a Dairy Queen lifestyle that I’m unfamiliar with, where children are taught that it’s women’s job to look pretty, and men’s job to throw money around to impress them?

This has to be part of the reason why I so rarely watch television . . . and why I mute the ads when I do.

Thanks to Violet for the link.

(Via feministe 2008-05-05.)

From a long post by PortlyDyke at Shakesville on the closet and PDAs (I mean Public Displays of Affection, not Private Defense Associations):

When ABC news did their second social experiment about Public Displays of Affection (PDAs) by having a gay male couple and a lesbian couple kiss and cuddle in public (the first experiment used straight couples), the reactions were varied.

There was the woman who called the cops:

Operator: Birmingham Police operator 9283

Caller: We have a couple of men sitting out on the bench that have been kissing and drooling all over each other for the past hour or so. It’s not against the law, right?

Operator: Not to the best of my knowledge it’s not.

Caller: So there’s no complaint I could make or have?

Operator: I imagine you could complain if you like ma’am. We can always send an officer down there.

And they did … . The officer told our couple that the police dispatch received a call because the two of them were making out.

Just don’t do that in public, he told them before leaving the scene.

There was the woman who said:

I would actually want our kids to grow up in a place where they would see various types of people engaging in behaviors that [are] loving.

And then there were the people who took a whole different think of teh childrenz! tack:

I don’t really find it inappropriate, especially during the day when schoolchildren aren’t running around. They might get confused and want an answer for what’s going on, bystander Mary-Kate told us. The majority of the people who spoke about children seemed to echo Mary-Kate’s feelings.

Which means, basically, these folks are fine with Gay PDA — as long as they don’t have to face the uncomfortable, icky business of explaining to their children that not everybody on earth is like mommy and daddy.

[…]

I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily sexual (in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act.

I don’t obsess about this — as in — it doesn’t eat up my days and nights — and I’m probably about as out as a queer can be in this country — but every single time I take my partner’s hand on the street, or toss my arm over her shoulder or around her waist, hug her goodbye or hello, I do a little, tiny security sweep.

[…]

This friend is the sister I never had. I loved her (and love her still) dearly, and her inability to see how the Measure 8 (which was passed that year) was likely to affect me and my family was incredibly painful to me. I remember weeping in her living room as I tried to explain something that was, to her, completely invisible. I talked to her about how scary it had been to come out publicly after having led a fairly comfortable life as a closeted queer, and she just didn’t seem to get why it should be a big deal at all.

So, I issued her and her husband a challenge (and I’ll issue the same challenge to any straight coupled allies here who want to raise their awareness of LBGTQ issues):

Spend an entire week pretending that you’re not a couple. Don’t write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being friends. Refer to yourself only in the singular I, never in the we. When you go to work on Monday, if you spent time together on the weekend, include only information which would indicate that you went somewhere with a friend, rather than your life-mate. If someone comes to stay with you, sleep in separate beds. Go intentionally into the closet as a couple. For a week.

They took my challenge.

They lasted exactly three days.

My friend returned to me in tears on day four and said: I’m sorry. I had no idea what it is like for you.

—PortlyDyke @ Shakesville (2008-04-29): Take My Arm, My Love

Read the whole thing. It’s a simple point, but it’s important, and powerful, and beautiful.

Here’s Brent Simmons (2008-05-06):

I was on the ground in Indianapolis…

I love it when TV People — newscasters, analysts, politicians — say they were on the ground somewhere.

It’s a good and welcome reminder that they normally live in the clouds, in heaven, up with the angels. Not on the ground with us, where things are mysterious and messy.

Gosh they’re lucky. Good and lucky.

—Brent Simmons, inessential.com (2008-05-06): On the ground

(Via Stephen Carson 2008-05-06.)

This is about a weightlifter and parent, not necessarily in that order.

The New York Times ran this in sports.

I loved her story, but I didn’t love the story, not the way they covered it. The whole thing starts with a very traditional-role narrative. First, the reporter sets it up:

Melanie Roach is a former gymnast who owns a gymnastics facility. Her husband is a state legislator. At 33, she is the mother of three young children, including 5-year-old Drew, who is autistic. And she can lift 238 pounds over her head.

