This article was published in today's Age newspaper.
We don’t switch to reality television when we want to expand our minds, but their frivolous pleasures do not mean that these shows are beyond criticism and public debate. In the past week, the teaser promotion for the new series of MasterChef Australia has drawn international attention for its sexism.
The offending ad pitches the upcoming series of the cooking program as a battle of a sexes, with the infantilising title of “Boys vs Girls”. The contestants are segregated on pastel gender lines with the women wearing pink and the men blue.
A volley of stereotypes relating to women’s and men’s respective abilities are traded as the teams trash talk. Women are “better at presentation”, for instance, because they’re “used to grooming” themselves. While the quality that “all the top chefs in the world” share is that “they’re all men”. The women face off against the men raising their pink oven mitts like boxing gloves, while the men wield baguettes like batons.
Yet the repeated national broadcast of limiting views that suggest women are naturally suited to tirelessly producing meals for the family while men are destined to elevate cooking to a sophisticated art form has been defended by some online commentators. Indeed, the counter-response to criticisms of the MasterChef ad shows just how complicated it has become to critique sexism in popular culture.
From both within and outside the feminist cause, we are told to ignore the reinforcement of sexist attitudes in the media because there are more worthy battles to fight. Proponents of this argument point to violence against women and female poverty as “real” causes to which outrage should be more rightly directed. Last month, for instance, Helen Razer described the Destroy the Joint feminist social media movement as a kind of “dessicated...masturbation”. She argued that such campaigns about sexism in popular culture mean that “we are spending our climaxes in tiny online moments when, really they are due elsewhere...”
Another common argument, which has been used frequently in support of the MasterChef ad, is that sexism sometimes arrives in the form of harmless jokes. Maudlin feminists are simply barging in to interrupt good-natured humour as self-appointed fun police. For those who subscribe to this view, there are innate gender differences that mean that men are incapable of doing two things at once (“A woman can multi-task”) and that women cannot complete most endeavours as well as a man (“When a man puts his mind to a job, it always turns out better”), and hilarity ensues from pointing out these fundamental truths.
Nevertheless, it is crucial not to separate the worst outcomes of sexist societies, such as violence against women, from the cultural ideas we take for granted that support them. The widespread propagation of ideas that women are inherently inferior and are primarily valuable because of their appearance and ability to perform domestic work contributes to the existence of the “more important” problems confronting women. While we need to agitate for political change to continue the process of lobbying for substantive equality in the workplace, reproductive rights and protection from violence and poverty, these victories will only come alongside transformations in how men and women are understood by our society.
This is not to say that MasterChef’s Stepford wives dancing with shopping trolleys have a direct impact on the treatment of women. Yet the continued acceptance of gender stereotypes as fact, and even as subjects of amusement, continues to imprint the belief that gender inequality is the result of natural differences rather than discrimination. An ad that was humorously playing with these stereotypes, rather than reinforcing them, might show a male contestant alongside a tiered stand of delicately iced cupcakes or would depict a woman bringing her tongs into the sacred realm of the masculine barbeque. Instead MasterChef gives us the uncomplicated view that biology determines whether we can bake or char-grill.
The show promises entry into an industry in which the majority of chefs are male for various reasons, including the incompatibility of restaurant working hours with the family responsibilities that primarily fall to women. The male hosts and judges are the resident experts on the profession.
One of the female contestants on the sexist ad spuriously claims that “the average woman cooks over 1,000 meals per year” in the home. Yet we understand that this kind of cooking is not regarded with the same esteem. Two of last year’s female “Professionals” contestants were repeatedly relegated to dessert duties, though they were not specialists in this area, while men took command of the mains, showing the entrenched view that a man’s work “always turns out better”. With real-world discrimination against women in professional kitchens, as in other prestigious male-dominated industries, MasterChef’s decision to exploit baseless gender stereotypes is thoughtless rather than entertaining.
The following article was published at The Conversation on 17 April 2013. It is sad to see perceptions in the article comments that Gender Studies must involve hatred of men or that it is irrelevant as an area of study if it does not extensively focus on men. Sadly, I think such views on a site that attracts educated readers provides even more conclusive evidence for why Gender Studies is needed in universities and beyond.
