Letters to the Editor
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The message is clear alright!
Some people just don't appreciate classic story lines, which generally involve a band of guys rescuing the damsel in distress, not a band of women rescuing a guy. Get it? That would make for more guys.
You know, like Shrek, Monsters Inc, Robin Hood... did they include Hansle and Gretel, and complain the witch is female?
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Girls rarely get included
Steven Spielberg's movies have always bothered me. Many of the early ones, especially, are of the young boy learns a lesson variety. E.T. could just as easily have centered around a girl.
I was unaware that Shrek was a classic children's story. And in Hansel and Gretel, the stepmother is mean, the witch is evil, and Gretel is clueless most of the time.
It is not surprising that there are so few girls in young people's movies when one looks at the literature that most kids read in school. The assigned readings are almost always about boys. Occasionally a "Little House on the Prairie" will be included in booklists, but most of the time the assigned readings are about boys. Out of six required books my daughter was assigned to read one year, one was about a girl (Little House on the Prairie). I even commented to her teacher about it and she said she had never noticed the imbalance, but those were the books assigned by the state education department.
Until writers start writing about girls as well as boys, and until schools and state education departments do a better job of selecting books to include girls, it will be very hard to have a reasonable number of girls in movies.
I wish Geena Davis and her group success in finding a better way.
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But...
On the flip side, consider a remarkably unscientific study of the cartoons avaialable on Nick. Although clearly an older demographic, nearly all the models for boys are that they are idiots, or in some way sidekicks to the boys in the shows.
In fact, the only two exceptions to this rule I've been able to find are Jimmy Neutron, and Danny Phantom.
In all of these shows, if both of the parents aren't complete idiots, only the women are ever shown to be even remotely reasonable.
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Happens in books too...
This is well-known among elementary school teachers and children's librarians. Girls will read books about both genders, boys are only interested in other boys and won't read girl stories. Of course this is a vast generalization, but a true one when applied to broad spectrums of children. I think the bigger question is not just what message is this lack of female characters sending to girls, but what is it also sending to boys?
It's no accident, I think, that Harry Potter is male, and the nearest thing to a female main character (Hermione) is a side-kick. It would have been a very different series, with a very different popularity level, if Harry had been a girl in the same situation.
Boys are also learning through these stories (TV, movies, and books) that boys are central actors and girls are ancillary.
And if you're looking for a good book for that little girl (or inner little girl) in your life, check out "The Paper Bag Princess" by Robert Munsch. A great story where the girl outwits the dragon and rescues the prince.
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This is already changing
Anyone who is interested in this topic would probably benefit from checking out the book "From Girls to Grrlz : A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines" by Trina Robbins. She talks about changes in female characters, female readers, and female creators in American comics over the decades.
On a tangent, The American comics industry has recently been blindsided by the huge amounts of American girls buying Japanese and Korean comics, when they had long insisted that girls just weren't as interested in comics as boys were. Now they are struggling to catch up and figure out how to actually market to what has turned out to be a huge demographic right under their noses. In Japan, females buy comics just as much as males, and there are plenty of working female cartoonists. Its sort of a chicken and egg question whether having more female creators brings in more female readers, or more female readers means more girls growing up to be cartoonists. In either case, the publishers in Japan know that there is money in comics for girls and women. Now that publishers here have begun to reawaken to this reality as well, there are going to be a lot of changes that are going to filter into tv and movies down the road. It's all about the money after all, and if the money is there, they are going to be chasing it.
I think as well that the notion that boys won't watch/read things with girls as the main characters is going to change more and more in the future as the possible roles that female characters take are expanded. You just have to look at the success of the Buffy franchise to see where things are headed.
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G for guys
"The message is clear," she wrote. "Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys."
Here's the problem with Broadsheet in a nutshell. Salon is news for people, but apparently "women's news" is so peripheral it has to be kept in its own pink box, even on Salon.
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Ugh
If boys wanted to read about girls, they would. They don't want to. Men (usually) don't want to read romance novels, either. There are gender differences, like it or not.
There was a very sad nonfiction book recently about a boy whose penis was damaged during circumcision. A doctor wanted to experiement and have him raised as a girl, with hormone shots. His parents trusted the wise doctor, so they tried it. But he was miserable, didn't feel like a girl at all, and finally switched to living as a man, with reconstructive surgery. Sadly, he lated committed suicide as an adult.
My point is, all this social engineering isn't working. Let's let boys be boys and girls be girls and be done with it.