Then, he (Greg Bishop) spends the first half of the piece talking about her role as the mother of an autistic child:

The problems she encountered in competition were nothing compared with the challenge she confronted with Drew after his autism was diagnosed in 2005. Roach said she was preoccupied with everything he would never be able to do — school dances, church missions, college classes. He did not have bad days; he had bad weeks, bad months, filled with relentless tantrums.

“It was literally in a week my life changed,” Roach said. “I went into depression. I went through a mourning process. Almost like I lost a child.”

She said she would kneel at his bedside every night, praying he would get better.

Not that I didn’t like that part of the story. In fact, it resonated with me quite a bit. I have young children with health problems — though not autism. So I felt a profound empathy with this fellow parent whose parenting challenges can be overwhelming, and I liked that part. But I saw it as positioned in the story in a way that it would not have been with a man.

The piece goes on:

“She learned that no matter how much money and time she put into it, she couldn’t change the outcome,” said her husband, Dan. “That has really helped with lifting. In the end, it’s the same concept.”

Without her experiences as a parent, the rest is a conventional sports narrative. She converted from gymnastics to weightlifting (so did US Olympic weightlifter Tara Nott, BTW; I think that’s a more common conversion than might immediately be apparent as both are dependent on explosive power, flexibility and balance and reward short people). She was an overnight sensation and set a record in 1998, but then injuries took their toll; she had several comeback attempts and a lot of pain and finally back surgery; now she’s the aging vet looking for one last shot at gold. She’s paid her dues and trained through a lot of pain to get here. That’s a conventional narrative, but it’s a good story. I’m totally with her on that. Go Melanie!

But the reporter’s interpretation of the interplay between Melanie Roach, Champion Weightlifter and Melanie Roach, Mother bothered me:

Thrush can tell immediately how well Roach is balancing the complexities of her life. He said he knew Roach was struggling with the pressure at the national championships in March, when she successfully lifted only two of six attempts. To qualify for Beijing, she must finish fourth or better in the 53-kilogram weight class at the Olympic trials in Atlanta on May 17.

“You’ll have an opportunity to be an average, everyday woman after August,” Thrush said he tells Roach when she seems distracted. “You need to be selfish now.”

Team Roach marches on through a life that Dan Roach described as “organized chaos.” Bonnie Kosoff, Melanie’s mother, moved in recently to take care of the children. Summers and Thrush travel to events.

“You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child?” Kosoff said. “Well, it takes a village to get someone to the Olympics, too.”
The changed outlook remains. Had Roach gone to the Olympics in 2000, she said, she would not have three kids or the business. Had there been no Drew, she may never have learned what Thrush tried to teach her all along — the concept of slow and small but steady and incremental progress.

But the biggest change that Drew inspired was in Roach, the athlete. She now enjoys the Olympic quest, 14 years after it started.

(Emphasis supplied.)

I don’t know Melanie Roach and I can’t speak for her. It’s possible that this reporting is completely true to her own interpretation of her experiences. Or it could be the reporter’s positioning. But I think that the reporter is highlighting things that would be true but taken for granted for male athletes.

If a man of 31, an international class athlete, were headed to the Olympic trials after a career of triumph, injuries and comebacks, with three kids and a spouse, it would also be true that it took a village to get him there. But I don’t think it would get much attention. I think everyone would just call it normal. But when a woman has kids, how she negotiates the demands of the rest of her life is The Big Question, the one that prompts several paragraphs in a major newspaper. It’s not just the way the role of mother is presumed to take over a woman’s life; it’s especially that this presumption goes unexamined.

And it wasn’t just the reporter. Her coach’s juxtaposition of “average everyday woman” (clearly a pejorative there) with high-level competition and positioning her ambition as “selfish” is exactly the problem. When men compete, they represent. The village isn’t just supporting them, they are bringing the triumph home for their family and friends, communities, nations, etc. But this guy is telling his lifter that she’s doing it all for herself. Way to motivate, coach!

I don’t have a good line to summarize this. I liked the athlete and I was bothered by the way it was framed.

p.s. there is a lot in the article that I didn’t raise. She’s Mormon, she had three home births, a few other things. It’s an interesting read for several reasons.

