"Snow Queen Palace" from the Early Learning Centre

The UK Telegraph recently ran an article about Pink Stinks, an organization founded by my friends Abi and Emma Moore, that “challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.”

Pink Stinks just launched a campaign against Early Learning Centre, asking the toy retailer to stop pinkification and gender-stereotyping of children’s toys.

Some interesting quotes from the Telegraph article:

The campaign has been backed by Ed Mayo, the former government “consumer tsar” and author of Consumer Kids, How Big Business is Grooming our Children for Profit.

He said: “There may be worse things to worry about, but I feel this colour apartheid is one of the things that sets children on two separate railway tracks. One leads to higher pay, and higher status and one doesn’t.”

[...]

“Why on earth do girls need to have a globe in pink?” said Mr Mayo. “Does it ultimately lead to the 15 per cent pay gap suffered by women further down the line?. That’s far too simplistic, but I feel gender roles are becoming polarised far too early on.”

Some fascinating trivia about the color pink and child play:

[B]efore World War II pink was more usually associated with boys, while blue – traditionally the colour of the Virgin Mary – was linked with girls.

Links:

The Telegraph: “Pink toys ‘damaging’ for girls” (full article)

Pink Stinks : The Campaign for Real Role Models (official site)

Follow Pinks Stinks on Twitter

From Newsweek:  “Generation Diva. How our obsession with beauty is changing our kids.” Written by Jessica Bennett.

Excerpt:

Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she’ll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the “Beverly Hills, 90210″ set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis.

Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that’s got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras” look ordinary. “My daughter is 8, and she’s like, so into this stuff it’s unbelievable,” says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. “From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities.“

(Emphasis mine.)

The article continues,

Why are this generation’s standards different? To start, this is a group that’s grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They’ve watched bodies transformed on “Extreme Makeover”; faces taken apart and pieced back together on “I Want a Famous Face.” They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women’s magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras,” or the show’s WEtv competitor, “Little Miss Perfect.”

Read the full article here – and check out the interactive chart about women’s beauty spending, from childhood into their 60s. Disturbing stuff.

Barbie may be turning 50 today, but the doll it was modeled on, its doppelganger, is actually a bit older than that: she’s almost 54. And everybody has forgotten her birthday. Poor Lilli!

Ruth Handler saw a Bild Lilli doll while vacationing in Switzerland with her kids, snatched up three of them, and brought them back to California, determined to copy the doll and sell it on the American market. Little did she know that Bild Lilli was actually a gag gift, a novelty item, sold in bars and tobacco shops and meant for an adult public. It was the sort of present men would give each other with a wink – a toy meant to titillate. Men would place Bild Lilli dolls in their cars – on their dashboard or hang them from their rearview mirrors, on a little swing.

Lilli’s history goes back a bit further. Before being manufactured as a gag gift, she had been a character in a comic strip created by Reinhard Beuthien for the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung. All her stories revolved around fashion & appearance, staying out late, and sleeping with old, rich men. In short, Lilli was an unabashedly sexual, proud gold-digger. 

Barbie kept the looks – down to a tee – but instead of flaunting her sexuality, she focused on looks and shopping – something far more “innocuous” for parents.

Now, watch these two videos:

Talking Barbie – 1968 (already discussed on this blog)

And a spot-on, biting parody of Barbie dolls from the Simpsons (via Jezebel.com):

Lisa, you rock

Another recent achievement by Barbie – which was not discussed by Mattel? This year, she won a prestigious TOADY award! Barbie Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader won the Worst Toy of the Year Award – handed to her by the CCFC, the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood. Read more about it here.

(Kim Novak and Alfred Hitchcock on the set of "Vertigo")

Two insightful articles about sexism in cinema have recently appeared in British newspapers.

From the Guardian – “Where Have All the Good Women Gone?” by Kira Cochrane.

Excerpt:

[The] women who people today’s romantic comedies seem to have three main obsessions. There’s shopping, of course, as seen in Confessions of a Shopaholic and Sex and the City. There’s babies, as witnessed in Baby Mama, Juno and Knocked Up. And there’s marriage, which was front and centre of the noxious recent release Bride Wars, featuring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway fighting over their dream wedding – described by Purkiss as “what some drunken bozo who never got a date in high school thinks women are like”. Marriage is also at the centre of Made of Honour, License to Wed, The Wedding Date, The Wedding Planner and 27 Dresses.

[...]

Now, at a time when 70% of women are in the workforce, career women in romantic comedies are generally either portrayed as incompetent, cruel, or both. Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, an academic at the University of Kent and an expert on romantic comedies, says that she finds it “quite insulting that a career woman now is something that is so frowned upon. You see depictions of women who are supposedly at the top of their game, yet they can’t walk down a corridor in a white suit without pouring coffee on themselves or walking into a bush. The films are not very subtly saying ‘yes, they may be at the top in their jobs, but actually what they really need is a man. In fact, a husband.’”

