Girls and dolls

This video was brought to my attention by a friend this evening. Have a watch and see what you think.

My initial reaction was OMG THAT IS SO CREEPY LOOK AT HER EYEBALLS. But then I began to think – this girl is 15. On a daily basis I see young girls that age who are caked in just as much make-up as this girl, only instead of powder and iris-extending contact lenses, they opt for oodles of fake tan, fake eyelashes, padded bras and fake nails. And I have to admit, I don’t find the doll look significantly creepier than the one I’m more culturally used to.

I also found it interesting that the female presenter said she would be “horrified” if her daughter chose to look like that, saying “it’s not normal, is it?” What is normal for a 15 year old girl these days? I genuinely do not know. I wonder if she would be fine with her daughter wearing the same amount of make-up as she herself does every day. That’s not a jibe at the presenter, I am well aware that she does not control what goes on her face or body, such is the glamorous nature of being a female on television. I’m just saying that personally, in terms of the shit on their face, I don’t see much of a difference between the young girl and the presenter (aside from age).

The issue here is not some teenage girls wanting to look like dolls. It’s that for a long time now, such dolls have become the personification of the ultimate role models for our female children. Dolls have everything a girl could ever want. They have big houses and cute pets and awesome clothes and big pink cars. They are pretty and youthful. You have never seen an ugly, fat, flat-chested Barbie. They never age, they never wrinkle. Dolls are human-like, but are, importantly, objects. They do what you want them to do without questioning or talking back, always with a big, beaming smile on their face. Is that what we want to turn our daughters into? Is that really the best we can offer them?

We shouldn’t be telling these young girls that dressing like dolls is creepy. We should be asking them why the hell they would want to be a doll in the first place. Whether that doll is a porcelain, big-eyed anime character or an orange plastic Barbie, our girls need to know that they can be better than that.

If we don’t want our girls to look like this, how about we stop shoving this kind of ideological imagery in their pretty little faces from the moment they can hand-grasp?

Additional notes added after some sleep: Having watched a few of Venus’s own youtube videos, it becomes clear that this is a very intelligent young lady. She apparently speaks five languages and is clearly very articulate. Perhaps this is just a case of expressive teenage identity and individuality and she is different in that she has the confidence (perhaps built up through a massive following and external gratification on youtube) to pull it off, even though it is a bit “odd”. We do tend to associate femininity with weakness, perhaps what this girl is really doing is rebelling against such a view and combining extreme doll-like femininity with her own intelligent personality. How do we want our teenage girls to look? Should they embrace their femininity or should we encourage them to be more gender-neutral? I have always believed it’s all about choice and if your daughter wished to look like Venus for a while, would you encourage that as a marker of individuality, or tell her she is being ridiculous?

I really don’t know what to think about this one – what say yee, dear readers?

Here is a radical idea. How about we blame the rapists?

The purpose of this article is really just to link to another one, because it sums up what I want to say better than I can. Please click on this link to read a wonderfully articulated take on the Rochdale grooming case.

Now just a few thoughts from me, which basically echo the above article but in a slightly more sweary and less coherent fashion. I apologise that this is a particularly sweary article by my usual blog standards but this is something I feel very strongly about and cannot express my feelings about it any other way.

Why the fuck are we allowing everything to be blamed other than the sexual abusers? Seriously, I honestly, HONESTLY don’t get it. So many questions surrounding this case – is it a race issue? Maybe. Is it to do with the sexualisation of our children? The fashion industry, marketing “provocative” clothing to children? Possibly. Is it a problem with broken families? Who knows. Are the children to blame? Are the parents? Probably.

!!!!OH WAIT I HAVE THOUGHT OF A QUESTION WE HAVEN’T ADDRESSED YET!!!

Are the rapists to blame?

Oh, hold on, what, the rapists?

Yeah, you know, the gang of men who groomed little girls, fed them cigarettes and alcohol and forced them to have sex with them?

Oh. Um… I don’t know. Hadn’t really thought about it.

