Basically, if one were to reread everything I complained about in last Tuesday's post and find oneself unable to continue life in the world it describes, and if one then were to personally procure Jim Henson (or a subsidiary thereof; I don't really understand what's involved in getting his name attached to things like this, but I like to imagine him just slamming crappy bodega coffee and storyboarding this his damn self at 2 am somewhere) to correct All of It, one might have just made Dinosaur Train happen.
 |
| What am I doing in a Pteranodon nest? Rocking the eff out. |
Like Mac, I was pretty much sold once I heard the (genius!) title, because who would ever want anything in life besides dinosaurs on trains OMG.
But there are other amazing features of this show! For one, Tiny and Don are totally gender indeterminate; I had to look up the show on PBS Kids (had to! this is research!) in order to verify that Tiny is a girl dinosaur and Don is a boy. In fact, I spent a good three weeks believing that the latter's name was Dawn. Moreover, the gender reveals on the PBS website did nothing to change the characters for me. It was exactly like their gender didn't matter.
(Even) more awesomely, on the accompanying website for parents, which you will go to and never leave, Tiny is described as follows:
Tiny, who loves to make rhymes, is quite clever and very brave. Tiny approaches every dinosaur she meets with the confidence of a news reporter trying to get the full scoop. Tiny is so brave that she often wanders a little bit too far; but, Buddy is always there to help her get back on the right track. And in return, Tiny is fiercely protective of her brother Buddy. Tiny also has two Pteranodon siblings: Don and Shiny.
 |
| You can tell she's a girl, because eyelashes! |
So simple, right? To just make a character with strengths and weaknesses and loves and features, and who -- in addition to having, like, an eye color and hands and feet and lungs, has a gender?
It's simple, that is, until you consider how "female" is the compelling characteristic that determines every other aspect of every other female cartoon character I know -- from the effing eyeshadow on Nala the lioness to the fact that, inevitably, Nala has to re-emerge in the second half of the Lion King as a love interest for Simba rather than an even-remotely-interesting character in her own right. Because lionesses totally wait around for male lions to get things done, except how that never happens. Check out the Discovery Channel: it's a busy life, being a lioness.
 |
| #lionesslyfe |
I get that this may not look like winning to every female person who cares about how other people who share her gender are represented in cartoons. I know that there are women who don't want their gender not to matter; who prefer to celebrate it as an important part of who they are. Were I making a case that racial or ethnic identity should be treated as an afterthought, well, that'd place me somewhere along a continuum of obtuse privilege and flat-out racism.
But I am a woman, see, and while I certainly don't speak for any other women, I am also proof that there exist human beings who are female but who do not find any aspect of a "female identity", as I understand it, appealing. I don't know how good it feels to "get all dolled up" or to "celebrate my body" by "flaunting my curves". I believe other women when they say they do -- that manicures, "skinny jeans", and dancing in public are acts of self-affirmation for them. For me, these things are chores, like dishes or laundry, only my husband and brother and dad are not expected to do them, so I can only surmise that they are optional. And I opt to not do them, since I gain nothing from them: I find it life-affirming to do my job and play with my kid and run and read and write -- much as you may, hypothetical male reader.
Honestly, I am pretty sympathetic to arguments that with so many immediate, material injustices in the world, gender inequity -- especially at it is experienced in the developed world -- is a privileged sort of cause to take up. I get why someone might be unable to care about bullshit gender programming in a world where kids are starving to death and economic and racial oppression have effects that are often much more tangible and immediately damaging.
However, feminism remains important to me because I do not like the way that what we tell our girls and women to be so rarely intersects with what we'd like for children and adult people to be. I would love Mac no matter what and who he was; but when I look at the shape that love takes, the things I think about when I am loving him and celebrating him, they are: his curiosity, his joy, his passion, his energy, his courage, his ingenuity, his stubbornness, his fascination with the world around him, his consistent turning outward towards things and people and places rather than inward, to himself. He engages the world rather than marketing himself to it.