In his response to the Steubenville rape case, musician Henry Rollins suggested that women’s studies should be incorporated into high school curricula. Rollins proposed that if young people were to understand that women, as war heroes, politicians, writers and revolutionaries, “have been kicking ass in high threat conditions for ages” that it would help to improve respect for women.
As we express outrage at rape culture and other manifestations of misogyny in a supposedly “postfeminist” age, it makes sense to support the study of gender in classrooms. In this context, it is astounding to see Australia’s universities dismantling their gender studies majors.
The University of Queensland houses a 41 year-old gender studies program. It plans to discontinue its undergraduate major from 2014. This will mean the loss of the last gender studies major in the state. Students at the university have planned a rally to protest the decision.The program itself, as at many universities, has no dedicated staff member. It relies on committed staff in disciplines including history, English and philosophy to teach subjects within the major.
This year has already seen the elimination of the gender studies major at the University of Wollongong. In 2012, La Trobe University began to restructure its Arts faculty, and gender, sexuality and diversity studies was targeted for discontinuation and inspired significant student protest.
The University of Melbourne abandoned its gender studies major in 2008. In response to continued student interest, a new gender studies lecturer was appointed in 2011 and the major was recently reinstated.
Enrolments for subjects in these programs are healthy, but the number of students who undertake gender studies majors are usually small. More than 80 students are currently enrolled in UQ’s introductory gender studies subject. Yet Executive Dean of Arts Fred D’Agostino justified the program’s axing because only 13 students have declared a gender studies major this year. Despite the phasing out of gender studies at Honours level in 2005, the students are committed to the major.
D’Agostino maintains that “most” gender studies subjects will continue to be offered at UQ. The primary difference is that students will no longer graduate with a gender studies major and their ability to pursue postgraduate research in the area at other institutions will be compromised.
If the subjects will continue to be taught, what are the savings that the removal of the major will generate? The price is the erasure of an important, interdisciplinary field. Nevertheless, the gradual dissolution of gender studies programs cannot be viewed purely as economic or demand-based decisions.
These courses arose out of the women’s movement in the early 1970s. They were sparked by activism for women’s rights and aimed to counter and critique the heavy male orientation of academic disciplines. In many instances, battles were fought to launch the study of women and feminist scholarship as legitimate areas of inquiry.
Activist and academic Merle Thornton taught the first women’s studies subject at UQ in 1972, establishing the program with Professor Carole Ferrier in the following year. It was as much of a challenge to the status quo as when Thornton chained herself to the bar of Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel with Rosalie Bogner in 1965 to protest women’s exclusion from public bars.
When a women’s studies course was put forward at a Humanities Board meeting at Flinders University in 1972, it was mocked. A Spanish Professor circulated a joke proposal among the male members of the Board for a course on “The Philosophical, Social, Sexual and Artistic Transcendency of Tauromachy [bullfighting]”. It belittled the very concept of the women’s studies bid.
Universities often suggest that the pioneering feminist scholars who initiated these courses have been so successful that “gender” is now integral to most subjects. Clearly there have been transformations in Australian society and university culture since the 1970s. However, simply because English departments, for example, no longer set entire courses devoid of women writers, it does not obviate the need for a distinct space for a focus on gender in the academy.
Today we grapple with the continued realities of misogyny and sexism even though our nation has achieved formal gender equality. Now is not the time to dismantle the courses that help us to understand how gender impacts upon us all.
A few months ago, I was invited by ABC Melbourne's Libbi Gorr to record five short segments on fairy tales. The aim was to talk about how earlier versions of the tales, prior to their revision for children in the nineteenth century, had more salacious and gruesome origins than most people know about from their own childhood reading.
I gathered together some of the most fascinating and unusual elements of some of the most popular tales as they have been told and recorded across time and place. The five "Scary Fairy Stories" that I discussed were Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Cinderella.
With the exception of groups of handsome teenage boys who sing bubblegum pop, we don't use the terms "boy" or "man band". After all, so many rock bands are made up of men only that we don't need see the need to distinguish them. While there is no shortage of amazing female singers in rock bands, there are far fewer female instrumentalists who have been part of mixed sex bands. For drummers, think Maureen Tucker in The Velvet Underground, Cindy Blackman who played with Lenny Kravitz, and Meg White in the White Stripes. On guitar, there's Poison Ivy from The Cramps, Gillian Gilbert from New Order, Bilinda Butcher from My Bloody Valentine and Kelley Deal from The Breeders. You'll find a few more women on bass, such as D'arcy Wretzky of The Smashing Pumpkins, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Debbie Googe of My Bloody Valentine and Kim Deal of The Pixies.
