Princesses and Superheroes

I had to remember on this International Women's Day:  I'm busy. I'm busy raising a future woman. But it's an important day to honor each year and to take account of our world.


She Asks for it by the Name "Superheroes"
My little woman-to-be saw this video rant shared by a Facebook friend and she loved it. It resonates with her love of Super Why and the Super Readers. If you're among the 2 million or so left who haven't seen Riley's insightful rant about the trickery of marketers (I'm a marketer) click play above. And may Riley's gender-segregated toy agenda angst thrive in future women.


Let the Audience Cry Out
May the 40+ advertisers who pulled their dollars from Rush Limbaugh's decades of horrible tirades be among the new leaders who are forced to make change--as a result of the audience outcry. My research shows his show has been on the air 24 years! Holy cow. The below image was shared by Violence Against Women and Girls (like them!)

Changemakers Who Need Your Help

• Amnesty International:   For Afghan women's rights.
• Invisible Children:  For ending child abduction into sexual slavery or forced into being soldiers and many other atrocities. Hot now and definitely has some controversy around it too.
• VAWG Dialogue:  Stands for Violence Against Women and Girls (Like them!)

Progress?
In this Al Jazeera opinion piece, When Women Lead the World, Joseph Nye makes the same kind of observations as if it were still nearly 30 years ago, "Questions of appropriate style - when to use hard and soft skills - are equally relevant for men and women, and should not be clouded by traditional gender stereotypes. In some circumstances, men will need to act more 'like women'; in others, women will need to be more 'like men.'"

It means we haven't come all that far in nearly 30 years because it jolts me back to 1982 when I learned every line from Tootsie. Nye's article stirs up the scene between Dorothy (Dustin Hoffman) and Ron (Dabney Coleman) as s/he's auditioning for a part in a TV soap opera:

Ron: Honey, I'm sure you're a very good actress. It's just that you're not threatening enough.

Dorothy: Not threatening enough?  How about this:  ‘You take your hands off me or I’ll knee your balls right through the roof of your mouth!’ Is that enough of a threat?

Ron:  It's a start.

Dorothy:  I think I know what you all really want. You want a caricature of a woman. To prove some idiotic point like power makes a woman masculine…or masculine women are ugly. Well, shame on any woman that lets you do that. And that means you Dear, Miss Marshall. Shame on you, you macho shithead.

The Mad Men Women
If you don't watch the show, my take on Peggy is she's a TV character who uses innocence and the female role in the early 1960s workplace to guide her aspirations. She holds what a call the Power of the Fool. I'm just on Season 2 (we don't have cable or watch TV, we're raising a woman) and every time I fish around for opinion I learn more I didn't want to know! Here's a great portrait piece about Peggy if you don't watch the show.

On Riley I Bestow a Princess and a Superhero
So who, in the case Riley makes for us now in 2012, created Wonder Woman...the princess who became a superhero? Surprise! The creator and cartoonist were men living in 1941 no doubt taking stock of the world around them at the time. For good or bad, it left a rich trail for the marketers to plunder decades later. Creator William Moulton Marston was a psychologist and feminist theorist. It'll soon be time to get out my old Wonder Woman doll for our daughter.

My past International Women's Day posts: 2011, 2010, and 2008.