And I am enormously proud of that, because it is hard to approach the world relationally, rather than appropriatively, as a would-be consumer or product, regardless of your gender. I wish I could live in the world that way, but for me, that would require an overhaul of my basic understanding of myself so total that I don't know that I would be myself if I ever accomplished it.
If I had a daughter, I'd want the same from her as I do for my son, though I often feel like I'd be alone, there. I'd want her to see the world as a site for awesome action and projects, not a stage or a mount for the product she makes of herself. But over and over, I see girls trained to fill a role in the lives of the male characters, to be marketed as products, most often to those with more power than they have (boys, grown ups, the omnipresent arbiter of who is good enough -- no one -- and what everyone else needs in order to become good enough).
This is why the Bechdal test is such a genius way of evaluating shows and films; because overwhelmingly, female characters do not exist independent of what they do to propel the male characters' stories. And, because this unfortunate and constructed set of circumstances announces itself as real, as part of some sort of inevitable female condition -- the projects which women are encouraged to undergo are so much more likely to be acts of "self-creation" that overlook the reality that we become the people we are, not by hyper vigilantly patrolling our bodies and responses and functions in the lives of others, but by going out into the world and doing things.
On Dinosaur Train, girls do just that -- so regularly, so unselfconsciously, that we can't tell the girl characters from the boy characters if not for the eyelashes (even with eyelashes, some of us need help). Because the show is also astoundingly pro-science and pro-learning and pro-doing-shit-rather-than-buying shit, all of the Pteranodon family adventures revolve around things scientists do: explore, create, problem solve. Their conflicts are external -- like Mac, they are oriented facing outward, at the world around them. Tiny and Shiny go on adventures, solve problems, and creature things ranging from gardens to Tiny Places to installation art featuring dinosaur representatives of each letter of the alphabet singing a song called "Dinosaur ABCs" on a moving train -- a train which, if I am understanding the show correctly, is able to move not only through time, but through space, unifying dinosaurs native to different periods as well as different times. (This is the actual plot summary of an actual episode of Dinosaur Train.)
Tiny and Shiny don't fall in love or attempt to make themselves worthy of loving to other, more interesting characters. They are not subject to the asinine "realities" of being female, mostly because they are dinosaurs, but also -- and this is important -- because their creator has put them in a world in which girls are smart and brave and curious to a fault, and this goes entirely un-interrogated. Because creatures sometimes are that way, and girls are creatures, so why would they not have those features?
On the one hand, it's sad that I am so excited to have a TV show for children not insert itself into this unsolicited cacophony of what girls should be and how one should go about being a girl, as though this were a fundamentally different question from what people should be and how one goes about being a person.
On the other hand, I think the problem is more complicated than: sexist culture versus feminist culture. I don't know if it's temporary, a culture moment that's dilated somehow -- though we can hope! -- or whether this is itself a universal reality, but people seem to enjoy showing how bad things "really are" than in using art to remake how things are, to point to how things could be and create a space in which we can recreate the world rather than simply replicating it as it is.
I could tell you why I just hate that Disney exists, why I find even Sesame Street's female characters somewhat unsatisfying, why Frozen makes me want to beat my head against the wall. But I am tired of writing papers and rants and blog entries about all the lame culture we're creating. I'm less interested in indicting the heavily marketing narratives/ merchandising vehicles with which we are all preoccupied with than I am in my new mission of guerrilla positivity. For March, maybe forever, I'm aggressively seeking out things that are legitimately awesome, ways the world could be more livable, more humane, more and better fun -- because I do believe than fun that leaves out half the world is ultimately hollow. That's not the fun I want for Mac, however enthusiastically it's being marketed to him as his birthright as a Super Special White Boy.
However, feminism remains important to me because I do not like the way that what we tell our girls and women to be so rarely intersects with what we'd like for children and adult people to be. I would love Mac no matter what and who he was; but when I look at the shape that love takes, the things I think about when I am loving him and celebrating him, they are: his curiosity, his joy, his passion, his energy, his courage, his ingenuity, his stubbornness, his fascination with the world around him, his consistent turning outward towards things and people and places rather than inward, to himself. He engages the world rather than marketing himself to it.
