gender roles

There are some contests in which women are truly at a disadvantage when competing with men. Football. Presidential nominations. Snow-writing. But acting is not one of them. Streep vs. Nicholson, Dame Judi vs. Sir Ian, Maggie Gyllenhaal vs. Jake Gyllenhaal - the Vegas odds would be close ones indeed if these actors were pitted against each other for top honors.

“At least 19 victims, mostly men and children, were taken for treatment to the hospital in Kandahar.” “The Israeli missile...took the lives of at least 14 other people—including three men and nine children.” “Tens of thousands, including men, children and the elderly, were victims of chemical weapons attacks.”

These quotes from recent news articles may read a bit strangely, but they’re all accurate (from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, respectively), with only one change: Each story documented the number of female victims, not male. The gender swap clarifies one writer’s point: “It’s bad enough that innocent people died, but they were among society’s most vulnerable.”

When i was 8, my father organized a present for my sisters and me to give my mom for Mother’s Day: a pressure cooker, wrapped up with other fun kitchen items like tea towels, pop-up sponges, spatulas, and an apron. It seemed like a good idea—Mom was the one who was always in the kitchen, and this was the day to celebrate her. But the minute she opened her present, even I knew we had the wrong idea.

When i was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, it didn’t matter that my parents were some of the earliest feminist leaders on the East Coast, that I grew up watching their activism from up close, or that I saw them live (not just profess) equality between the sexes. It didn’t matter that I was a girl hooked on Ms. magazine from the very first year it was out, that I regularly flipped through my mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, or that I ravenously collected Wonder Woman comic books.

Wish there were more kick-ass female characters in the movies? Enough with The Piano-esqe mute-is-powerful bullshit. Sometimes you can find feminism in the most unlikely places, like action movies and Freaky Friday-like comedies.

"So now you can eat like one of the boys, but still look like one of the girls," says the male voice-over touting Baked Lays potato chips while supermodels stuff their faces on screen... Oh, boys, did you know—Twix bars are the new way to get rid of those pesky, materialistic, shallow, shopping-obsessed females in your life... Eating is a masculine activity, part two: Wendy’s Big Eaters ads. Chunky men eat while the announcer talks about how big the meals are... On Caroline in the City, four men discuss post-break-up ettiquette. Dell, Caroline’s ex-boyfriend, is pissed because she has a date with another man... Eating is a masculine activity, part three: On Wings, Helen and Joe are babysitting for a little girl. Joe offers her ice cream...

How about that new Taco Bell ad featuring 11-year-old boys on the beach ogling a shapely lifeguard... Guess what? According to Cosmopolitan you'll never get a date without duct tape and a "No Trespassing" sign... When Camille Paglia addresses the defunct pedophilic Calvin Klein ads in the October 31 issue of The Advocate, she implies that pedophilia is somehow an essential part of gay life... Sometimes we feel like we hallucinated this one, because we only saw it once-and because it was so horrifying... We're all for home exercise equipment, but why do the ads always have to be so fucking smug?... Now we have Nike telling us that the revolution will not be televised. On tele-vision...

Esquire’s annual “Women We Love” feature gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Hidden behind the premise of honoring them, the article puts women firmly in their place by using the traditional patriarchal tool of male approval—rewarding certain traits in the female while disparaging others.

Kids has been hailed as a film that breaks the teen-movie mold and shows a long-hidden side of young life. But, while it may be more graphic and harsh than other movies, it basically covers the same ground: voracious young male sexuality. The only innovative element of the movie—an honest portrayal of female sexual pleasure—is conflicted at best.