The Pixel Project mission is to advance a gender-blind approach to ending violence against women (VAW) and raise funds for two organizations working to end VAW.

Our big fundraiser involves unveiling a collage of portraits of celebrity male role models online, one pixel at a time. (The photo will consist of 1 million pixels, with each being sold for US$1.)

In preparation for the Pixel Reveal fundraiser, The Pixel Project is launching a mini-campaign to raise some interim funds for our work and raise our profile. We are holding a “Paint It Purple” campaign that has both and online and “on-the-ground” component (the latter involving the biggest charity bake sale of the year, with parties being held around the world by VAW organizations and individuals).

I encourage everyone to read about the “Paint It Purple” campaign and do what you can to help out–download virtual goodies for your web site or blog, host a party, attend a party, spread the word and, if you can, record a PSA for our Wall of Support.

Read all about the campaign on the Pixel Project blog and on our site!

I will start with one of my all-time favourite children’s authors—Margaret Wise Brown. Most parents know her for the classic Goodnight Moon—a lovely bedtime story that features a little bunny saying goodnight to the various things in his room—and The Runaway Bunny. Both books feature males and mother characters. The absence of the father figure would be considered stereotypical today but, in the case of these two titles, is more a reflection of the times in which they were written (1947 and 1942 respectively).

(The era has no bearing on the room the little bunny occupies in Goodnight Moon. It could belong to a child of either sex, with its toy house, dolls, little pink socks and stuffed animals. Not sure about the animal rug on the floor, but I digress.)

For anyone who has not ventured beyond these two titles, I encourage you to do so. While I have not read all of her books, the ones I have read possess the lyricism and gentle tones of her two most famous works. They are not overtly masculine or feminine—they are just simple stories that boys and girls in the preschool and early school-age years can enjoy.

Consider one of the favourites in our house: Two Little Gardeners. The story follows a boy and a girl as they plant and tend their garden, then harvest, cook and preserve the many vegetables they produce. Both are equally involved in the task of gardening and both share in the work of washing and preparing the food. The boy even wears an apron!

Sneakers, the Seaside Cat is another nice read. The story focuses on a little cat and his discovery of various aspects of the ocean, from the wildlife to the changing of the tides. (Note to parents: both Sneakers and Two Little Gardeners are a little longer and may be suited to children closer to kindergarten age.)

For the younger set, there is The Big Red Barn, a cute story about all the animals who inhabit the titular big red barn. The Important Book showcases Wise Brown’s ability to write from the perspective of a child: “The important thing about a spoon is that you eat with it… The important thing about wind is that it blows…The important thing about you is that you are you.” And for a simplified telling of the Christmas story, there is Christmas in the Barn.

Wise Brown’s books focus on discovery and making sense of the world. Her approach was novel at the time, described in a website bio of the author as follows: “She wrote with the then ‘new’ idea that children would rather read about their own lives instead of fairytales and fables. This approach, dubbed the ‘here and now’ philosophy, was created and tested at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City. There, under Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s tutelage, Margaret encouraged children to swap stories with her. In that special writing laboratory, she communicated with children about what they wanted to read and the problems they faced.”

Her biography tells the story of a fascinating, determined and creative woman who wrote hundreds of books before her premature death at the age of 42. Her stories are a delight to read and, even though written decades ago, are decidedly gender-neutral, making them an ideal choice for boys and girls.

As I recently posted on Twitter, book editing + children at home for the summer + regular work as a copywriter = no time for personal writing.

Fortunately, I have completed the first draft of the book and have sent it out for review with a few writer friends. I am anxiously awaiting their feedback and, after receiving their comments and making any necessary changes, I will finish the submission process to the publisher.

By that time, school should be back in and I will return to blogging and commenting on the films and books I encounter.

A few spare minutes may emerge between now and then and I will endeavour to get back into the blogging groove. I am in the process of creating a Facebook Fan page and will announce it here when I am done.

P.S. I had temporarily shut off comments because of the spam I was getting, but I will re-enable them shortly.

Be back soon!