In such a male-dominated art-form, it hasn't been easy for bands comprised of women to find an audience and success. This post celebrates some of the pioneering women who have broken through perceptions that females can't rock by forming bands with only female members. To qualify as an all-girl band, the primary members must all be women, therefore ruling out bands such as Hole, where a male member was integral to songwriting and performance across a significant period. I've also focused on rock primarily, so you won't find country bands like The Dixie Chicks or classical ensembles like The Medieval Babes on this list. (And I appreciate that the term "girl" can be seen as infantilising when applied to women, but as I think the rest of this blog suggests, "girl" ought not be a derogatory or insulting term.)
10. Jem and the Holograms/The Misfits
Now this isn't like when an Australian publication listed a
horse as Australian sportswoman of the year in 2012. There are countless female
musicians, and indeed hundreds of all-girl bands across the past ninety or so years,
but for girls growing up in the 1980s, the relative lack of female musicians on
MTV was countered by the morning cartoon Jem
and the Holograms (1985-1988) in which girls could play instruments and
form their own bands. (Not that I'd recalled it, but Ken and the
blonde-mulleted Derek butted in to Barbie and the Rockers.) And to top it all off, Jem had to
overcome the schemes of rival all-girl band, The Misfits. Not one, but two,
bands to show young girls dressed in their nighties that girls could not only sing,
but play bass, guitar and drums.
9. Pussy Riot
I can't say much for Pussy Riot's musical influence and the group considers itself as a feminist collective of performance artists rather than a traditional band
(the members have rebuffed offers to play with the likes of Madonna because they
oppose capitalism and paying gigs). Nevertheless, a group of female musicians
has perhaps never had such a significant impact on world politics. Five members
of the collective created the video "Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin
Away!" by performing in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in
February 2012. Within weeks three of the group had been arrested and were later
convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Two members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were sent to prison labour camps in
October 2012. The women are not scheduled to be freed until October 2014, despite
the fact that both are mothers to small children.
8. The Ingenues
We're still dismayed that women rarely succeed in the performing arts unless
they also happen to be spectacularly beautiful, and so it was from 1925 to 1937 that
the promotion for successful Chicago all-girl jazz band, The Ingenues, often emphasised
the women's physical appeal, though most of the members were talented multi-instrumentalists. The women's visual appeal encouraged a career in film
shorts, including the unbeatably titled "Syncopated Sweeties".
Despite the giant entourage of 22 performers, The Ingenues were sufficiently
popular to mount tours of Australia, South Africa, Asia and
Australia.
7. The Slits
When most
people imagine the classic era of British punk, they inevitably picture the
likes of The Sex Pistols and other groups disaffected working-class young men.
The Slits formed in 1976, around the time that key bands like The Buzzcocks and
The Pistols emerged. While other phenomenal female performers like Siouxsie
Sioux (of the Banshees) arose out of the
punk scene, The Slits were the only all-female band to attain notoriety . Their
debut album, Cut, released in 1979 when singer Ari Up was still only seventeen years
old, unsurprisingly attracted attention for its cover, on which the band appeared
topless but for a light covering of mud. Yet, though their biting feminist
critique was somewhat overlooked at the time (the song "Typical Girl"
asks cynically: "Who invented the typical
girl?/ Who's bringing out the new improved model?/ And there's
another marketing ploy/Typical girl gets
the typical boy"), The Slits have since
acquired legendary status and Cut's
influence has been acknowledged in lists of the most important albums in rock.
