I’ve been very preoccupied lately and I realized that my more recent posts don’t have any of the old fire and zing that I usually display.  Often I’ll have one of my trademark firecracker thoughts, but then they slip away because I’ll be busy dealing with something else.

The other day I started jotting down these ideas as they came to me and thought that I would share some of this stream of consciousness with my readers.  I’ll try to get it to flow somewhat cohesively, but really, this blog is a bunch of disjointed thoughts strung together.  Hopefully it’s not too rambling and incoherent!

I’ll start with a short rant on feminism.  My youngest daughter, Rosemary’s Grandbaby, likes to play those dress up games online.  There are princesses, actresses, singers, and characters you can dress in different outfits, change hairstyles and make up.  There are hundreds of these sites and she is always finding new ones. 

The other day, she found one with the characters from Shrek.  My problem started when I saw that Shrek was fat like in the movie, but they made the Ogre Fiona (as opposed to the Princess Fiona) skinny!  The whole point of Fiona turning into an ogre was to make her attractive to Shrek!  As an ogre, she is not supposed to look like a princess!  This really irked me.  This shows little girls that you must be skinny and pretty, or even an ogre won’t find you attractive.

I started talking to the child about this, trying to explain body image, self-esteem and feminism.  She just looked at me and said “Mom, I don’t know what you are talking about.  I’m only six”.  Okay, point taken.  I’ll have to take this up at another time.

My next point is a related rant.  I’m not a huge hip hop fan, but Big Daddy Kev likes some of it.  Lately, I’ve discovered a few hip hop songs that I like, so I downloaded them.  We were listening to these songs when I realized that almost every one of them talked about “dey asses”.  I know hip hop is not known to be among the forerunners of the feminist movement, but I did not realize just how pervasive the sexism is in that subculture.

It’s easy to laugh at these songs and brush it aside, but I think that so many young people listen to these lyrics that the next generation of young men may bring misogeny back in a big way.  It concerns me that women are so objectified in these songs.  What can I do about it?  Absolutely nothing.  I hope this fad goes away quickly before too much damage is done.

Well, folks, I see my word count is nearing 500, so I guess our time is up for today.  I have many more thoughts and ideas jotted down on my scraps of paper, so stay tuned for the next disjointed ramble.