A CALL TO MEN is running a campaign from now until June 30, 2010 in which they are seeking 5,000 men to add their names to a list of men saying NO to violence against women. I invite you to spread the word about the campaign. For more information and to sign, visit http://www.acalltomen.org/the_call.php.

http://blog.pigtailpals.com/2010/06/what-the-hell-happened-to-summer-camp/

Clearly, the message sent by the camp ad is not a good one for girls, but what does it tell any boys who see it? Let’s see. Girls like shiny, pretty things. They like to play party host. And they must be very fragile, seeing as they are not allowed any exploring or adventures at their camp.

If it were just an ad for summer camp, maybe we could let it slide. But the same messaging appears in toy ads and in much of the entertainment aimed at boys or a mixed audience.

Toys marketed to girls never allow them to imagine themselves as heroes. Action figures, police and firefighter costumes and rescue vehicles are all marketed to boys, at least by big retailers like Toys R Us and Chapters/Indigo. According to these retailers, pretend play for girls should involve baby dolls, kitchens, cleaning implements and, for those with higher aspirations than “housewife”, princess costumes and tiaras.

On television, female superheroes are catching up to the males to some extent, but in most films the female character is left out of the final rescue.  Sam in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs–a great character–is sidelined by a peanut allergy, leaving Flint to save the day. Ellie in Ice Age 3 goes into labour and cannot help save Sid the Sloth. Fiona in Shrek the Third tries to save her husband but ends up captured, leaving Shrek and Arthur to disarm the evil Prince Charming. Astrid from How To Train Your Dragon, shown as tough and strong at the beginning, quivers with fear on her first dragon ride with Hiccup and snuggles into him to feel safer. In the film’s climactic battle with a monstrous dragon, she (the best dragon hunter in her class) fades to the background,  leaving male lead Hiccup to save his village alone.

Is it any wonder sexual inequality persists when boys as young as four see girls presented as frivolous, delicate creatures, incapable of solving problems or doing anything other than cooking, cleaning and making themselves look pretty?

As part of efforts to recruit Celebrity Male Role Models for the mystery collage, The Pixel Project is pleased to launch their first Voters’ Choice Celebrity Male Role Model campaign through which a worldwide audience votes for the actor to be included in our A-list line-up which includes a Nobel Prize Winner and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

The two nominees with the most votes will be invited to donate JUST 45 MINUTES of their time to have their picture taken for the collage and to join the global community in saying “It’s time to stop Violence Against Women. Together.”

The superstar nominee who accepts the invitation will be revealed through the Pixel Reveal fundraiser which will be launched in the second half of 2010.

Voting is open from 17 May 2010 – 17 June 2010 and you are invited to key in your vote and sign the online petition here: http://bit.ly/PixelVote.

At the same time, the federal government of Canada, which runs CIDA, has stated that it intends to make maternal and child health the focus of the upcoming G8 and G20 summits, which it is hosting. Non-funding of IPPF flies in the face of this promise to focus on the health of women and children around the world.

If you are a Canadian who is concerned about the government’s policies toward IPPF, please sign this petition and spread the word.

Thank you very much.

I will start with one of my favourite authors, Mary-Louise Gay. She writes some of the most wonderful children’s books around. She has two series of picture books based on the characters of Stella and her younger brother Sam. The latest is When Stella Was Very, Very Small. Stella is an imaginative and thoughtful protagonist who interacts lovingly with the sweet and inquisitive Sam.

For the older set, Mary-Louise Gay co-wrote Travels with My Family and its sequel, On the Road Again: More Travels with my Family. Each book contains a selection of short tales about the parents of two boys who like to take their children “off the beaten path” when on vacation. The stories are funny, inventive and include a very positive father character.

