Sex In The Public Square

Change Of Address

Elizabeth — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:03:15 +0000

Much has changed in my life over the last few years. One change is that I've become very active with Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Another is that I've become even more active with my union. This latter change has created a problem for Sex In The Public Square: I have very little time to maintain this site. Fortunately, the former change provides the solution: I will now be blogging at Woodhull's web site. You will find my blog featured on the home page at http://woodhullalliance.org and it will have its own page at http://www.woodhullalliance.org/category/sex-in-the-public-square/.

I'm excited by the move. I'll be joining folks like first amendment attorney Larry Walters, sexual freedom and education scholar-advocate Marty Klein, and the folks at AVN in providing commentary for Woodhull.

This site will remain here as an archive. Comments will be turned off and new content will not appear. Please join us over at Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance and be part of a bigger conversation!

Two stories about gender inequality

Elizabeth — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:13:38 +0000

Two stories about gender and children caught my eye, over the last couple days. They are not at all connected to each other, but the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they illustrate very different responses to gender inequality, and that those different responses say a lot, potentially, about the structure and culture of gender in two different societies: Canada and India.

The first story was making the rounds a few days ago on Yahoo! News. It tells the story of the Witterick-Stocker family, of Toronto, who have decided not to share the sex of their 4 month old baby Storm with anyone other than immediate family and the midwives who assisted with the delivery.

The second is a story I read in the New York Times yesterday morning, and it tells of increased rates of sex-selective abortions among well-off, well-educated women in India. Specifically, it reports on a study recently published in The Lancet, documenting the spread of sex-selective abortion practices across India over the past 20 years. The study placed particular focus on the decisions made about second children when the first child was a girl.

What a world apart, both literally and figuratively.

In one society there is gender inequality but yet enough freedom that a family might decide to challenge the social structuring of gender by refusing to label their child. Theoretically this frees the child to take full advantage of those equalities that do exist and might remove some of the barriers to equality that remain. Storm's parents explain their choice in relation to this very freedom, according to Zachary Roth's Yahoo! article:

Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher in an alternative school.

In the other society, gender is so powerful in the structuring of inequality that parents use it to choose whether or not a child should exist. Girls are understood to be liabilities where boys are understood to be assets. Parents with means will apparently tolerate one girl, but not a second. Education and wealth are associated with better access to health services so a family wanting to limit its liabilities and maximize its assets use the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion to end pregnancies where the fetus is categorized as female. The impact is dramatic, demographically. According to Jim Yardley's New York Times article:

The 2011 Indian census found 914 girls for every 1,000 boys among children 6 six or younger, the lowest ratio of girls since the country gained independence in 1947. The new study estimated that 4 million to 12 million selective abortions of girls have occurred in India in the past three decades.

We should see both stories in terms of social structure and inequality, and not purely in terms of individual choices. Storm's parents are making an individual choice, but they are doing so in a way that directly challenges the structure of the society they live in, and they are doing so because they dislike the constraints those structures impose. Any given pair of well-off parents in India are also making choices in reaction to the constraints of social structure, and are doing so in a way that reinforces the structural constraint they are individually trying to avoid.

Parents should be free to choose whether or not to have a child. Children should be free to decide how to identify themselves. But our individual choices are not always as individual as we think, and often they have collective unintended consequences when we add them all up. And some of those consequences are much likely than others to move a society in the direction of justice and freedom for all.

Ad Placement Fail?

Elizabeth — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:39:17 +0000

From page A18 of the May 24 edition of the New York Times

What do you think? This Bloomingdales ad for Rag & Bone Jeans ($165.00) and silk Equipment top ($178.00) contains the tag line "MEET YOUR NEW MUST-HAVE" and depicts an Asian model staring into the camera with her lips parted. It accompanies an article with the headline "In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims" which, among many things, criticizes the 'exoticization' of Asian women in the US.

The article can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html

Ten

Elizabeth — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:31:42 +0000

Ten is the number of bodies that have been found on Long Island's southern beaches since December. The first four, all found between December 11 abd 13, were confirmed to be the remains of women who had had some experience in sex work. The next was found on March 29. Three more were found on April 4, and two were found today. The identities of those most recently found have not been determined, and police have not made a definitive statement about whether all of the murders are connected.

