Quickies
Quickies: Feminist Fishmongers, the Gudjonsson Test of Suggestibility, and Petty Olson
The Girl Guides, now known as the Girl Scouts, were founded on March 12, 1912. I used to be a Girl Scout but I was never that into it, maybe because my troop never did anything cool (even though overall I think the Girl Scouts is a great organization).
- People—Including Cops—See Black Kids as Less Innocent and Less Young Than White Kids – What a sad state of affairs.
- The World’s Greatest Feminist Fishmonger – “It’s refreshing to remember that some of America’s oldest institutions embrace change—make room for women and racial and ethnic diversity—more willingly and with more alacrity than, say, the modern G.O.P., or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. It’s even more refreshing when those institutions happen also to sell delicious pickled herring in cream sauce.”
- The Gudjonsson test can discover how suggestible you are – Insert your Star Wars joke here.
- An Ode to Mad Men’s Peggy Olson: TV’s Most Relatable Feminist – “A New York Magazine profile on Elisabeth Moss reminds us why Peggy Olson is TV’s most relatable feminist.”
- Every Known Galaxy in the Universe, As Seen From a Spaceship – Are you suffering from some post-Cosmos withdrawal?
As much as I love Peggy Olsen, I mourn the fact that Moss, such a great talent, has to be involved in Scientology.
I’ve got a good idea, ditch the ‘Girls’ and ‘Boys’ title and merge them to form one organisation called ‘Scouts’! … thus ending yet another western form of gender segregation that gets conveniently ignored when talking about, well, you know…
Problem is that Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts aren’t titles, they’re completely separate entities. The Boy Scouts were originally started… well basically to keep boys from masturbating, and displays its Christian roots to today. The Girl Scouts are a response to the boy scouts, so that girls can get the same positive aspects of the boy scouts. However, being started later, and for much saner reasons, they tend to be the much more rational group.
Few points
1. Girl Guides/Girl Scouts didn’t start very much later than the Boy Scouts but in the US they have always been separate organizations and relations haven’t always been amicable (right down to threats of lawsuits by the BSA over the name back around 1920).
2. Scouts as a whole wasn’t explicitly a Christian movement (individual organizations might be) though there were other youth organizations for that and the largest scouting organization in the world is in a majority Muslim country (Indonesia) and another of the largest is in Thailand, a Buddhist country (for obvious reasons ‘god’ isn’t in their promise)
3. Many national Scouting organizations include both girls and boys (even in the US one section of the Boy Scouts, Venturing, is mixed).
4. In the US Girl Scouts on the whole has been far more liberal than the Boy Scouts. Other than a ban on boys and on limits on men as adult leaders (they can be leaders but they can’t be the only leaders in a troop), I can’t think of much else (fine with atheists and the promise can be modified).
5. If the two organizations merged whose current policies would prevail? Note this also includes struture, in the BSA the troops are owned by the sponsoring organizations and the sponsoring organizations reps have the vote (and they have to be over 21) hence the clout of the churches and of the LDS; in the GSUSA troops are owned by the council and scouts, adult and girls, over the age of 14 can be representatives and vote (churches have no direct power).
6. Oddly enough in the UK the Guides Association (all girls) is slightly larger than the Scouts Association (completely mixed); not sure why.
In the US, though, Boy Scouts is largely connected to LDS, which can explain a lot of the homophobia and such; they say it’s to prevent sexual abuse. Note that all this does to combat sexual abuse is mean that a boy who’s molested by his Scoutmaster is now afraid of coming forward about it because having sex with a man gets you banned from Scouts.
The Gudjonsson test?
But, but, we HAVE to believe Dylan…?