I don't like Hillary Clinton for many reasons, mainly: her slippery non-positions on some issues, her demagoguery on other issues (even when I might agree), her "taking responsibility" for her support of the war on Iraq while not taking any responsibility, and the smarmy tone of her campaign more worthy of a Rove than a progressive.

Yet this kind of misogynistic crap:

“Nixon in a pant suit” is an anti-Hillary meme that Andrew Sullivan, longtime stalwart of Tricky Dick’s party, has successfully propagated. And James Wolcott, with presumably better intentions, has followed, um, suit.

Google this:

hillary pantsuit OR “pant suit” OR “pantsuits” OR “pant suits”

By last count, there are over 300,000 web pages referencing this candidate and garment choice.

What does this fixation with “pant suits” mean?

Indeed. A loaded phrase. Because women aren't supposed to wear pants. Or, maybe, do other things men do?

William Mayer brings us the latest in political news from Htrae’s election season:

If you think Chicago 1968 was bad then the prospect of what could happen in Denver is truly frightening. Picture a million people in the street with bombs going off and the central downtown business area burned to the ground.

Denver is a very liberal city, ala San Francisco and Seattle there is nowhere near the political will, nor is there sufficient police power to stop committed rioters.

You think I’m kidding?

Get real, the potential is there because Obama’s natural shock troops, something that has not been discussed anywhere in the MSM that we can find, consist of the same crazies that have caused so much trouble at various anti-globalization demonstrations around the world.

It’s therefore an international force.

Hell, when taken as a whole the nutcase hard lefties are the least dangerous people in that universe. The anarchists, and trust me, thousands of them could be mobilized from the Western United States, will constitute the SS divisions in this pro-Obama army. These folks live to cause trouble and are totally unpredictable and uncontrollable.

—William Mayer, PipelineNews.org (2008-04-26): Is Denver Burning? - Hillary Must Stay In Race To Ensure Destruction Of Obama

If those of us who are anarchists on Earth were half as numerous, well-organized, and uncontrollable in our efforts to undermine and ultimately destroy State authority as the Bizarro Anarchists are in their efforts to get a smooth politician invested with the authority of the President of the Bizarro Divided States of Acirema—well, then I’d be a lot more sanguine about the near future than I am.

(Via Dan Clore on the LeftLibertarian2 listserv.)

You know what really gets my panties in a bunch? When people quote a commenter from a blog and attribute said quote to the blog itself. Take this article from the Twin Cities Daily Planet, "Imagine a pro-vagina world." (The article was originally featured at Minnesota Women's Press)

Reporter Shannon Drury writes that the feminist blogosphere hate women who vote for Hillary:

I realized that I wanted a woman to be the nominee much more than I thought. I wasn’t satisfied with Obama, who is not white. He’s still a guy, and I am sick of guys.

Yet when I announce this, I am accused of being not only sexist but racist. No, I don’t mean me personally, mostly because I am too mousy to stand up in the public square and talk about how sick I am of men in power (though my supportive husband encourages this). I should defer to the royal “we” here, because when Gloria Steinem wrote about the subject in a widely read opinion piece in the New York Times, you better believe my heart sang.

But many women writers in the blogosphere whom I respect and admire called the essay sexist. And racist. And they said very hateful things about women like me who support Hillary Clinton, including that they are sexist and racist. One blogger on Feministing.com called it “pro-vagina selfishness.”

Except we didn't. One of our commenters did. Yet Drury builds almost her whole piece around this quote. Not that she shouldn't - so long as she's clear where it came from. But I'm betting Drury knows that the "pro-vagina selfish" sentiment has a bit less weight when you admit it's not from a blog, but from a reader.

(Note: The editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet responded immediately to my request for a correction. Big thanks for the prompt response and action.)

There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!

—Last words of August Spies (1887-11-11), immigrant, anarchist, and Haymarket martyr

Fellow workers:

Today is May Day, or International Workers’ Day, a holiday created by Chicago workers—most of them anarchists—to honor the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and to celebrate the struggle of workers for freedom, for a better life, and for control over the conditions of their own labor. It was created during the radical phase of the struggle for an eight-hour day: after legislative campaigns by the Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union failed, labor radicals in Chicago — organizers like Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, August Spies — declared that workers should take matters into their own hands, in the form of direct action on the shop floor. Workers would no longer try to get an eight-hour day by promising a useful and compliant voter base in return for patronage from politicians. To get an eight-hour shift, workers would make their own: in many shops, workers in the International Working People’s Association would bring their own whistle to work and blow it at the end of an eight hour shift — at which point most or all of the workers on the floor would just get up and just walk off, like the free people they were, whether or not the boss demanded more hours of labor. At the height of the struggle, they organized a General Strike, in defiance of the bosses and in spite of repeated violence from the Law.