So far, none has turned out to be Shannon Gilbert, the search for whom turned up these other victims.

I suspect they will turn out to be related, victims of a serial killer who targets women who, among all of the other things that they do in their lives, also exchange sex for money.

SWOP-NYC has responded with a statement that rightly reminds us that the dangers of sex work are the dangers of stigmatization and isolation, and not particular to the exchange of sex for something else of value.

I just spent three days at my statewide union's Representative Assembly where health and safety was one of the key concerns. There was a singificant focus on framing issues in human rights terms. There was a lot of talk about the dignity of all humans, and the dignity of all labor. I was even impressed that when the issue of trafficking and children came up, the focus was on slave labor in the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast, and not a lurid focus on sex trafficking.

But I don't think my union would stand up publicly for sex workers. Not yet.

I spent a couple of hours on Saturday at a huge labor rally in Times Square. I am sure there were people attending that rally who, in addition to all the other things they do, have also exchanged sex for money. But I did not see any sex worker advocacy signs in the block where I was standing.

We still separate sex from the rest of work, from the rest of pleasure, and essentially from most of everyday life.

The longer we relegate sex to the dark corners of our political and social discourse, the longer we will continue to find bodies hidden in the reeds of our beaches, long undiscovered because they were marginalized from the start.

Sexual freedom, including the consensual exchange of sex for other things of value, must come to be seen a fundamental human right. Sex is a valuable thing. The right to physical autonomy and the right to sexual pleasure and the right to earn a decent living all intersect in the phenomenon of sex work.

Stand up publicly for your own right, and the right of others, to safely determine the conditions of each sexual exchange we make.

Photo is by Karl Monaghan (Red_Tzar on Flickr) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

Come out for labor rights

Elizabeth — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:22:41 +0000

Are you a union member, or a friend or family member of a union member? If so, please come out. Please identify yourself that way in conversations. Please stand up for unions and for the basic worker rights that they protect.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010, only 11.9 percent of workers in the US were represented by unions, and that number is only as high as it is because about a third of public sector workers are union members.

What does this have to do with sexuality? First of all, without unions there can be no economic justice in a capitalist society, and without economic justice, sexual freedom is impossible in any meaningful way. To fully realize our sexual freedom we need basic economic security.

Second, there is a lot to be learned from the coming out campaigns of the LGBT movement. When we are visible we reveal ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable, but we also become three dimensional human beings to those who have previously seen us as one-dimensional stereotypes.

Third, there is something similar about taking a part of your life, a part of yourself, a part that you perhaps take for granted, and making it a part of your identity. I am not just a professor, I am a union member. I am not just a clerk, I am a union member. I am not just a groundskeeper, I am a union member. Union membership is something we often see as part of the background of our lives, and we need to bring it into the foreground. Again, LGBT activism gives us a model for doing this.

In tough economic times it is easy for people to villify or demonize a small group of people who are represented in the press as greedy, lazy, and selfish. Especially if you don't have any reason to suspect that real live union members are any different from that representation.

But that's not who we are, and it seems to me that the only way for unions to turn the tide that is undermining them now is if we each come out of the union closet and identify ourselves to our friends and neighbors so they see us as the hard-working, community-minded, caring and dedicated people that we are.

Harvey Milk is represented in the biopic Milk as saying "They vote for us two to one if they know they know one of us." (It's also worth recalling that Milk worked with union leaders and had strong labor backing of his campaigns, and that progressive labor unions and LGBT political unions often work in concert with each other.)

When nonunion workers are facing layoffs and pay cuts and the media tells them its all the fault of unions, it's easy to see how they'd vote to undercut the power of workers who are depicted as leeches feeding off an increasingly anemic public. But if they knew that we were their neighbors, their kid's friend's parents, the people they always nod to at the supermarket, it might be different. If we talk to them about the ways that unions protect not just their members but the basic rights of all workers, they might feel differently. What if, instead of hiding our union membership out of fear of being criticized or attacked, we talk to them about the struggles of all employees and encourage them to seek the strength of unions to protect themselves rather than to tear down the organizations that helped bouy their own raises and benefits just by virtue of comparison?

