Quickies: the Female Chore Burden, Bitter White People, and Inequality in Children’s Movies

• Meet Melody Ellison, New American Girl—and Hopefully a Sign of More Diversity to Come – “It’s great that American Girl has finally given one of the most important eras of American history its due attention, but this is just the first step in what needs to be a continued effort to better represent the diversity of American girls’ history. Within their BeForever line, we’ve had 14 dolls to represent white history.”
• Should Dictionaries Do More to Confront Sexism? – “To address these larger patterns, dictionary editors—and readers—must decide whether it’s possible to hold up a mirror to language without sanctioning its ugly side.”
• The Scourge of the Female Chore Burden – “All over the world, women are doing work they’re not getting paid for. In rich countries, it might be folding the laundry or staying home to take care of a sick child. In developing countries, unpaid labor tends to be more physically arduous, like hauling water and chopping wood. Wherever you are, it’s considered women’s work.”
• A Quick Summary of Why Only White People Want to Make America Great “Again” – ” The United States, in living memory, was a better/more affordable place for the working class in part because of government retirement benefits, union-friendly laws, federally subsidized home loans, and federally subsidized education. One of the reasons that there was so much of this ‘free stuff’ available to white people back in the day is that it wasn’t available to nonwhite people. Discrimination meant there were bigger slices of the pie to go around, so to speak, for every white person.”
• Our Favorite Childhood Movies Taught Us The Wrong Lessons About Equality – “The researchers found that the way the movies addressed social issues suggested that ‘children’s media legitimates poverty and social class inequality in a new way — by presenting them as benign.’ Social issues were left mostly unaddressed by movies that presented them as unimportant.”
• Meet Lane Moore, the Genius Behind the “Male Feminists of Tinder” Tumblr – “In the last few months, I kept noticing guys calling themselves feminists in their bios or making these weird intense statements about how they were obsessed with women’s issues, which is cool, but it just made it seem like they were basically holding up signs saying ‘I DON’T HATE WOMEN!!!’ and it seemed kind of weird.”

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