6. The Runaways
The Runaways was not the first girl rock band to be signed to a major label in
the United States (that honour belongs to Goldie and the Gingerbreads at number
1), but the band did find mainstream success, most especially in Japan, and
influenced succeeding generations of female musicians. The Runaways launched Joan Jett to stardom and also created an inauspicious beginning to the
career of The Bangles' eventual bassist Michael (Micki) Steele who was fired
from the group. The band crossed a number of gender barriers in the music
industry: bands such as Van Halen and
Cheap Trick opened for The Runaways headline shows and the group took to hanging out with The Ramones,
The Sex Pistols, The Damned and Generation X. The Runaways' signature song 'Cherry
Bomb', from their first album in 1976, is shown in this clip from their
sold-out Japanese tour of 1977.
5. The Go-Go's
While 'We Got the Beat' and 'Our Lips are Sealed' have little punk or feminist
fire, The Go Go's are the one of the most important girl groups by virtue their
debut album Beauty and the Beast (1982)
being the first ever album by a female group who played their own instruments
and wrote their own material to top the US charts. Though it might be hard to
imagine 'Leave a Light on For Me'-era Belinda Carlisle being on the musical
edge, the band developed out of the Californian punk scene. The Go Go's began
to establish a following in their home city and in England when they
supported Madness on a substantial run of dates in 1980. Though the band did have
subsequent gold albums and top ten singles, The Go Go's were not able to
replicate the phenomenal success of their first album, which topped the charts
for six weeks, and disbanded in 1985 after the release of a third album.
4. L7
It's a long way from 'Summer Rain' to throwing a used tampon from the stage*,
but though L7 may have never had the chart success of fellow Californians The
Go-Go's, the band is emblematic of an important swathe of American girl bands
who preferred to get angry than to co-ordinate their jumpers and perms. (I
could have equally included any number of Riot Grrrl bands that rocked out from
the early to mid-'90s, most notably Bikini Kill.) There is perhaps no better
example of expressing anger rather than feminine insecurity and self-loathing
than L7's track 'Shitlist': "When I get mad/ And I get pissed/ I grab my
pen/ And I write out a list/ Of all the people/ That won't be missed/ You've
made my shitlist." The band was also politically active for women's rights
causes. In 1991, L7 organised and played at Rock for Choice, a pro-choice
benefit concert. L7 had their roots firmly in punk, but successfully adapted
their sound during the explosion of grunge with the single 'Pretend We're Dead'
put on high rotation in 1992.
*At the Reading Festival in 1992, the crowd erupted angrily and started
slinging mud when L7 was affected by sound problems. Donita Sparks removed a
tampon from her vagina and hurled it into the crowd, with the following cry:
"Eat my used tampon, f***ers!"
3. The Pleasure Seekers/Cradle
Now I've got to admit that, as a child, I was only aware of two pieces of
information about Suzi Quatro: (1) she often performed on the "golden
oldies" circuit in Australia and (2) she played Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days. I probably thought that
Leather Tuscadero was a real musician, as the show clearly conveyed that
somehow this character was famous beyond the set of Al's Diner. Not only did Quatro become a rocker and celebrity in her own right, but she was a founding
member and singer of Detroit's The Pleasure Seekers, one of the first girl bands to be
signed to a major label. As with The Slits, the band was formed when its
members were still girls; when their first single 'Never Through You'd Leave
Me' b/w 'What a Way to Die' was released, Suzi was only fifteen and her guitarist
sister Patti was seventeen. Not only did both of the band's singles chart, but
the group managed to change direction from the comparative restraint of The
Pleasure Seekers to become the heavier outfit Cradle in 1969 and toured the
United States and Vietnam. 2. The Bangles
The Bangles might not be everyone's idea of one of the most significant female
bands, but the band certainly impacted on me as a girl. Beyond cartoon images of female
musicians, The Bangles were the first live women I saw on television who played
instruments. There were no shortage of female singers, but I was soon aware that
playing guitar or drums was not something that women typically did. But here
were four exceedingly attractive women, who not only were fashionable and
pretty, but who could wield a guitar. The band emerged from the West-Coast "Paisley
Underground" scene in the early 1980s, in which bands paid homage to 1960s
pop such as The Mama's and the Papa's, the influence of which remained evident
in The Bangles' emphasis on vocal harmonies. The band's story, like that of
many other female artists, is coloured by both elements of triumph and constraint in a male-controlled industry. The Bangles wrote the vast majority of their own material, but the three most successful singles, 'Walk Like an Egyptian', 'Manic Monday'
(penned by Prince) and 'Eternal Flame', were written by men (though singer Susannah
Hoffs was a co-writer on the latter single). Purportedly significant parts of hit album Different Light (1986) were overdubbed by no-doubt male session musicians, with the exception of the bass of Michael Steele (formerly of The Runaways).Internal division was sown as the
sexy Hoffs was gradually promoted as the central figure in a band that actually shared lead vocals and through the intervention of executives who sought
to extricate Hoffs from the group and promote her as a solo artist. Steele was similarly promised a solo
contract to encourage the dissolution of the band, but unsurprisingly, the less
marketable Steele never received a solo record deal.