This week is a week of We Are One events spreading solidarity, raising consciousness, and making demands for economic justice. Take a moment this week to identify yourself in relation to that effort. If you are a union member, or a friend or lover or kin to one, take a moment to tell someone else about that. Tell a story that helps counter the negative impression of union members in the press. Take a risk. We can't rebuild the labor movement from inside the closet.

I'm a union member, and a union leader, and I'm proud of my role in protecting rights for all workers. How about you?

What makes someone good in bed? If you have to ask...

Chris OSullivan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:41:36 +0000

Value judgements are useful if you you can quantify what makes something good. But what if the actions that you want to evaluate are very subjective?

Heather Corinna

writes about the subjective and hard to pin down qualities that might make someone "good in bed"

http://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/what_makes_someone_good_in_bed

Creating Change: Solidarity, Human Rights, and the Smell of New Ideas

Elizabeth — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 03:02:27 +0000

Exactly one week ago I was preparing for a workshop at Creating Change in Minneapolis. The session was led by Ricci Levy, Executive Director of Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and consisted of a panel and story telling exercises.

Our goal was to show how powerful story telling is for building empathy and connection with a group of people and communicating about the kinds of change that you care about. Robert Perez, of Fenton (a stellar communications firm) talked about story telling in general terms and offered examples. I talked about the problems of jargon and identity politics. Ignacio Rivera, performance artist and educator, talked about the need to introduce new language and educate people. Carmen Vazquez, long-time activist and advocate for sexual liberation and human rights, talked about the need to communicate about desire, sex, and connection. Then participants had a chance to identify changes they wanted to see, and to begin to create stories that would help them talk about those changes. It was a powerful session.

This is what I said.

Do you remember the smell of new ideas? The kind that make you feel powerful, connected to other people, and suddenly sure of yourself?

I remember the smell of wool sweaters and patchouli in a college classroom in New England during a storm that rattled windows and sent a kind of electricity through a very passionate discussion of sexual justice. My Philosophy of Sexuality class was reading Suzanne Pharr's Homophobia - A weapon of sexism, and suddenly the world made sense.

As a student, I learned new words and they changed everything: heteronormative… nondichotomous... Just saying them made me feel better. I learned theories of social constructionism and hegemony, and found frameworks that helped me suddenly understand the difference between how I felt and what was expected of me. I felt powerful with my new words and my new ideas. I joined feminist activist groups and the campus LGBT student organization. I protested. I marched on Washington. I felt like I could change the world.

I wrote my senior thesis on the ways that theories of nondichotomous gender roles could be used to challenge the hegemony of the heterosexist patriarchal nuclear family.

And then I went home.

Heteronormative didn’t mean anything there. My mother is a very open-minded, college-educated woman who moved up and down the class ladder from working class family of origin to upwardly mobile woman working to support her dental student husband, to stay at home mom in professional class marriage, to working poor and lower middle class single mother of two. She's a firm believer in the need for gender equality and she was encouraging of my gender and sexuality exploration. She certainly wanted me to be happy.

She just couldn't understand what I was talking about.

I was frustrated that she didn’t know - and didn’t always see the need for - these new powerful words of mine. It took me quite a while to realize that she wanted the ideas without the jargon. It took me a while to realize that the power came not from the words but from the ideas that they represented.

My mother unsuspectingly became my best teacher. She read every paper I wrote in graduate school (at least every one I didn’t put off too long to show her before it was due). She read my entire dissertation, chapter by painful chapter, through multiple drafts. Later she read drafts of articles before I submitted them. And she was brutal at pointing out jargon. “Why do you always say hegemonic when you could just say dominant?” (I confess to harboring a love for the word "hegemonic" but I've learned to enjoy it sparingly, the way I would a fine scotch or expensive chocolate.)

Her editing made me a better communicator. I learned that talking with people is different from talking at people, and that conversation requires shared contexts and shared vocabularies. I learned that even people I thought were on the same poststructuralist jargon laiden page as I didn’t always share the same ideas about what our words meant. I once was 5 minutes into conversation with a fellow graduate student about my dissertation on sex work before we determined that she thought I was talking only about prostitution when I was actually talking about stripping, and neither of us was talking about a whole range of work that can be considered sexual labor.

