It still boggles my mind that guys like Parson Jim post here.

It's obvious you don't agree with anything on Broadsheet--probably half of the people that read Broadsheet don't agree with everything on Broadsheet. I find the majority of the stuff on Broadsheet pretty inane, myself. But do you actually think that by posting here you're going to change the writers' minds or suddenly make them all go away? Actually, the way I understood it was the more clicks they get in the comments page, the more ad revenue comes in. So, in a sense, you're helping to pay the Broadsheet writers' salaries with all your trolling. Is that what you really want?

You'd further your agenda if you started a blog of your own, where you could get your ideas out there, probably connect with other people who are sympathetic to you, and maybe even make some money off of it if you do it right. What you're doing right now is not accomplishing anything.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/whos_oppressing_who/

Who’s oppressing who?

In its earliest and most benign form – the political campaign to achieve equality under the law and equality in economic opportunities – feminism was a necessary and welcome reform movement. No rational person could be less than delighted to see barriers to a full range of educational and career options for women fall by the wayside.

The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years.

This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal "system", but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.

That kind of feminism is so deeply entrenched in our society’s cultural elites and the institutions they dominate -- really it is the defining ideology of our era -- that whether she wants to or not, no thinking woman can escape the necessity of negotiating some kind of relationship with its claims.....

The last statement in your above post is clearly false.

Get help - there are bigots like you who turn over a new leaf. It can be done.

Wow. You don't pay much attention, do you?

1. If the majority of films, books, tv shows and other media were about Girls Saving The Day, and we were presented with yet another example of A Girl Saving The Day, while her 99 brothers were ignored as meaningless, superfluous added decorations to a previously well-crafted story, I'd be miffed. Can you give me one example of a work of art like this?

2. As I have stated many,many times before (heck, even in this thread!) I have 2 daughters.

3. I remain happily married to their father, and so I am not embittered towards an entire gender.

If the new plot contained 99 boys and one girl who was the heroine, I doubt you would be commenting.

I hope you'll reconsider before thinking about having children.

For children a bit to young for His Dark Materials, try some Robin Mckinley; particularly The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword. The Telzey Amberdon books by James Schmitz are great too. I also remember really liking Sara Crewe by Frances Hogden Burnett, she was a strong character with firm principles though the world is smaller than the typical fantasy. Patricia Wrede also writes good heroines, Magician's Ward has a particularly intricate ending, beautifully wrapped up.

Even though I'm talking to a brick wall ...

Sagal was talking about a film adaptation of a book. The book is 40 years old, the movie is contemporary. The film created 99 daughters, and changed "the little Who who cried Yop" - originally a nameless small child - into the Mayor's son. And then the film created a tortured father-son relationship.

Sagal's problem is not that the hero happens to be male, but that the father *ignores* *the* ***99*** *daughters* *and* *obsesses* *over* *his* *son*.

None of that was in Seuss' book, none of that was necessary in translating the book into a film, and none of that, Sagal suggests, was even really interesting.

There is nothing wrong with male heroes (though it is frustrating that there are *so* *many* boy heroes compared to heroines). But Sagal takes issue with the clumsy, callous, and inane way the Mayor of Whoville (and the filmmakers) treated his daughters.

a boy in 2008 is actually a hero. Terrible, thought we had ridded this society of such a notion. One film shows there is much more work to be done to eradicate the idea that a boy can be a hero. Now let me get back to my Kim Possible to cleanse myself.

The fact that you ignore the more significant discrimination that boys experience in schools across the country demonstrates your tunnel vision, which unfortunately is a mainstream perspective in feminism today.

The Paper Bag Princess (Munsch & Martchenko)is a wonderful story with a dragon-defeating, prince-saving, spunky herione who has her own idea of "happily ever after" -- and it's more than 25 years old to boot!

Reverse Discrimination? Reverse Discrimination?!!?

Parson Jim, the vast, vast majority of stories with heroes have boy heroes. Pointing out this very obvious instance of implicit prejudice - and, yes, even feeling a little disappointed when you see yet one more example of it (out of many and many and many) - does not constitute reverse discrimination.

The fact that you're more concerned by someone mentioning or reacting to something that is part and parcel of a very common, widespread prejudice (boys are heroes, girls are cheerleaders), while you apparently have no interest whatsoever in the prejudice itself and its effects, shows an odd kind of tunnel vision. Isn't it satisfying enough to you that the vast majority of heroes - like the vast majority of presidents - are male?