1. Goldie and the Gingerbreads
Without Goldie and the Gingerbreads, however tame their songs, such as 'Can You
Hear My Heartbeat' which hit number 25 in the UK singles chart in 1965, there
might never have been a riot grrrl movement. The band of four (a drummer,
organist, guitarist and vocalist) was the first all-girl "rock" group
to be signed to a major American label (Decca) in 1963. Goldie and the
Gingerbreads faced general apathy toward female performers, or alternately
promotion that situated them as a "novelty" act because of the
members' gender. Though various circumstances, including the difficult
conditions for women artists, forced the band's demise in 1968, the band had
already made monumental strides for women musicians by touring with The Rolling
Stones, The Animals, The Beatles and The Yardbirds in the United Kingdom.
Promotional image for Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful
The two most enduringly famous fictional girls are surely
Lewis Carroll's Alice and L. Frank Baum's Dorothy. Alice has made her way into
countless film and television adaptations of Carroll's novels, as well as
recent grittier manifestations in games and comics. (She also features with Dorothy in a sexually explicit graphic novel, Lost Girls.) While Alice is still very
closely associated with Carroll's books, even if not a great number of people
have read them, Dorothy, and the land of Oz, have drifted further and further
from Baum's original series of books. Indeed, it is hard to find current
editions of all but the first book, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz.Books of Wonder's hardcover facsimile editions, while beautiful, are oriented toward adult collectors. There is some scholarly interest in the MGM Wizard of Oz film of 1939 but there is scant research on Baum's Oz, especially in contrast with an
abundance of papers on Alice.
It seems, however, that Oz is entering a phase of cultural renewal. In the
past decade we have seen the birth of the successful musical Wicked (which debuted in 2003 and was
based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel), the Sci-Fi Channel's dystopian mini-series
Tin Man (2007), the abysmal,
low-budget Dorothy and the Witches of Oz (2012),
and now several major films in 2013.
Dorothy of Oz
The upcoming Dorothy of Oz is a
computer animated film based on books written by one of Baum's great-grandson's,
Roger S. Baum, a former banker and stockbroker. L. Frank Baum did work as a
travelling salesman, bred rare chickens and wrote a book on visual
merchandising prior to creating Oz, so perhaps we won't let Roger S. Baum's former career prejudice us
too much against his stories. The trailers suggest the film is aimed at a pre-teen audience, but the now familiar motif of an Oz that is no longer quite so
"wonderful" is central in even this version. The story outline states
that not only has Kansas been devastated by the cyclone that transported
Dorothy to Oz in the first place, but that Oz itself "is in a state of
decay".
Fairuza Balk at Dorothy in Return to Oz (after escaping a
mental institution)
Disney's Return to Oz (1985)
pioneered the representation of a severely decayed Oz complete with the yellow brick
road in rubble. Though one of the books on which it was based, Ozma of Oz, did indeed feature some of
the characters and places shown in the film, including the Wheelers (though I
don't think they had punk hair in Baum's day), the deadly desert and the Nome
King (who imprisoned the Royal Family of the Land of Ev within ornaments).
Dorothy being sent to a dubious mental institution for electroshock therapy
after her first visit to Oz, however, was solely the questionable invention
of Disney.
Dorothy in one of W.W.