And I am enormously proud of that, because it is hard to approach the world relationally, rather than appropriatively, as a would-be consumer or product, regardless of your gender. I wish I could live in the world that way, but for me, that would require an overhaul of my basic understanding of myself so total that I don't know that I would be myself if I ever accomplished it.
If I had a daughter, I'd want the same from her as I do for my son, though I often feel like I'd be alone, there. I'd want her to see the world as a site for awesome action and projects, not a stage or a mount for the product she makes of herself. But over and over, I see girls trained to fill a role in the lives of the male characters, to be marketed as products, most often to those with more power than they have (boys, grown ups, the omnipresent arbiter of who is good enough -- no one -- and what everyone else needs in order to become good enough).
This is why the Bechdal test is such a genius way of evaluating shows and films; because overwhelmingly, female characters do not exist independent of what they do to propel the male characters' stories. And, because this unfortunate and constructed set of circumstances announces itself as real, as part of some sort of inevitable female condition -- the projects which women are encouraged to undergo are so much more likely to be acts of "self-creation" that overlook the reality that we become the people we are, not by hyper vigilantly patrolling our bodies and responses and functions in the lives of others, but by going out into the world and doing things.
On Dinosaur Train, girls do just that -- so regularly, so unselfconsciously, that we can't tell the girl characters from the boy characters if not for the eyelashes (even with eyelashes, some of us need help). Because the show is also astoundingly pro-science and pro-learning and pro-doing-shit-rather-than-buying shit, all of the Pteranodon family adventures revolve around things scientists do: explore, create, problem solve. Their conflicts are external -- like Mac, they are oriented facing outward, at the world around them. Tiny and Shiny go on adventures, solve problems, and creature things ranging from gardens to Tiny Places to installation art featuring dinosaur representatives of each letter of the alphabet singing a song called "Dinosaur ABCs" on a moving train -- a train which, if I am understanding the show correctly, is able to move not only through time, but through space, unifying dinosaurs native to different periods as well as different times. (This is the actual plot summary of an actual episode of Dinosaur Train.)
Tiny and Shiny don't fall in love or attempt to make themselves worthy of loving to other, more interesting characters. They are not subject to the asinine "realities" of being female, mostly because they are dinosaurs, but also -- and this is important -- because their creator has put them in a world in which girls are smart and brave and curious to a fault, and this goes entirely un-interrogated. Because creatures sometimes are that way, and girls are creatures, so why would they not have those features?
On the one hand, it's sad that I am so excited to have a TV show for children not insert itself into this unsolicited cacophony of what girls should be and how one should go about being a girl, as though this were a fundamentally different question from what people should be and how one goes about being a person.
On the other hand, I think the problem is more complicated than: sexist culture versus feminist culture. I don't know if it's temporary, a culture moment that's dilated somehow -- though we can hope! -- or whether this is itself a universal reality, but people seem to enjoy showing how bad things "really are" than in using art to remake how things are, to point to how things could be and create a space in which we can recreate the world rather than simply replicating it as it is.
I could tell you why I just hate that Disney exists, why I find even Sesame Street's female characters somewhat unsatisfying, why Frozen makes me want to beat my head against the wall. But I am tired of writing papers and rants and blog entries about all the lame culture we're creating. I'm less interested in indicting the heavily marketing narratives/ merchandising vehicles with which we are all preoccupied with than I am in my new mission of guerrilla positivity. For March, maybe forever, I'm aggressively seeking out things that are legitimately awesome, ways the world could be more livable, more humane, more and better fun -- because I do believe than fun that leaves out half the world is ultimately hollow. That's not the fun I want for Mac, however enthusiastically it's being marketed to him as his birthright as a Super Special White Boy.
No comments:
Post a Comment