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Friday, March 9th, 2007

And They Showed It on International Women’s Day…

So yesterday was International Women’s Day and Blog Against Sexism Day, and what shows up on Disney Channel? The age-old beaten by a girl plot.

Yes, the two boys sit there and talk about how “humiliating” it was to have a girl be better than you; sure, he admitted that it was OK to be beaten at “girl stuff”, but at sports? Heaven forfend!

What’s worse is that the boys’ mother says he should “give his girlfriend another chance” and let the humiliation slide because “he really liked her.” Sigh.

The mother should have said “Hey! Hang on a minute! Why is it humiliating to be beaten by a girl*? Because girls are inherently inferior to boys? Because boys are automatically better at sports than girls? Who taught you this sexist claptrap anyway?”

The sad thing is that the character was pretty egotistic, and it would only have taken editing one, maybe two scenes to remove the sexist context. The writers could easily have made the character lament that he simply didn’t want to hang out with someone who could beat him because he was a sore loser and not harped on the fact that person who beat him was one of those uppity vagina-Americans.

*I asked my daughter this question, and her response was “Because the other boys will make fun of him.” Which leads to the next question: why will the boys mae fun of him? etc. Peer-pressure-driven sexism is as bad as personal sexism, maybe even worse.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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