By Tracee Sioux

We took our kids and my mentee to see Shrek the Third (Widescreen Edition).

I was thrilled to expose the girls to the scene where the Disney Princesses, Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, deliberately nod off to sleep to "wait to be rescued" when the villains of children's literature lock them up.
Fiona and her mother look mystified by such a stupid response and take matters into their own hands - effectively saving themselves.

HELLO! It's about time someone had the nerve to confront those girls about the stupidity of waiting around for someone to save them. Thank you Fiona and Queen of Far Far Away!

I used to allow princesses at out house, I've since banned them. (We still have some videos and books that were sentimental gifts.) But the messages of the Disney Princess culture is that girls are valued for beauty rather than competence. That a prince must come save them for they are incapable of effective action. See Cinderella Should Have Saved Herself, Belle - Battered Codependent, and Ariel - The Little Mute for details about why I've restricted access to the princess message.

If parents are going to offer their daughters the Disney Princess culture, and it's really not possible to isolate them from it completely because it's so pervasively marketed, at least offer up an alternate view of a girl's role. Shrek the Third should join the others on the DVD shelf, at the very least. Use it to point out to your daughters the (dis)functionality of the Disney stories. Give them permission to envision saving themselves and be proactive about their lives.

Tell them the truth about men they will date someday - that prince grows up and turns into a fallible man that picks his nose and turns right back into a frog - just like the King of Far Far Away does in Shrek The Third.

Watch Shrek the Third (Widescreen Edition)and tell her that you think Fiona and her mother's actions are more admirable than the Princesses who passively nod off to sleep and wait for someone to save them.

by Tracee Sioux

The beautiful America Ferrera won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series last night for her role as Betty Suarez in Ugly Betty.

Hurray!

While my husband believes the themes in Ugly Betty are too adult for our five-year-old daughter, and they are, I love Ugly Betty's message about beauty.

I think it's a provocative look at beauty and the value we place on women. The social climate at Mode Magazine begs the question are women valued for their brains and abilities or are they valued for how much they participate in the ideal of beauty?

With lots of glamour, fashion, paparazzi and soap opera gender themes it seems the only thing everyone on the show wants to be is the ideal of a beautiful woman.

Take Wilhelmina Slater, played by Vanessa Williams, she's beautiful but what she really wants is to be taken seriously by the publisher. She wants to run a magazine. She wants to be valued for her abilities, she's obviously the most capable of running a fashion magazine. But, as the "beautiful woman" she keeps getting the "assistant's" job.

The cattiness and image obsession of the receptionist Amanda is like a caricature of what mean girls grow up to be. Beauty is so important she'll do anything to get it.

Even the men are caught up in the obsession with fashion and beauty. The less-than-masculine boy, Justin, and the homosexual assistant place place an equally distorted importance on beauty and fashion. They become completely absorbed in the whole glamorous world, in which they can never be the ideal, as they are male. They accept worshipping it from the sidelines.

The two heirs, both male, chase the ideal of the beautiful woman with equal vigor - one, Alexis Meade, surgically becomes one, while the other, Daniel Meade focuses on sexually obtaining many. Much like their father, Bradford Meade, who has built a dynasty around photographing the beauty ideal and writing about the importance and significance of beauty to encourage that other women, his audience, to seek it.

It even brings in the cultural influences of beauty with Betty's sister, Hilda, obviously beautiful by the standards of her Queens neighborhood going to beauty school.

Betty, completely oblivious to the vicious competition for becoming "the prettiest", always seems the most truly beautiful person in the room. She broadens the scope and definition of beauty, being refreshingly a-typical of young Hollywood.

DVR Ugly Betty, Thursdays on ABC this fall. It will make you think of beauty, the ideal of the beautiful woman, and the importance of beauty in lots of new ways.

by Tracee Sioux

My daughter was reciting all the things about "A" she had learned her first week in Kindergarten.

A is for alligator, apple tree, astronaut, Ainsley.

Then she handed the phone back to me.

Well, when she was reciting all the things that start with A, I refrained from listing Asshole.

