“Things are not “for” boys or girls”…could not have had a better example today. My daughter spent part of her afternoon putting her toy dinosaurs in doll’s dresses…they were dinosaur princesses who were trying to get their treasure back from the robot police car. They succeeded, and locked up the bad robot car.
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There is actually a metric buttload of Frozen apparel featuring Kristoff (usually with Anna and the reindeer) and Olaf. Mostly Olaf, although I’m not entirely sure an animate snowman should count as male.
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People are not corporations. Corporations are (largely) about profit. Individual people are different. I trust a lot of people but a corporation looking to make a profit and most importantly clean up a PR mess and not lose their BIG IMPORTANT rights to sell Disney stuff? Yeaaaaaahhh.
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‘under-served’?
That’s the thing though, gender equity works both ways. This particular instance is regarding female characters from a superhero film. Check the Googles and you will find examples that run in the opposite direction.
And, maybe, discuss with your daughter the concept of the straw man? 
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Actually, SteampunkBanana’s quote was about people, although he’d referred to corporations earlier. Perhaps he meant corporations are people :-).
No, I didn’t think so, either.
Anyway, I am also largely about profit. [Looks at bank book] Although apparently not very good at it.
However, most of us are trying to earn more than we spend. We spend much our day towards the goal of profit.
Do most of us pursue this profit in violation of morality? No, but neither do most businesses. But that’s not surprising. Corporations are (apparently) full of people, and as such, each person acts according to his or her morality. Since people are basically ethical, so are most corporate actions.
Not all, but most. And yes, there are exceptions to the general tendency of corporate and personal morality. But they are exceptions. After all, do you, or anyone of your friends leave their morality at home when they go to work?
I didn’t think so. Why assume it’s different for everyone you don’t know?
Using the concept of “trust” for a big corporation is pointless and not all that rational. It doesn’t work for government bodies, either. What do we mean by “trust”, anyway? And why do people feel I don’t “trust” this random company I know nothing about all because I take issue with the original copy text and their nice, neat fluffy PR statement? It implies that those of us who aren’t all that happy with the response think the company and the person who wrote the PR piece are coming from a place of malice. That’s not the case at all.
Sexism isn’t always (or even usually) malicious or always (or even usually) intentional. Indeed, that’s what makes it so difficult to address and fix. I’m pretty positive whoever wrote the copy is probably a decent person, and likely doesn’t hate women overtly or anything like that. That’s not the point. I even made sure to take care explaining that I didn’t think it was intentional when I responded to @springscreative.
Do you know what “institutionalized sexism” and “internalized sexism” mean? Both apply here.
The conversation shouldn’t just stop when someone apologizes. There is a REASON that the person(s) who wrote the copy literally said that boys find depiction of women/girls “yucky”. As in gross. Or disgusting.
Addressing the lack of female characters in their product is a great start, but that doesn’t mean that the statement never happened.
The depiction of girls/women was literally called “yucky”. Personally, as a woman, I find that very troubling. How is that not troubling to you?? It amazes me how many people here don’t find it deeply troubling!
We can’t just be like “OH OKAY THEY SAID SORRY!” and then stop the conversation, not when this sort of behavior and attitude is persuasive. This didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Wishing to discuss (even if unintentional) obvious sexism that has occurred and the reasons why it has occurred is not in any way “throwing mud” or carrying a torch. That sort of language just seems like yet more silencing and dismissing of the oppressed, which is also persuasive and super common. “Be nicer! Be quiet! Stop talking about it! They said they were sorry! Isn’t that enough?!”
No. It’s not.
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Let me clarify, I’ don’t find your response particularly unfair or overly harsh, and I think your diagnosis of “institutionalized sexism” and “internalized sexism” is spot on.
Yes, and it’s because there’s traditionally been an age (usually somewhere between 6-10) when boys and girls found each other, in the parlance of that age, “yucky”. I certainly remember being the object of scorn, and scorning in turn (and yes, I vaguely remember ‘yucky’ being the used.) The term she used was almost certainly an accurate depiction of her own experience of how boys viewed girls in that age bracket (and how girls viewed boys).
And from what I’ve seen from my children, it’s pretty much absent nowadays, which is a good thing. (I note on the playground that boys and girls still have their own worlds, but don’t see the taunting back and forth.)
So, I have to ask, do you want to inspire fear or want to inspire understanding?
BB just covered the book about shaming in the online culture. Do you approve of Internet shaming? It certainly works to ensure that people, in fear of the Internet’s destructive power, learn to shut up.