Denslow's original
illustrations (1900)
Dorothy of Oz, Return to Oz and Tin Man all
retain Dorothy, or a Dorothy-like figure, as the protagonist. The first two
preserve Dorothy's girlhood, as in Baum's books, where illustrations suggest
that she is under ten years of age. Judy Garland was sixteen at the time that
she played Dorothy in the MGM film, and despite having her breasts bound and
supposedly wearing a corset, she contributed a much older, and substantially less
feisty, Dorothy to our popular imagination. Tin Man's D.G. is a small-town waitress who has been hidden in the
world beyond Oz by her mother, the former Queen of Oz, from her sister,
Azkadellia, who is possessed by the spirit of an evil witch. As an adult, she
is not especially dependent on others, is smart and brave, and eventually
discovers her own magical powers. For an article on this very topic, you can read Deb Waterhouse-Watson's "Re/deconstructing the Yellow Brick Road".)
The most heavily promoted new Oz adaptation is Disney's Oz the Great and Powerful (dir. Sam
Raimi), which is described as something of a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Disney has clearly decided to eschew the large body of Baum sequels that they might have adapted to film after the commercial failure of Return to Oz.The new film focuses on the back story of the Wizard from
his time as a circus illusionist in Kansas to his travel to Oz and encounters
with three witches who question whether he really is the great wizard that the people in the land of Oz have been awaiting. The trailer emphasises his journey towards becoming
"a great man". This seems a little bizarre in the context of the
original novel and the MGM film in which he is shown to be merely a charlatan
using smoke and mirrors to deceive those who he leads. Crucially, this
big-budget film necessarily omits the character of Dorothy in order to reveal
the Wizard's history. Baum himself did not include Dorothy in the first sequel
to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvellous Land of Oz (1904), which
tells the story of Princess Ozma, who for the most part of the book is
enchanted in the form of a boy named Tip. But the question that remains to be
answered is whether a contemporary tale of Oz needs Dorothy as much as any
story of Wonderland requires Alice. As in Wicked, the focus on the tension between good and bad women, might fill the void left by the writing of Dorothy out of Oz.
Even if the end of the Mayan calendar cycle doesn't bring
forth the apocalypse, a shopping centre in the days just before Christmas
resembles something close to the end times. Many poor souls are buying up toys
for their children or child relatives, the happiness of their innocent hearts
depending on the right purchase. The world toy market in 2010 was worth over 83 billion US dollars, with 2.6 billion spent in Australia alone.
Last month I gave a talk at Melbourne Free University about sexism in popular
culture. In one brief sentence I mentioned the popular Lego Friends range for
girls. The question time of almost half an hour afterwards was almost entirely consumed
by debate about the girls' Lego. I talked about Prime Minister Gillard's media
representation and popular culture's fixation on women's appearance and sexual desirability,
but the audience was most fascinated by toys. We have all played with toys as children and
continue to interact with them if we have our own children or grandchildren: toys
are ubiquitous. They are also often seen as having no broader significance or
importance (i.e. not important enough to warrant serious discussion). Yet
attempts to influence the kinds of toys that are sold, their colours and
marketing so as to minimise gender stereotyping always attract negative
responses about social engineering that seeks to upend innate gender differences.
The 'old-school' Easy-Bake Oven in its Betty
Crocker incarnation
In the past month, an American girl named McKenna Pope has petitioned Hasbro to
manufacture an Easy-Bake Oven that her four-year-old brother, Gavyn, who likes
to cook, can use without feeling like a traitor to his sex. The Easy-Bake has
been sold since the 1950s and enables children to actually cook small treats,
formerly through a light bulb that generated heat and now via an electrical
element inside. Though it has always been explicitly marketed to girls, as
advertisements and packaging from past models make clear, the oven used to look
much like a regular household oven. The new model gives up verisimilitude for
pink and purple colouration, giving off the signal, along with the girls
featured on the packaging, that this oven is not a toy for boys. McKenna's
petition now has 43,000 signatures and some leading chefs have put together a video in support of the cause, all championing the idea that cooking is
something that both boys and girls should be able to enjoy. And so should Gavyn
feel able to whip up some cookies, but the total saturation of male chefs
featured in the support video suggest that perceptions about home cooking being
a role for women has not impacted upon the prevalence of men in the more
respected realm of professional chefs. With this employment reality in mind,
the pinkified Easy-Bake Oven seems more about hemming girls in than stultifying
the ambitions of boys.