As I worked on communicating more clearly I bumped up against another challenge: finding the right language with which to describe myself. My identity is complicated and multifaceted. I think this is true for most of us! I don’t easily fit into boxes, and somehow it seems harder now, though the boxes are proliferating. I've often thought of my identity as if it were comprised of a box of loosely jumbled color forms. Do you remember those? Where you could dress the figure with the princess crown, the firefighter coat and the scuba flippers? Am I "white middle class woman"? "Queer feminist college professor"? "Married queer activist"? It's complicated.

Identity politics became a personal challenge and I believe it is a challenge to the movement as well, something that must be clear to each of us who has tried to append a new letter to the ever-expanding alphabet umbrella we need to describe it.

The problem is not that there are too many identities under that umbrella. Quite the contrary. The diversity of our movement is what gives us our strength. The problem is that we forget that there are identities that we all share, and we forget that the rights we are all fighting so hard to achieve are ours, born with us, not because we are lesbian or gay, bisexual or queer, but because we are human.

Rae Carey articulated clearly in her State of the Movement address and it's heartening to see threads of human rights woven throughout the fabric of this entire conference.

I don’t mean to say that our unique sexual and political identities don't matter. They do. But they matter differently than many of us thought they did in the past. Developing queer political identities was tremendously useful in mobilizing this movement. But identity politics hurts us if it weds us to a civil rights agenda. Those who attack us and prevent us from exercising our rights may do so because we are queer, but the rights they try to take are ours by virtue of our humanity, and only once we have protected them as human rights will we really be free.

Identity needs a new place in our movement.

I think that new place is in telling our stories to one another. You heard it last night at the plenary. Our challenge is to be brave enough to share our stories with people who are sheltered under different parts of our umbrella. Perhaps even more challenging is to be open enough to hearing the stories of those others, whose desires and struggles might be so different from our own.

Yes, our identities matter. They matter for the same reason our sexualities matter. They matter because they are intrinsically part of us and we each have a right to be our whole selves. And we need to recognize and honor one another's whole selves. Your struggles may be different from my struggles, but I cannot truly win mine if I am not invested in yours.

It comes down to this: I've claimed my right to form loving and lustful relationships. I am free to express my attraction to people who fuck with gender, to live openly in love with more than one person at a time, to proclaim a desire to be fisted and a love of making out. I have a right to define the terms - emotional, erotic, financial - of my sexual exchanges. I have the freedom to work and to use my body as I wish. I have these rights and freedoms not because I am queer, but because I am human. And because I am human and I care about these rights it is my obligation to fight so that everyone, regardless of identity, can enjoy them.

It will be by sharing our unique identities, by telling our stories and sharing our desires, by listening compassionately to one another's struggles, that we strengthen the connections between the diverse constituencies under our umbrella, and thus strengthen our movement. But we will also communicate clearly to people like my mother, who thinks of herself as standing just outside our umbrella, that our movement includes her too. That we are fighting for our rights because they are human rights, rights that should be enjoyed by all, because nobody can legitimately take them away.

Technorati Tags: Creating Change, advocacy, sexual freedom

Sexuality educators set the record straight:

Elizabeth — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:44:28 +0000

Talking about sexuality does not increase sexually transmitted infections, despite what non-experts report.

Contact:  Megan Andelloux

HiOhMegan@gmail.com

401-345-8685  

Contact: Aida Manduley

Aida_manduley@brown.edu

787-233-0025

In yet another attempt to shut down access to quality sex education, South-Eastern New England conservative advocates hit the sex panic button in a multi-state, email and phone campaign to colleges all over New England last week.

On February 3rd and 4th, certified sexuality educator and sexologist Megan Andelloux (AASECT, ACS) received word that numerous colleges and university faculty received a document stating that colleges who brought sex educators such as Ms. Andelloux onto their campuses were linked to the increasing rate of transmission of HIV in RI. Furthermore, among other misleading “facts” that were “cited,” the author of this bulletin claimed that Brown University was facing an HIV crisis, which is false.