But it certainly doesn’t promote understanding or dialog. In this particular incident, the company would have been far better off simply not to reply. Instead, they gave an honest, but problematic response, and because of that response and the dialog that follows, they will likely change their policy, and a sales rep will have learned that times have changed in the playground and among children.
By ensuring that the crime stays front and centre, you punish the company for communicating, because, yes, communication will occasionally be problematic. After all, not everyone shares your upbringing and cultural constraints.
Moreover, and I’ve seen this in the workplace, a highly aggressive “you should pay for your stupidity” attitude invokes a defensive response in people, and often leads to the informal exclusion of the person from standard interaction. The person gets fewer problematic conversations because there are fewer conversations, period. Those who can make people gently understand that society has changed and certain attitudes have reached their expired date tend to be much more effective in actually achieving change.
There are limits of understanding, of course, but let’s face it, an awful lot of people understood exactly what “yucky” meant either from their own experience, or because they had a kid who went through that phase themselves. It’s worth pointing out times change, and catering to that attitude hurts others, but punishing beyond that doesn’t really make things better and over the long term risks the general populace fearing us liberals for fear of misstepping because their own experience is not ours.
(I’ll just add that being the majority everything, I obviously can’t judge the anger at having to put up with these annoyances and worse. Thus I’m certainly not going to say you should not be angry. However, I don’t think it’s the most effective way of bringing general social change on a person-to-person basis.)
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I was not shaming nor inspiring fear. I was asking a reasonable question and desiring a conversation and dialogue. By implying that oppressed people who seek dialog and conversation about these subjects as “shaming” and “inspiring fear” is yet more silencing.
Thus I’m certainly not going to say you should not be angry. However, I don’t think it’s the most effective way of bringing general social change on a person-to-person basis.
Angry? Because I asked a reasonable question to someone who is representing a corporation?
“Shaming”
“Fear”
“Anger”
Your choice of words are telling, even if you try and reassure me that you aren’t really trying to insinuate that I’m doing any of this.
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Look, my apologies as I’ve managed to get somewhat sidetracked. I was responding to what I saw as the general “getting a back track and acknowledgement is not enough” sentiment (and that sentiment was not primarily from you, either) and what I see as the most effective tactics for eliciting social change.
I also suspect there’s also a cultural gap here. The phrase “boys are yucky” (5,100 Google hits) or “girls are yucky” (8,200 Google hits) is absolutely understood among my peer group as the sentiment of many a child of a certain age, so using it as an explanation, even if wrong, doesn’t carry much weight. It’s simply a short hand that is universally understood by everyone in that culture (which I suspect is 40+ year-olds).
If you’re not aware of that culture, or didn’t experience the “xxx have cooties” stage. then I can imagine that the phrasing could have darker implications that I just can’t see.
[quote=“marilove, post:111, topic:55309”]
“Shaming” “Fear” “Anger”
Your choice of words are telling, even if you try and reassure me that you aren’t really trying to insinuate that I’m doing any of this.[/quote]
I’m talking tactics, not what you’ve done or planned to do. My whole post was based on the abstract “does one continue to push after you’ve won the main issue”, not on on your question, which I only re-read in response to your last response.
You also seem to be assuming that I find shame and fear intrinsically terrible, and that’s also incorrect. Tactics are just that, tactics. In some circumstances, shaming or the fear of shaming is an effective tactic. My claim is that in these circumstances, those particular tactics aren’t optimal, not that they are intrinsically wrong at all times. My post isn’t about politics, it’s about policy.
As for anger, I’m aware that there’s this terrible meme that ‘if you are angry, you’re in the wrong’. It’s stupid, and I wanted to make it clear that IF you were, (and being on the receiving end of an endless stream of sexism seems to be a pretty good reason to be angry or at least annoyed), then I did not consider that as disqualifying one’s arguments. It was not meant to anything more than that, and certainly not meant to imply you were angry.
Frankly, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I consider your general assessment to be quite measured and spot on.
My apologies for my failure in clarity and for making a post about tactics into something of an attack.
I was certainly out of line on the:
Again, my apologies. This post was more of a continuation of arguments I’m having elsewhere about similar issues than anything specific here, and my escalation of the rhetoric was unwarranted.
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Thank you (sincerely).
I’m also not sure it fits the definition unless you present it for sale/distribution.
I fixed it as soon as I saw it.
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