Today is also the third annual day of rallies, strikes and marches against the criminalization of immigrant workers. A day which immigrant workers have chosen for actions against the bigotry of nativist bullies, the violence of La Migra, and the political system of international apartheid, as contemptible as it is lethal. A day to proudly proclaim We are not criminals and We are not going anywhere, to demand the only political program that recognizes it — open borders and unconditional amnesty for all undocumented workers.

And it is a joy for me to read that today is also a day of strikes against the bosses’ war in Iraq, which will shut down all the sea ports on the west coast of the United States, as an act of defiance against the State war machine and against the worthless political opportunists who promise to end it while voting, over and over again, to sustain it:

Amid this political atmosphere, dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all U.S. West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers’ Day, to call for an end to the war.

This decision came after an impassioned debate where the union’s Vietnam veterans turned the tide of opinion in favor of the anti-war resolution. The motion called it an imperial action for oil in which the lives of working-class youth and Iraqi civilians were being wasted and declared May Day a no peace, no work holiday. Angered after supporting Democrats who received a mandate to end the war but who now continue to fund it, longshoremen decided to exercise their political power on the docks.

—Jack Heyman, San Francisco Chronicle (2008-04-09): Longshoremen [sic] to close ports on West Coast to protest war

The Longshore workers have the explicit support of postal workers in New York and San Francisco, and I hope this will be only the beginning of ongoing, widespread industrial action to end a war that political action — even after two election cycles, after hundreds of millions of dollars, after countless hours of lobbying and electioneering, after a change in government, and with the backing of an overwhelming supermajority of the populace — has proven completely incapable of ending.

This is May Day as it is and ought to be. A Day of Resistance against the arrogance and power of bosses, bordercrats, bullies, and the Maters of War, who would harass us, intimidate us, silence us, exploit us, beat us, jail us, deport us, extort us, and do anything else it takes to stop us from coming into our own. A day to celebrate workers’ struggles for dignity, and for freedom, through organizing in their own self-interest, through agitating and exhorting for solidarity, and through free acts of worker-led direct action to achieve their goals, marching under the banners of We are all leaders here and Dump the bosses of your back. A day to remember:

There Is Power In A Union

There is power, there is power,
In a band of working folk,
When we stand
Hand in hand.

—Joe Hill (1913)

Radio Bilingüe has a list of immigration marches and rallies across the country today. I plan to be at the mitin in Las Vegas tonight:

• Las Vegas immigrant rights mitin (rally)
• Tonight, May 1, 2008, 7:00 PM
• Federal Courthouse, 333 Las Vegas Blvd S.

Meanwhile, in the news, some useless idiot is wandering around Washington proclaiming Law Day, accosting hundreds of millions of complete strangers to tell them to put on ceremonies in praise of his own power to do the beating, jailing, deporting, etc. In Istanbul, organized workers marched to Taksim Square in defiance of the Turkish government, which has declared their free assembly illegal, and which has deployed government riot cops to attack them with firehoses and tear gas. In Harare, organized workers are holding rallies today to call attention to the devastating effect of the government’s hyperinflationary money monopoly on workers’ wages—and an apparatchik of the Zimbabwean government—one of the most violently anti-worker governments in the world—is taking the opportunity to wear a concerned expression and assure that Government would at all times endeavour to make sure that workplaces were monitored through inspections to minimize hazards that might injure or kill them. (No word yet on whether the hazards the inspectors will be inspecting for include the Zimbabwe Republic Police or the Central Intelligence Organization.) We must never forget what this band of creeps and fools is doing their best to remind us of — that the State is the most deadly weapon of our enemies, and that it is a weapon that we will never be able to wield for ourselves without chaining ourselves to politics and destroying the very things we meant to fight for.