When will this pile of bullshit stop? What will it take to convince people that rape is never, ever, ever the fault of the victim. I don’t give a shit if she was flashing her knickers, I don’t care if she had her tits out. Hell, I don’t even care if she let you buy her a drink! We live in a society in which 21% of the general population believes a woman is partially responsible for getting raped if she “acts flirtatiously”. 28% of people think a woman is partially responsible for her own rape if she “dresses provocatively”.  THAT IS NOT OK.  If she did not want to fuck you and you went ahead and did it anyway, you raped her, and that is your fault.

Seriously. I’ll say it slowly just so you *definitely* understand.

Blame. The. Fucking. Rapists.

Evolution giveth, and evolution taketh away.

So this article was brought to my attention by the super-cool Tom Houslay who tweeted it earlier this evening. The article is very short so do go and read it if you can. If you can’t be bothered, FINE, I will rip it apart summarise it later in this post.

The article is written by an organisation called the Institute for Creation Research who are a… Well I’ll just take a quote from their own website which describes exactly who they are.

For over four decades, the Institute for Creation Research has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.

The article in question is criticising a paper published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology which investigates traits such as loss of sight and pigment in Mexican blind cavefish, and the advantages this may carry for this species. I’m not going to go into the paper in any detail, because that’s not what this post is about. This is about clearing up blatant misunderstandings about evolution. I’ll go through the ICR paper paragraph by paragraph, pointing out what (I think) is wrong with their arguments.

Evolution maintains that as more time passes, living things evolve to acquire better and more useful traits. As such, shouldn’t the loss of a useful trait, such as eyesight, be regarded as the opposite of evolution? Not so, say recent news reports on blind fish.

Uh, ok, first of all, evolutionary theory doesn’t maintain that things acquire “better” and “more useful traits”. Evolution is defined as any genetic change that is inherited over generations. This needn’t be particularly useful, and can involve the loss of traits, not just the invention of brand spanking new ones. Eyesight may well be deemed “useful” from our anthropomorphic view, but we are here talking about fish living in a cave in almost complete darkness. Not such a useful energy investment now, is it?

A New York University news release attributed the fishes’ loss of sight to “convergent evolution,” which makes little sense if evolution, as neo-Darwinists describe it, is supposed to generate new features and functions.

Convergent evolution is the process by which unrelated species evolve similar traits because they have had to adapt to similar environments or pressures. The most common example of this is the wing. Birds and bats both have wings. However, birds and bats are not closely related animals. Their last common ancestor did not have wings, therefore they both evolved wings independently.

For lots more examples of convergent evolution, there is a whole Wikipedia page of them (Hurrah!).

In this study, the authors note that the blind cavefish live alongside and are able to breed with a very genetically similar species of fish who are not blind. Yet, despite this gene flow and interbreeding with non-blind fish, the blind phenotype is still maintained in the cave populations. This leads the authors to conclude that there must be advantages to being a blind (as opposed to a seeing) cave fish. It is perhaps because eyes are costly things to maintain in terms of energy investment, and so it may be the case that Mexican cavefish with poor or no eyesight are able to invest that extra energy in something that is more useful to them in their environment.

So to repeat, evolution is not “supposed to generate new features and functions”.

But obtaining the fish sight system required an input of a massive quantity and quality of information. And making the fish blind merely required the loss of some of that information. How could attributing these opposite processes to “evolution” be scientifically accurate?

I don’t know what to say to this, I don’t really understand what they mean. “Making the fish blind” does not require the loss of information, it requires the reduction of energy cost associated with maintaining an essentially useless trait (DARK CAVE, remember, VERY DARK CAVE) which should be favoured by natural selection.

The study of blind cavefish can undoubtedly contribute valuable insight into the genetics of trait variations and the fishes’ potential to adapt and survive in varied environments.

Well, yeah, that’s kind of… That’s kind of adaptation, you know, natural selection, evolution…? Maybe they’re getting it…

But because evolution is supposed to make new traits or develop new and useful genetic information, mere losses and variations should not be called evolution.

I GIVE UP.

Bradic, M. et al. 2012. Gene flow and population structure in the Mexican blind cavefish complex (Astyanax mexicanus). BMC Evolutionary Biology. 12: 9.