Citizens Against Trafficking, the face behind the fear-mongering, spammed numerous local institutions from a University of Rhode Island account with its latest malicious missive that targeted specific individuals as well as Brown University. The author of the letter, Margaret Brooks, an Economics Professor at Bridgewater State, suggested that colleges and universities that host sexuality speakers, including those who are professionally accredited, are partly to blame for the four new cases of HIV which have been diagnosed amongst RI college students this year.

Ms. Andelloux states: "My heart goes out to those students who have recently tested positive for HIV. However, there is no evidence of any link between campus presentations on sexual issues and the spike in HIV cases. Rather, I would suggest that this demonstrates a need for more high-quality sex education to college students.“ It is unclear why people at URI or Citizens Against Trafficking, a coalition to combat all forms of human trafficking, is attempting to stop adults from accessing sexual information from qualified, trained educators. What is certain however, is that this Professor of Economics miscalculated her suggestion that a correlation exists between increased HIV rates in Rhode Island and the type of sex education these speakers provided at Brown University: one that emphasized accurate information, risk-reduction, pleasure, and health.

Barrier methods have been shown by the CDC to reduce the transmission of HIV and other STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections). Research has shown that when individuals have access to medically-accurate information, are aware of sexual risk reduction methods, and have access to learn about sexual health, the number of infections and transmission of STIs decreases, pain during sex decreases, and condom use increases. The CAT circulated bulletin is blatantly misleading about many issues, and often omits information that is crucial to understanding the full picture of sex education at Brown and in Rhode Island.

When individuals who do not hold any background in sexuality education speak out in opposition because of their fear or prejudice, society becomes rooted in outdated beliefs and pseudo-science that do injustice to people everywhere. Furthermore, when those individuals personally and publicly attack those devoted to providing sex education with false and misinformed accusations, it not only hurts those who are defamed, but also the community at large.

We ask for an immediate retraction of the vilifying and inaccurate statements made by Ms. Margaret Brooks and Citizens Against Trafficking in their latest newsletter. We also ask that esteemed local universities such as URI and Bridgewater State continue to hold their employees to ethical standards of normal scientific inquiry and require that their faculty hold some modicum of expertise in a field of education before raising the public level of panic over it.

Megan Andelloux is available to answer any questions the press, Margaret Brooks, University of Rhode Island or Citizens Against Trafficking holds. Aida Manduley, the Chair of Brown University’s Sexual Health Education and Empowerment Council and Brown University’s is available to discuss the upcoming Sex Week and sexuality workshops held at Brown University.

Signed,

Megan Andelloux

Shanna Katz

Reid Mihalko

Aida Manduley

State Budgets, Higher Education, and Sexual Freedom

Elizabeth — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 17:26:39 +0000

It's hard to avoid news of state budget shortfalls, and the New York Times reported yesterday that states, along with some members of Congress, are even investigating the constitutionally controversial idea of bankruptcy to solve their problems. These budget crises are political, not financial, at their roots. It isn't the case that there isn't enough money to go around. It's just that the money isn't where it needs to be in order to solve the problems.

What does all this have to do with sexual freedom? A lot, actually. For one thing, public health services, public financial assistance, housing and food subsidies, and public education are all being attacked to try to fill the holes in these budgets. When a person doesn't have the security they need in order to get by from day to day, all of their freedom is undermined.

But there are also ways that state budget shortfalls are being used to directly restrict sexual freedom. Last week I learned that Tristan Taormino, a nationally respected sexuality educator and feminist pornographer, was "uninvited" from her engagement as Keynote Speaker at Oregon State University's Modern Sex conference in mid-February. The reason? The university decided it could not use "general fee dollars," which include taxpayer dollars, to fund a speaker who does the kind of work that Tristan does. According to a press release circulated Megan Andelloux, founder of the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, and posted online in this thoughtful post by sexuality educator Shanna Katz), her manager contacted OSU, and spoke to a source who told him "I think they're uninviting Tristan because they don't want to have to defend her appearance to conservative legislators." This source, who requested anonymity and was not named in the original press release, said that the college did not want to defend having a pornographer present at an OSU conference.