In this season and in these days, in the midst of Babel during its most raucous festival—when so much of what we see and hear are the endless shouts of professional blowhards who know of no form of social change other than political change, and who know of no site of political change other than the gladiatorial arena of electoral politics, and who seem to know of no form of electoral politics other than polling, horse-trading, and endlessly shouting about a series of nomenklatura-contrived issues, which boil down to little more than a media-facilitated exchange of racist, sexist, ageist, and authoritarian barbs among the nomenklatura-approved serious candidates—it’s important to remember that, in spite of all the noise and spectacle, the most significant events for labor and for human freedom are happening in the streets of cities all over the country and all over the world, where workers are organizing among themselves, demanding their rights, fighting for their lives, and defying or simply bypassing the plutocrats and their so-called laws. In the U.S.A., while the punch-drunk establishmentarian labor movement reels from one failure to another, some of the most dynamic and successful labor struggles in the past few years have been fought by a grassroots union organized along syndicalist lines without NLRB recognition, using creative secondary boycott tactics which would be completely illegal if they had submitted to the regulatory patronage of the Wagner-Taft-Hartley system. There is a lesson here—a lesson for workers, for organizers, for agitators, and anti-statists. One we’d do well to remember when confronted by any of the bosses—whether corporate bosses or political, the labor fakirs and the authoritarian thugs styling themselves the vanguard of the working class, the regulators and the deporters and the patronizing friends of labor all:

Dump the Bosses Off Your Back

Are you cold, forelorn, and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back!

—John Brill (1916)

Happy May Day, y’all.

Elsewhere Today:

• Scott McLemee, Crooked Timber 2008-04-30: All Out for May Day
• Gulf Stream Blues 2008-05-01: Labour Movements Cry Mayday!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-05-01: May Day 2007
• GT 2006-05-01: May Day 2006: A Day of Resistance
• GT 2005-05-01: May Day, May Day
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!

Anybody here give a shit about Hannah Montana posing for Vanity Fair? Me neither. I've got bigger fish to fry and she's about to become a billionaire, so I'm not all that worried about her reputation. Every major news agency has been covering 3 stories this week: Hannah's "racy" pictures; The freak in Austria who kept his daughter and their 7 kids in a cellar for 24 years (ugh); and Reverend Wright. This, America, is what your media thinks you want to hear about. Or maybe it's what they want to tell you to kee you from focusing on what's really going on. Either way, the media sucks.

You would almost think Reverend Wright was running for office, because he has dominated the news cycle for a couple of weeks. As with most ministers, he says some outrageous things in the heat of the moment, mostly for effect. He's got some strong and controversial opinions, and he isn't shy about sharing them. That should be the concern of his congregation and only his congregation. The fact that his congregation included Barack Obama is not relevant to... anything. It's not relevant to the election, certainly. I've been in a lot of churches and I've heard preachers say some pretty offensive things. Not once did I worry that my mere presence in the building when these things were said tagged me with those beliefs. My attendance certainly didn't mean I agreed with everything, or even anything, that was said from the pulpit.

The Radical Right and Hillary Clinton, who are rapidly becoming one and the same, have been trying to tarnish the reputation of Barack Obama for weeks because he sat in a particular church most Sundays and because he attended a fundraiser once for a guy who has never been convicted of anything like the terrorism he may or may not have committed. Ayers is a blip - only an idiot would spend time on it. Like Sean Hannity. An idiot.

The Rev. Wright issue should have been closed for good when Obama made his historic speech in Philadelphia where he spoke so eloquently about matters of race in this culture. Being a good and decent man, Barack didn't disown Rev. Wright, but gently acknowledged that sometimes imperfect people can have a positive effect on us, and stated that Wright's views were not his views. In a reasonable society, that would have been the end of the controversy. WE, however, are about as far from reason as we could possibly be. Our founders would be ashamed of the "gotcha" politics and journalism that comprises our public discourse. We're supposed to be the first nation founded solely on reason and logic, but we fall very far short of that position these days. In a reasonable society, we would have moved forward with conversation about the failing dollar, rising gas prices, record housing foreclosures, corporate welfare, and possible food and water shortages - but we didn't.