Some of our favourite picture books include the following titles, which offer a mixture of male and female protagonists in entertaining stories. The male lead characters in these stories also show boys in a positive light:

• Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero by Anne Cottringer. Eliot proves that a boy can use his brains and not just his brawn to save the day.
• The Salamander Room by Anne Mazar. This book tells the story of a thoughtful and caring boy who brings home a salamander and imagines the transformation his room will need to undergo to make a suitable environment for his new friend.
• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. The protagonist in this book is a gentle and imaginative boy who creates entirely new worlds with his purple crayon.
• Sophie and the Sea Monster by Don Gillmor. Sophie finds a sea monster under her bed and, after overcoming her fears, she confronts him, befriends him, and helps him conquer his fear of water so he can return home to the sea. Her older brother teases her, but he is less a stereotype than an archetype of an older sibling who likes to bug the younger one.
• Virtually anything by Robert Munsch. His wild and crazy stories involve boys and girls and include excellent portrayals of mothers and fathers.

There are also some chapter books that are free of stereotypes:

• The Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. This series features two siblings—Jack and Annie—who travel back in time to visit historically significant places. Both children are equally involved in seeking adventure and in leading themselves out of misadventure. They clearly enjoy a healthy sibling relationship, with not a hint of condescension between the older boy and younger girl.
• A Bad Case of Ghosts by Kenneth Oppel. This title is the first in the six-book Barnes and the Brains series. The stories talk about the supernatural goings-on in the world of Giles Barnes. Giles is intelligent, patient and compassionate. The “brains” in the story are sister/brother geniuses, Tina and Kevin.  Tina, while overbearing and less than kind toward her younger brother, is a brilliant girl with a scientific mind. Giles’ mother and father figure prominently in all of the stories.
• Judy Moody by Megan McDonald. Including female protagonists in the reading materials you select for your son can help combat the sometimes overwhelmingly male-dominated world of children’s popular culture. Judy Moody is a great choice. She is, as her name implies, moody, but she is a fun and quirky character who appeals to boys and girls alike. McDonald has also written a great series based on Judy’s younger brother, Stink.
• Tales of  a Fourth-Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. The first in the “Fudge” series, this book features the character of Peter, a boy in fourth grade who is trying to deal with his mischievous younger brother. Peter is a very good role model for young boys and someone to whom all older siblings can relate. He is sensitive and caring, even when exasperated by his brother. Again, there is an excellent portrayal of a father (it may seem stereotypical at first with him working and mom staying home, but it gets better). Along with being a great snapshot of family life, these books are very funny.

These books represent just a small sampling of some gender-positive titles. As I uncover more, I will post them in this blog.

Happy reading and Happy Mother’s Day!

So I’m talking about the film again. This time, I will look more closely at the female characters.

My last post covered the absent mother. The lead male’s mother, Valhallarama, was alive and well in the print version of the story on which the film is based, but somewhere between book and screenplay she was killed off.

This disposable mother trope (as it was called by a writer at the Hathor Legacy) is a familiar one in children’s films. Valhallarama joins: the drowned mother from Ice Age; Remy’s non-existent mother and Linguini’s dead mother from Ratatouille; Nemo’s mother who became lunch for a barracuda in Finding Nemo; Po’s unmentioned mother in Kung Fu Panda; and Flint’s deceased mother from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, to name just a few. There is also the very popular Anakin Skywalker who first lost his mother in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace. His story has been re-introduced to a new generation of boys through the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars film and television series.

In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, one could argue that the producers compensated for the lost mother by adding female character Astrid, a young woman enrolled in dragon hunting class with lead male, Hiccup.

There has been criticism over the years about the lack of female characters in films aimed at boys or mixed audiences. It seems producers have gotten the message and have begun adding girls to these films. While their presence is a good thing, their presentation leaves a lot to be desired. Astrid is just one case in point.

There seem to be two extremes in the way female characters are depicted. On the one hand, we have the women who are articulate, smart, brave and decidedly maternal, like Ellie from Ice Age 3 and Sally from Cars. Then there are the ass kickers—the women whose equality is demonstrated by their ability to be angry and belligerent in the same way as the boys. Astrid falls into the latter category. She scowls, speaks aggressively and even beats up Hiccup.

The ass kickers are, of course, beautiful, and seen as such by the males. Witness the enormous crush that Hiccup has on Astrid.

