An interesting viewpoint in Hurrah for tomboys!
I don't have children of my own, but recently it struck me that all the little girls I know are, well, a bit girly. Where, I wondered, had all the tomboys gone?For women of my generation - late thirty and early fortysomethings - it's almost a badge of honour to say that you were a tomboy when you were a child. The fashionable books of the time - The Famous Five, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird - all had tomboy heroines. Girls such as George, who could row a boat "like a grown man"; Jo, who'd rather be a soldier than a seamstress; and Scout who feels "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me" every time she is made to wear a dress. For that matter, why couldn't JK Rowling have written a book called Harriet Potter? Surely it can't be the case that boys are still taken more seriously than girls ... ?
Alarmingly, when it comes to the box office, it seems that semi-sexualising girls is still the only way ahead. Take Disney's revamped Famous Five cartoon, Famous 5: On the Case. Jo, the daughter of George, seems forced to wear figure-hugging girl versions of boy clothes (no tomboy worth her salt would ever wear figure-hugging clothes). And what of poor Dora the Explorer? Nickelodeon recently redesigned the Dora doll to make her more "feminine" (read "profitable"). Instead of being equipped with tools, map and backpack, her new accessories include halter-tops, tiaras and glittery hairbrushes.
A random find on Flickr the other day - a nice bit of culture jamming captured at Dalston Lane: "Freedom Through Shopping".
I can't believe I haven't gotten around to blogging this (from April). I've got a few weeks where I'm not teaching or studying or doing freelance work or busy volunteering, or even, sometimes over the next few weeks, not even working, so expect a rash of catch-up posts. Anyway, onto the article... a lot of the same points could be made about blogs, but at least there's a clear sense of 'caveat emptor'. A very long time ago I used to expect that I could trust something I read in a newspaper.
Our media have become mass producers of distortion
"There never was a time when news media were perfect. Journalists have always worked with too little time and too little certainty; with interference from owners and governments; with laws that intimidate and inhibit the search for truth. But the evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it was.I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their "facts", they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these "facts" had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.
The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.
And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don't find their owns stories, or check their content, because they simply don't have the time.
Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists' trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information."
Boris Johnson's 'Cultural Metropolis: The Mayor's Priorities for Culture 2009 - 2012 (pdf link, front page showing one of those despicable central London cultural venues)' states that:
"there are physical and sensory barriers that can reduce access for disabled and older people, as well as those with young children. There is real potential for cultural organisations to build new audiences by removing such barriers"
but at the same time he's letting Transport for London "scrap an upgrade scheme to offer step-free access at South Kensington station"?
And if it's so hard for 'outer borough' Londoners to get in to central London, how much harder would it be for outer Londoners on the other side of London to get to something held in an outer borough? Let alone for a tourist. So is he going to magically multiply the funding available so events can be held in the north, south, east and west, or do most people just miss out?
But hey, maybe it's all part of his 'donut' strategy - suck up to London's outer suburbs (the poor neglected waifs) and ignore the inner suburbs who were rude enough not to vote for him.
Yep, London still needs Boris Watch.