| October 6, 1999 I just finished reading “The Smurfette Principle.” This is my honest opinion, and it probably varies greatly from those of other women. But I don’t see what all the fuss is about! We’re talking about cartoons and kid’s shows and “Sesame Street.” Sure, at some point, I agree; we should stop giving kids the message that girls are inferior. It’s sad to think that this far into the century (and on the brink of a new one), young boys still learn to think of themselves as superior. It is seen on the playground, where girls play on the swings and guys play soccer. When I was a child I wanted to be a nurse. Be a doctor? Girls weren’t doctors. This mentality is wrong, probably not healthy, and needs to be fixed. Cartoons may be the place to start. But honestly, if we are too busy criticizing films and books and reviews for what they are not, we will miss what they are. I never noticed that Dr. Suess books only had guy characters. I never realized most adventure books had guys. And as a child, I never got the impression that girls were inferior to guys from the media. Where did this impression come from, then? I’m not really sure. From my parents, perhaps. From the fact that every teacher I had in elementary school was female. Not from the media. Children are smart. Nobody has to write out for them the way the world works today; they instinctively pick it up. Thus, the answer to fixing it is not in picking apart innocent children’s literature. It is to fix our society. If we change our own mindset, the books will change, the movies will change, the muppets will become multi-gender. But it doesn't work the other way around. If we try and fix it backwards, we’ll be working on the same problem for a much longer time. The correction must come from within us all, individually. |