I love seeing more females in kids’ films, but I have to ask if characters like Astrid represent real progress. By making Astrid an object of desire, the producers are diminishing her “tough” side. They are giving with one hand (by making her strong) and taking away with the other (by objectifying her).

The message here seems to be that females need to become more stereotypically male and resort to gratuitous violence to prove their strength while being be conventionally beautiful so they can, despite their “maleness”, be desirable and become love interests for the boys.

In other words, it’s okay for girls to be strong, but they’d better be pretty too if they want to get the guy. And getting the guy is what it’s all about, even for independent, intrepid Astrid.

In an amazing turnabout, this brave and fearless girl gets scared during her first dragon ride with Hiccup. As they are flying through the air, she finds comfort by wrapping her arms around the boy she once saw as a nerd. She then begins to see him in a new light and eventually falls for him. (The narrative arc for Samantha from last year’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is similar—she is off-the-charts brilliant, pretty, and thin, and ends up in love with male lead Flint.)

As this movie proves, it’s one step forward, two steps back for female characters. We move forward with every depiction of a strong female, but we move in the opposite direction each time they are depicted as babes or, in the case of mothers, removed altogether.

The film is based on the book of the same name which, thankfully, I managed to read before seeing the movie. If I had seen the movie first, I likely wouldn’t have read the book, given the extreme differences between the two.

I understand that film adaptations of books often take liberties with the text. In the case of this film, the liberties taken went too far, at least in the case of the parents.

The book and film centre on Hiccup, a young Viking who is different from the other members of his tribe. He is physically smaller and gentler. In the movie version, he shocks his community by showing a preference for training dragons rather than killing them. (The tone of the book version is quite different—dragons are viewed as dangerous, like any wild animal, but the people choose to domesticate some for use as hunting animals. In the movie, they just want to kill dragons.)

In the book, the mother of lead character Hiccup plays a small part. Valhallarama is there the day after Hiccup returns from his initiation into dragon training. She offers Hiccup’s pet dragon a tuna sandwich before he and Hiccup are to demonstrate the results of their training. And she is there when Hiccup wakes up after his battle with a colossally huge dragon.

In the movie Valhallarama is, well, dead. She is spoken of only once in a scene that shows the awkwardness between Hiccup and his father, Stoick the Vast. Her large breastplate is played for humour, as Stoick offers half of it to his son as a helmet. (Hiccup does wear the helmet later). After this scene, she is not mentioned again.

Stoick, the larger than life father of Hiccup and leader of the tribe, is also greatly changed in the film.

In the book, Stoick sees the good in Hiccup, even if the boy and the dragon he has chosen to train are smaller than the others. Stoick defends the boy and his new pet by telling the entire village that size doesn’t matter. When it comes time to banish Hiccup and the other boys for failing their initiation into dragon training, Stoick is genuinely torn. He is devastated that the “Laws” dictate banishment as a punishment and eventually makes the decision to “un-banish” the boys because he cannot bear to send his son away.

All in all, the literary Stoick is a good father, compassionate and caring. His counterpart in the film is the exact opposite. He sees Hiccup as a disaster waiting to happen. He is disappointed in that his son is nothing like him. According to family friend and dragon trainer Gobber, it’s what’s inside Hiccup that Stoick can’t stand. In other words, it’s Hiccup’s very nature that is disagreeable to his father.

Stoick cajoles Hiccup into dragon training, noting, excitedly, that he and Hiccup would finally have something to talk about. But there is nothing but awkward silence between the two. When Stoick later learns that Hiccup has been training a dragon, he virtually disowns him, telling him: “You’re not my son.”

I am routinely disappointed in Hollywood for its depiction of fathers, but after reading How to Train Your Dragon, I was hopeful that there would at last be a decent portrayal of a father in a high-profile children’s film. Didn’t happen. Instead, the filmmakers took a good dad and turned him into a cold, harshly critical, insensitive cad.

Bad dad. Dead mother. Son left to mature on his own. This trope is so tiresome. Yes, it creates dramatic tension, but do we really need to demonize fathers and eliminate mothers in virtually every narrative involving a young male protagonist? There has to be another way.