It seems that Rev. Wright has a book to sell. And there was an excuse to bring him to Washington DC (which may have been orchaestrated by the Clinton campaign.) And he decided to screw Barack Obama for his own benefit. He apparently decided that Barack couldn't win the Presidency, so he'd help himself in spite of the damage he would do to the Obama campaign. And so he did. He railed against the government, and acccused them of starting the AIDS epidemic to oppress black people. He gave his best anti-Zionist screed. He praised Louis Farrahkan. He painted Barack into a corner.

Barack has tried to take the high road in every situation, even when people might prefer that he would come out swinging. In Wright's case, Barack first refused to disown him, then later admitted some of his comments were offensive, and then finally, today, Barack had to put his foot down and pretty much end his association with Wright altogether. He had no choice. He didn't want to have to go to that extreme, and it was obvious over recent weeks that he was doing everything short of that. But Wright saw an opportunity for... what? Self-aggrandizement? A larger forum? Book sales? Whatever his motivation, Wright hurt Obama, who had gone so far out of his way not to hurt Rev. Wright.

Part of me still wishes Barack had told his oppenents and the yammering press to pound sand. The behavior of the media, from the odious Christ Matthews to the normally sympathetic Keith Olbermann, was shameful, and they deserved to be told off. Hillary Clinton and her Neo-Republican machine smelled blood in the water, and something had to be done to end the controversy definitively. So Barack had to cut Wright loose, and make it clear that he didn't speak for him, nor did he even seem to understand him. I'm sorry he had to do it. I'm sorry Rev. Wright pushed him to it. I'm sorry that our media and our culture are no better than this.

I choose Barack Obama because his movement represents our last best chance to really change the culture in Washington DC. He's our best shot at restoring the rule of law, opposing the corporate control of our government, and getting us out of Iraq. I don't know if he can win, but given that he is setting records for donations and new registrations, his chances look damned good. Add to that the fact that I have no desire to go back to Monica 24/7, as we certainly will if Hillary steals the nomination and has to go head to head with the Karl Rove's of the Right, and I am adamant that I want Barack Obama to be my next president. When the chips are down, he always tries to take the high road. He tries to stay calm, he tries to be reasonable. What a refreshing change that will be for us all.

Contributed by Nancy Gruver, the author of “How To Say It to Girls,” Founder of the international publication, New Moon for Girls and CEO of New Moon Girl Media, Inc.

Cross-posted at Girl Media Maven.

You can imagine that the sexed up photos Vanity Fair published of Miley Cyrus have been a topic of discussion at New Moon, just as on [the organization's blog]. Thanks for all the thoughtful comments so far on the topic - they're well worth reading.

Kathleen Kvern and I were talking about how the prevalence of sexualized images of girls in our public culture creates an atmosphere of impersonal, silent, constant harassment for girls.

Like an iron grip in a velvet glove, the hypersexualization of girls in the media holds actual girls hostage under the pretense of entertaining and informing them. And, like in the Stockholm Syndrome, it's not surprising when girls start to identify with the all-powerful culture that's holding them hostage.

It feels more subtle than verbal or physical harassment, but that's part of its stealthy effect. It's like a neverending buzz in the background that you try to ignore but can't. Gradually, sub-consciously, more and more of your energy and attention is spent on trying to ignore the buzz.

Girls are barraged by sexualized images all around them and everyone they come into contact with in daily life is also surrounded by those images. The images viscerally teach "the importance of being sexy" if you are female. The images teach all of us that acting sexy is how girls/women can have power without being rejected as domineering or bitchy (see media coverage of Hillary Clinton for the way "non-sexy" female power is conveyed).

Now imagine the extreme confusion girls feel when they are surrounded by images promoting the power of female sexiness and at the same time are told that it's bad for girls to be interested in sex, to act sexy themselves, to dress sexy, etc. The real message being conveyed, of course, is that girls shouldn't want to be powerful.

The conflicting messages about personal power create an epic inner struggle for girls that stays with us into adulthood, sapping creative energy and focus that would be better used in changing the culture and making our world a better place for everyone.

I believe media oppression of girls and women via hypersexualiztion is one of the most serious barriers standing between us and full equality. We need to break that barrier down and release the power it's holding back. That's why I work with girls' media and bringing girls' voices to the world at New Moon.

How would you do it?

Note: The above post does not necessarily represent the opinions of Feministing or its bloggers.