While many seem supportive of the idea of toy ovens for both sexes—after
all most chefs are men, and many celebrity chefs are quite coarse, like Gordon
Ramsey, so it's not as if cooking is seen as inducing effeminacy—a Swedish toy
chain's recent gender-neutral catalogue has been reported with a greater degree
of scepticism. Sweden is the model nation with its aims to minimise the effects
of gender stereotyping, and not to mention its progressive laws on
prostitution, which criminalise the buyers of sex, not the sellers. The Egalia
pre-school in Stockholm caused an international fuss when news of its aims to
reduce the effects of social expectations of gender were reported in the media.The school encourages children of both sexes
to play with all kinds of toys and the teachers do not use gender-specific
pronouns, but refer to children as "friends" or use a gender-neutral
term borrowed from Finnish, "hen".
A page from the Swedish Toys R Us catalogue
Top Toy, the
franchise holder for Toys R Us in Sweden, was given training and guidance by
the country's advertising watchdog for the gender discrimination it perpetuated
in its catalogues, which replicated the standard segregation of toys along
gender lines. This nudge encouraged the chain to produce their latest catalogue
with a girl shown deftly working a Nerf gun, a small boy nurturing a baby doll,
and both a boy and girl playing with a doll's house (though the boy is perched
precariously near the end of the house where a male doll appears to be
luxuriating in a spa). When the UK's Daily
Mailreported on the catalogue, it placed "gender-neutral" in
scare quotes, presumably to emphasise the ridiculousness of such a concept, and
described the toy retailer as "forced" to show boys and girls playing
with all kinds of toys, as if such representation went against all that is
logical and natural.
Unlike the Easy-Bake Oven, which may prove a gateway to an
acceptably male career in the male-dominated restaurant industry, boys cuddling baby
dolls and rearranging the furniture in a doll's house were presumably seen as
perverting the natural order, in which girls are meant to desire these things
because they will become mothers and homemakers. Though young boys seem equally
attracted to dolls, as Cordelia Fine's Delusions
of Gender explains with reference to studies that have measured young
children's reactions to them, they are taught that it is only girls who may
play with them. "Action figures" like G.I. Joe are distinguished from
"dolls" that are about fashion and make-up, like Barbie and Bratz,
and mothering, like Baby Born and Baby Alive.
'Lottie', Arklu, 2012
'Black Barbie', Mattel, 1980
As Dolls are understood as central to girls' play alone, and hence some parents and
professionals are concerned by the unnatural proportions of the likes of
Barbie, who was modelled on the German Bild Lilli (an adult novelty, moreso
than a children's toy). A new doll named Lottie, who resembles a nine-year-old girl,
rather than an adult woman or a baby, has been released by a UK
company, Arklu, and has been praised as "a healthy alternative" to Bratz, Barbie and Monster High. Lottie has a flat chest, does not appear to be wearing make-up,
has normally proportioned legs and wears typical girls' play clothing, rather
than focusing on high fashion or a sexy appearance. Lottie is probably
not the type of nine-year-old who is going to grab hold of a Nerf gun, however.
In addition to two dolls dressed for playing in the garden, two of the
incarnations come clothed in ballet and horseriding outfits, while another is
wearing a party dress to wear to a masked ball. "Lotteville Festival
Lottie" has black skin, though as with Barbie's "Colored
Francie" who debuted in 1967 and "Black Barbie" of 1980 and
onward, her features are still those of a white girl. (Colored Francie was made
using the head mould of the regular white Barbie.)
As the examples of the Easy-Bake Oven and boys playing with dolls show, we
place great strength in the idea that what kinds of toys that children play
with helps to determine the kind of adults that they will become, especially in
terms of how appropriately masculine or feminine they will be. Another clincher
for this argument is the recent release of "Breast Milk Baby", a doll that enables girls to play at breastfeeding and which comes complete with a
function that enables it to make suckling sounds. Predictably, some have seen
the idea of breasts being used for their primary function of feeding children
through doll play as "sexualising" girls while others have emphasised that we should be normalising breastfeeding to girls to ensure that breastfeeding rates
do not continue to fall.
Last year I wrote an article for The Conversation about women in the Australian military after the announcement that the remaining male-only combat roles would be opened up to women. On 28 October, after an Australian Defence Force document listing the perceived risks to the ADF of women entering these roles was made public, I was interviewed on Channel 10's The Project.