According to the Modern Sex conference page, this is a student-led conference supported by faculty and staff. It's purpose is to look at the struggles and conflicts around sexuality as it intersects with gender, race and class. Emphasis is placed on "communicating and understanding diverse perspectives around sexuality through workshops, guided facilitations, lectures, and film screenings." It is no wonder that Tristan Taormino was invited as Keynote speaker. Her work has, for years, dealt with the controversies of erotic entertainment, personal sexual empowerment, and communication. It is shameful that she was disinvited precisely because she works at the crossroads of exactly the kinds of issues the conference plans to address.

Regardless how you feel about pornography, this should trouble all of us. Colleges and universities self-censor out of fear. OSU, like other public institutions of higher education, is no doubt facing serious budget cuts. Anything that causes the state's legislature to further restrict their funds is cause for concern. In this case, though no complaint appears to have been made, the University chose to pre-emptively cancel a potentially controversial speaker despite her expertise in the context of the Modern Sex conference.

When experts are rejected because their work is controversial, we should be worried not only about sexual freedom but also about academic freedom more broadly. There are places where evolution is the hot-button issue, or where the politics of Israel and Palestine is the main cause of political concern. We can't ignore this instance of self-censorship simply because it has to do with sexuality. Once "we can't afford to offend the legislature" becomes a widely accepted rationale for canceling or refusing to fund programs, we can expect to see many more threats to the foundation of public higher education in general.

Public higher education leaders need to be courageous in times of political crises. Right now, when public employees are unjustly targeted as the cause of the financial crisis (has everybody forgotten the Wall Street raiders?) it is more important than ever that Higher Ed administrators stand up for their faculty, their students, and the basic principles of academic freedom, free exchange of ideas, and critical inquiry.

Sexual freedom is a fundamental human right. Education is an important component of protecting that right. Please let OSU know that you are outraged about their preemptive self censorship and call on the University to defend critical inquiry into sexuality and to acknowledge that it was wrong to cancel Tristan Taormino's Keynote speech.

***

Note from Tristan:

Don't Let the Anti-Sex Conservatives Win!

If you support free speech and my mission of sexual empowerment, please voice your opinion about OSU’s decision to cancel my appearance at the last minute (and not reimburse me for travel expenses) to the following people. I would really appreciate your support —Tristan

Larry Roper

Vice Provost for Student Affairs

632 Kerr Administration Building

Corvallis, OR 97331-2154

541-737-3626 (phone)

541-737-3033 (fax)

email: larry.roper@oregonstate.edu

Dr. Mamta Motwani Accapadi

Dean of Student Life

A200 Kerr Administration Building

Corvallis, OR 97331-2133

541-737-8748 (phone)

541-737-9160 (fax)

email: deanofstudents@oregonstate.edu

twitter: @deanmamta

Dr. Edward J. Ray

President

600 Kerr Administration Building

Corvallis, OR 97331-2128

541-737-4133 (phone)

541-737-3033 (fax)

email: pres.office@oregonstate.edu

Video Girl Barbie Kneels for Easy Shooting

Elizabeth — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:08:26 +0000

File under "Horror Movies I don't Ever Want to See". Mattel is marketing it's new Barbie-as-concealed-video-camera by telling kids they can make movies "From Barbie's point of view". I don't know what you did with your Barbies when you were a kid, but I don't think I'd want to see movies shot from the point of view of my own.

I'm also pretty sure that kids don't need concealed video cameras. And while the FBI is apparently concerned that kids will be tricked by creepy grownups who use Video Girl Barbie to take surreptitious kiddie porn shots, I don't think there is a girl within Mattel's advertising reach who isn't very much aware of the new doll.

I watched the Mattel demo video ("About the doll") and found this image, which I found troubling for the way that Mattel is again uncareful about the images it creates. Does anybody remember the "Math is hard!" debacle?

Am I the only one who sees Barbie on her knees ready to be shot? The hole in her chest isn't helping me any (though I realize that is the camera lens). Again, maybe it's just that I don't want movies from the perspectives of my own childhood Barbies, but still ;)