feisty!

The other week at work an intern presented a case in which a 12 year old girl invented a story about feisty unicorns. When this whole thing about feisty unicorns came up, everyone in the room laughed. And it does seem kind of incongruous, doesn't it? We think of unicorns now as symbols of soft peaceful innocent girlhood. How could they possibly be feisty?

But this wasn't always the case for unicorns. According to my trusted research sources, unicorns were believed to be wild woodland creatures with various healing powers, including turning poisons into drinkable potions. Unicorns come up in Judeo-Christian texts as feared beasts of might: "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of a unicorn" (Numbers 23:22). They appear in medieval lore as untamed and powerful animals of the forest. Unicorns are depicted on many military coats of arms, for good reason.

So how did we get from thinking about them as this:

To this?

I know I am using more pictures than words here to illustrate (ha!) my point, but the pinkification and passification of unicorns and the girls that use them in their play is just so obvious in technicolor. And it's problematic to associate anything to do with girls and their imaginations only with sweetness, passivity, and ultimately, powerlessness. So here is another example to hate and oppose the hard-lined gender dichotomy of modern socialization. Because the mythical creatures we play with can be feisty if they want to. Don't tell us the only thing we can do with them is paint their nails and braid their tail hair.

Rape is rape in all colors and shapes

The semester is almost over, and then, we will have all sorts of feminist issues to discuss. But in the meantime, two pieces in the news caught my attention recently and warranted a brief pause from writing, grading, and researching to mention here.

One is the Rape is Rape campaign. Turns out, people in government are trying to change the definition of rape to mean only forcible rape. They argue that it is too hard to prove whether someone really said "No", and thus, rape victims must prove that sexual activity was truly forced on them. Clearly, this definition is absurd for so many reasons, including the fact that even force is hard to prove sometimes, non-bruise-leaving acts are still violating and wrong, "No" always means "No", even if one is gently coercing sex, etc.

So please support the protection of all people (mostly women, but some men, too) against sexual violence. Let's all enjoy sex consensually and responsibly.

Secondly and unrelatedly, as I was reading various comments regarding the rape issue, I came across this one. Readers had gone on a tangent about why the Women's Issues banner on the Huffington Post website is pink.

GraniteSkyline

Commented 1 day ago in Impact

“I hate pink, but when I wear it my husband is nicer to me (he doesn't realize he treats me differently). When I have had a hard day at work I come home and slip into my pink sweats and not only is there no whining from him but he will cook dinner and serve it to me at my desk! The color has power!”

Interesting, isn't it? Hooray for this woman's self-awareness or it never would have entered my attention either. But it got me thinking that, huh it's true, there is something disarming about a pink bathrobe/sweats since we tend to associate pink with femininity and femininity with weakness and tenderness. It makes sense that this simple act portrays the attitude of "please take care of me", whereas maybe slipping into a black hoodie with skull and bones on it would get a response of, "get your own damn dinner". Who knows, but in any case, here is another reason why I hate anything girl-related being encoded entirely in pink.