Feminist Fred

Large and in charge

My little girl is getting close to five now and I’ve read her hundreds of children’s books, from the bookstore and from the library. I’ve also watched hundreds of hours of children’s TV with her. I have no objective statistics to back up my general finding, but I defy anyone to disprove that sex bias is universal in children’s education and entertainment.

I can pick up five books at random and every character in them, even if they are androgynous-looking animals, will be male. In the remainder of rare books with female character, she is never the lead character, always a character observed by the main character or supporting the main character. It’s not that the girls are bad characters. It’s simply that they never have the center stage, unless it’s a girl book about princesses or something like that. 

The default character in children’s literature is definitely male. Considering how many women write children’s books, it’s almost tragic. Many men and women in our world today will look askance at this obvious truth and ask me “What’s wrong with that?” Well, it’s fundamental training to put girls in their place, for one thing. Book after book celebrates and demonstrates that only men can have the center stage, only men count, even that only men exist. 

My little girl really doesn’t like boys that much. She’s not friends with any of the boys at her school and refuses to wear boy colors, which are pathetically limited and easily-identifiable by any parent: Dark blue, brown, black, and anything with violent graphics or male superheroes. I can’t blame her a bit. When I was a kid I didn’t have to wear ultra-butch clothes to try to force me from seeming the slightest bit feminine, or insufficiently masculine, whichever the case may be.

So she has me change the gender of characters she likes to female when it makes sense to her, such as when they are genderless animals, and there is no conceivable reason why they should be one sex or the other. And this doesn’t even begin to even the score. But she likes it, so I do it happily. This is something she decided on her own, with no prompting from her mom or me. 

When you consider that boys do worse in school than girls, while being the center of attention on shows and books for kids, you have to wonder if we were to switch the bias whether the boys would start to do better than the girls.

The raped are now the rapists

One of the most horrible trends in modern life for women is the legal drift towards softening the definition of rape. There is an idea out there that men can be raped, too, as long as they are young enough, which does not make any sense at all if you see these men. They are huge, powerful, sexually active rape machines ready to coerce and exploit weakness and the submissive training women get from childhood on.

There was recently a case in the paper here in St. Louis about a teacher who was prosecuted for raping boys 13 to 16 years old. She said she was forced to have sex with them, but her defense didn’t hold up, because a colleague of hers claimed that when she spoke about it to her, she never mentioned being forced.

Rape. She was forced to perform oral sex on these boys and the prosecutors successfully charged her with rape and sent her to prison.

Just another addition to the already growing list of legal excuses to allow men to rape women. If a man is young enough he is allowed to rape as many women over 21 as he wishes and simply claim that they raped him, making it impossible to prosecute. I suspect that the teacher, Cathy Heminghaus, knew this and it probably played an important part in her feelings of being trapped and intimidated by those kids, who were the real criminals.

My readers, few as they are, yet much appreciated by me, might want to help me list all the latest legal excuses for raping women. I know that dressing provocatively is a great legal case for wanting to be raped, as is being drunk, asking for it then changing your mind, and many other things.

But it took me a long time to blog about this case, though it has been outraging me for weeks now as I followed what little of it I could glean from our once-great and now pathetic local paper. The full horror of teens being able to rape teachers as much as they please and then send the teachers to jail for doing it was just too much for my tender heart to take. It just makes me so sick.