Penmanship is now 'handwriting' as Washington state removes gender bias in statutes Sports Direct under fire for 'Girl Stuff' toy cleaning set Emily Gosden – Published 06 January 2014 03:05 PM SportsDirect has come under fire for encouraging sexism after selling a toy set of cleaning products branded “It’s Girl Stuff!”. The set, which includes a dustpan, brushes and spray bottle, is sold in a bright pink packaging adorned with flowers and a “female” sign. The retailer, controlled by Mike Ashley, was tight-lipped about the product on despite a growing backlash online. Twitter users have reacted with dismay to images of the toy set, made by manufacturer Kandytoys and being sold for £5 on the SportsDirect website. One, Em Murphy-Wearmouth, a director at Octopus Communications, described it on the social media site as “outrageous” and “the most disgusting sexism I have seen targeting young girls”. Louise Mensch, the former Tory MP, joined the backlash, writing: “Wow. ”I just wouldn’t label it girl’s stuff – it’s just so unnecessary and restrictive for both boys and girls.” A spokesman for SportsDirect declined to comment.
Susan Sarandon: 'Feminism is a bit of an old-fashioned word' | From the Observer | The Observer Susan Sarandon photographed in Los Angeles for the Observer by Steve Schofield 2013. Photograph: Contour by Getty In Arbitrage, you play the wife of a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager who is stronger than she first appears. It's not the usual character arc for a female support role – was that part of the appeal? Arbitrage Production year: 2012 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 Runtime: 107 mins Directors: Nicholas Jarecki Cast: Brit Marling, Laetitia Casta, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth More on this film Absolutely and I was also taken by Nicholas Jarecki's enthusiasm and passion, and Richard Gere, I've known forever and I got to work with him. I think that what happens in a long relationship [like the one in the film] – and the longest I've ever had was 23 years – is that people have assumptions and firm habits in the way they relate to each other. You're known for playing strong women… Except I don't particularly think of them as strong. Would you call yourself a feminist?
Watch A Student Totally Nail Something About Women That I've Been Trying To Articulate For 37 Years Lily Myers: Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn't deprive herself, but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it's proportional. It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, round stomach, and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking, making space for the entrance of men into their lives, not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation. You learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much. still staring at me with wine-soaked lips from across the kitchen table.
What happened when I started a feminist society at school I am 17 years old and I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality, and am under no illusion about how far we are from achieving it. Identifying as a feminist has become particularly important to me since a school trip I took to Cambridge last year. A group of men in a car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and me. I asked the men if they thought it was appropriate for them to be abusing a group of 17-year-old girls. For those men we were just legs, breasts and pretty faces. Shockingly, the boys in my peer group have responded in exactly the same way to my feminism. After returning from this school trip I started to notice how much the girls at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender. I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of "the best schools in the country", to try to tackle these issues. Our feminist society was derided with retorts such as, "FemSoc, is that for real?
Children at play: The war on pink There is a resurgence in response to the wash of pink aisles for little girls, by those who object to the gendered way toy marketing is being done, writes Judy Crozier. PINK FILLS THE GIRL-AISLES of toy stores, because everyone knows what little girls want, what little boys want. Isn’t that so? We know the categories from which to choose — boys have go-get-‘em toys like trucks, things you can build, models of muscle-bound heroes or villains. Girls have domestic toys — the tiny ironing board, the dolls, the little toast rack. They have dolls to dress in swanky clothes; they have dolls’ houses So that’s clear. Many of us don’t think that’s so. Way, way back when I was a new mother, we visited a family with two young boys. The boys’ mum turned to me, raised her eyebrows and said: “I just don’t know what they do with them for hours!” I looked at those little plastic figures scattered amongst the sandals and socks, and it came to me: "Well, after all, what did we do with dolls?’" She looked at me:
Representing gender in children's reading materials would a boy have been shown with flowers in the 1970s? Are girls and boys portrayed differently in children’s reading materials today than in the past? During the 1970s and 80s, studies of children’s reading materials found that males not only featured more than females but also they tended to take the lead roles and were more active than their female counterparts, who were often restricted to traditional stereotyped roles. Many of these earlier studies of gender in children’s reading material analysed the texts based on their content, which meant that researchers made their own judgements about what was sexist and what was not. Now, however, advances in computer and electronic technology mean that ‘corpus linguistics’ can be used to analyse texts more systematically. Macalister based his study on New Zealand’s School Journal, a multi-authored journal of prose, drama and poetry, published and distributed to New Zealand school children every year.
'Too Much Estrogen': The Golden Globes, Chris Christie and Men Who Don't Want to Share Culture | Soraya Chemaly Brit Hume thinks Chris Christie is paying for a "feminized atmosphere," in which his naturally tough guy (read: male) behavior has been erroneously cast as bullying. Meanwhile, the NY Post's film critic Kyle Smith's take on the Golden Globes was that there was just "too much estrogren." These are just this weekend's examples of men having a hard time-sharing culture. Sounds an awful lot like my 3-year-old brother, who used to chant, "Mine! Mine! "Guys [like Christie] who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old-fashioned tough guys," explains Hume, "Run some risks." Smith, in the meantime, thinks that the Globes should have just been called "Girls." You can't argue with the way people feel. The Globes red carpet and crowd shots suggested a nice gender parity, everyone seemed to have a spouse or a date, usually of the opposite sex. Horrors. First, let's put Smith's disgust in context. Likewise, Hume's casual concerns about "feminized atmosphere."
Men and women: are we really worlds apart? - Features Do women and men talk differently? And, if they do, why? Kitty Sadler explores the theories Kitty Sadler, 13 March 2011 Everybody knows men are from Mars and women are from Venus. There's no denying it: no education or social conditioning has succeeded in erasing the differences between the language of men and women. For Otto Jespersen and other linguists from the early 20th century, a woman is not a man's counterpart; she is his wife. Despite an investigation into memory in which women came out on top, it was still asserted that it was men who had the higher intellectual capacity - it was easier to succeed in the test when the subject was enough of an airhead that they could make use of "the vacant chambers of the mind". It's not just old men born in the 19th century who have supported deficiency theory. Lakoff stated that women use phatic (empty) language; apologise too much and can't tell jokes, for example. A stance many readers may find more palatable is the theory of dominance.
Van Badham battles the Brosphere: On women, trolls and the Australian media in 2013 Social media is the new democracy of Australian opinion. Not so long ago – like, you know, the dark ages of the 1990s – participation in the contemporary political discourse was a privilege of, well, privilege. If you didn't have the time and money yourself to create your own publication and distribute it (hello, The Chaser!), you had to wait for an established media brand to anoint you with a platform. The selection process of the latter were, of course, drawn from the unacknowledged, systemic prejudice that talks about "merit" even as it seamlessly restocks its ranks of middle-class, white men. Now, one no longer requires a broadsheet masthead above a headshot to claim a public media platform, and Twitter is the new distribution. Participating in this discussion and its activism is exhilarating. Trolling is happening because there have never been so many women visibly engaged in public nation-making debate as there are online. Here's what to do when they strike: Remain calm.