Why Feminists Need to Take Over School Boards

[HuckleB]

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/05/08/shailene-woodley-is-why-feminists-need-to-take-over-school-boards/

"Actress Shailene Woodley is this week’s “She’s not a feminist!” It Girl. When asked her opinion about feminism, Woodley expressed her belief that it’s a bad thing and requires hating men.

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When bell hooks wrote Feminism Is For Everybody—something that should be required reading in primary schools but isn’t—she explained, “By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative.”
The overwhelming impression we give children as they grow up in the United States—that there is a kind of equitable balance between men and women in the public sphere—is so outrageously laughable that the only way to describe what we teach them is as propaganda. By any metric you care to consider—political, religious, corporate, and practically all forms of media and cultural production—we are nowhere near parity. Girls and women are the vast bulk of humans being sold and traded as sex and forced labor products on a global open market. Most depictions of girls and women continue to create an environment of denigration that make the expression “powerful woman” an oxymoron. We can’t even visualize the concept appropriately. And, while a recent spate of books, movies and music videos featuring strong, female role models (like those played so well by Woodley) is a significant positive development they are, functionally, drops in a bucket. As for depictions of feminists, well, we produce such a steady stream of straw feminists you could hold a yearlong bonfire and have some left over.

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In one instance, in a room of more than 100 students, I asked how many had learned about the civil rights movement. One hundred percent. Since we were going to talk about rape on campus, I asked how many had heard and laughed at rape jokes: more than 90 percent. I asked how many had learned about fights for women’s liberation in the United States. Maybe six hands, and two were teachers. I was compelled to point out at the end of the quiz that Sojourner Truth was not the name of an indie band.

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A very thoughtful, important read, IMO.