And again from the UK’s Guardian: “Is cinema just the ultimate boys’ club?” by Bibi van der Zee.

Excerpt:

Hollywood is monstrously, demonstrably sexist. It’s sexist in a way that must make industries like construction and engineering take off their hard-hats and whistle with admiration. According to the Celluloid Ceiling review, of the top 250 films of 2007, women made up just 15% of key behind-the-scenes roles. They were just 6% of the directors, and just 2% of cinematographers.

In front of the camera things appear to be slightly better: you can see women, they’re all over the place. But actually, with all those male directors, directing films about men, the women really don’t get much of a look in. Of the 6,833 speaking characters in the films nominated for the best picture Oscar between 1977 and 2006, only 27.3% were female (only one woman director has ever been nominated for an Oscar: Sofia Coppola, in 2003, the same year that Fernando Meirelles was nominated for City of God without his female co-director, Katia Lund).

In Alison Bechdel’s cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the character Mo explains that she only watches films in which 1) there are two female characters, who 2) have a conversation which is 3) not about men.

Think of your top 3 favortite films… Do they pass the test?

Last October, I wrote a post unmasking Dove’s corporate hypocrisy and cynicism.

Today, I discovered yet another example of duplicity, this time from Mattel & Barbie dolls.

Watch this video:

And then this one:

Discuss.

WebWire: “Clinique Skin Supplies for Men launches new website Cliniqueformen.co.uk”

My favorite product: NEW Age Defense Hydrator SPF 15 (see pic above, link here).

Absolute killer: the male voice-over on Clinique’s website, reciting instructions on how to use it – paraphrasing: “if you want to erase fine lines, apply it every morning.”

Boys, men, welcome to the beauty myth. Enjoy the ride.

USA Today – “Mattel gives Barbie online dream house”

Excerpt:

Toy company Mattel is revamping the online presence for its popular brands — including the iconic Barbie and, for boys, Hot Wheels — with expanded playable, customization and networking features on the new Mattel Digital Network.

[...]

And the upgrade will help Mattel keep pace with its competition online. Other brands such as Disney, LEGO and Hasbro have added features that aim to keep children connected with their sites — and products.

“There is a battle is for kids’ eyes on the computer,” says Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review (childrenssoftware.com). These days, companies need “a smart strategy behind their toys that does things like keep track of a child’s age and recommend or suggest (products), whether obviously or subliminally.”

Parents should know that such sites merge content and advertising, Buckleitner says. “I don’t think these things are necessarily bad, and a lot of learning can go on. But we have to be smart so we can tell the difference between manipulation and play.”

There’s an eager, youthful clientele on the Web. Three-fourths of children 2 to 14 use a computer, according to The NPD Group’s report Kids & Digital Content III, which found that computers are the most widely used consumer electronic device among children. Cellphones, MP3 players and game systems are next.

Oh boy.

Full article here.

I’m currently re-reading Margo Maine’s excellent book “Body Wars” – to add useful information to my documentary script.

In the chapter “Barbie Dolls & Body Image” Ms. Maine writes about the group Barbie Liberation Organization:

One group, the Barbie Liberation Organization, formed by a graduate student from the University of California at San Diego, went so far as to swap the speech mechanisms of the Talking Barbies with those of G.I. Joes, causing havoc for the toy stores that received the tampered merchandise. The Talking Barbies were saying things like, “Vengeance is mine,” while the G.I. Joes were saying, “Let’s go shopping.” This political art expresses the distress many feel about the status of women in our society and the symbols that threaten the self-esteem of females.

Barbie : My Scene doesn’t leave you much choice.

At least in 1985 Barbie wanted to be a disco-dancing astronaut:

You’ve come a long way, Barbie!

From scientificblogging.com.

Excerpt:

This kind of sexualization of ‘tween girls – defined as those between the ages of 8 and 12 – in pop culture and advertising is a growing problem fueled by marketers’ efforts to create cradle-to-grave consumers, a University of Iowa journalism professor argues in her new book.

“A lot of very sexual products are being marketed to very young kids,” said Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect. “I’m criticizing the unhealthy and damaging representations of girls’ sexuality, and how the media present girls’ sexuality in a way that’s tied to their profit motives. The body ideals presented in the media are virtually impossible to attain, but girls don’t always realize that, and they’ll buy an awful lot of products to try to achieve those bodies. There’s endless consumerism built around that.”

(Emphasis mine)

Full article here.

The Lolita Effect on Amazon.