Well, thanks for showing some restraint Mom, I said. Sometimes I don't even know who you are. When I was a kid I would have sworn you would never, ever say the word Asshole. Let alone be tempted to say it to a five-year-old.

I would have sworn the same thing. Then I had you.

You mean parenting a child like myself in particular, or the experience of mothering in general?

It was parenting you. When you have a kid like you and you start defending them to people, you don't realize how many assholes there are in the world. The world is pretty full of assholes.

I've learned more things about things I never, ever wanted to know about or understand being your mother. Well, and Larry's wife. The two of you. I was so naive. I've really had to grow and learn being married to him and mothering you. You two are my trials to endure. You're the people in my life that force me to grow.

My poor mother. She'd have chosen a life of rule following, respecting authority and blending in.

Then she had me and I would have none of it - straight from the go. Challenging authority, questioning the status quo, getting into trouble, experimenting with addiction, using my voice loudly and publicly, forever going against the grain.

She did defend me too. I remember she took on the vice-principal of my junior high when I kicked out a window at school. I went right to him and confessed and offered to pay for it. I kicked it, but was surprised it had broken. My intention wasn't to vandalize. The principal expelled me for the rest of the year and she fought that. But, you know what she would have chosen for herself? That I was not the type of kid to kick anything. That I would have just nicely and politely gone to class.

I put my mother through hell. People always make vague comments about myself to me. My grandmother recently wrote, You always have marched to a different drummer.

I never do know what they really mean. I always choose to take it as a compliment. But, I'm vague about how people really perceive me. I never quite understand how exactly I'm so different. Occasionally I'll struggle against it, my nature, but it's futile. I worry that my daughter is too much like me, and girls like us are really such a challenge to mother.

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

by Tracee Sioux

The American Psychologocial Association has published a Report of the APA Task force on the Sexualization of Girls.

This 74-page report should be required reading for every mother, mentor, and educator. It contains a multitude of studies and evidence that girls are being negatively effected by being inundated with images and innuendos in all facets of culture that sexuality them.

Sexualization defined as:

* Valued for sexuality rather than other characteristics.

* Being objectified, made into a thing to be used for someone else's sexual use versus rather than being seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.

* Sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person.

Ample evidence suggests that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality and attitudes and beliefs, the report states.

* Cognitive and physical functioning. Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study had girls unable to do well on a math test if wearing a swimsuit versus a sweater. The boys were unaffected by their attire.

* Sexualization and objectification undermine comfort with one's own body leading to feelings of shame, anxiety and even self-disgust. Vigilant monitoring of clothing or appearance leads to increased shame about one's body.

* Frequent exposure to cultural beauty ideals in the media has been shown to be associated with poor mental health including eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem.

* Studies show a link between sexualization and physical health. Girls who reported feeling negatively about their bodies were more likely to smoke and less likely to participate in sports or athletic activities.

* Frequent exposure to narrow ideals of attractiveness leads to narrow ideas about actual feminine bodily experiences like breastfeeding, menstruation, sweating and real sexual experiences.

* Frequent exposure to fictionalized images of sex made girls and women feel worse about real life sex.
Proposed solutions include:

* Formal education about healthy sexual and romantic relationships. Things like dating respect conferences.

* Comprehensive sex education in a human biology sense arms girls with the facts about their biological sexuality.

* Participation in athletics and extracuricular activities not of a sexual nature. Athletics that focus on stregth and competence increase self esteem.

* Religious and spiritual practices.

* Girl-centered groups and activities such as mentoring, Girl Scouts, and girl-related after school programs.

* Educating girls about how images in the media are produced and the profit motives behind advertising campaigns.

As a parent, mentor, woman, and journalist I find the findings of this paper to be consistent with what I'm seeing in girls and women.

Culture has meaning, the toys and clothes we allow our children to wear carry significance, the media they are exposed to has consequences. The statistical evidence suggests that perhaps we, as parents, are not taking it seriously enough.

It is my belief, and this is supported by the APA's report, that mothers are in the best and most appropriate position to impact a girl's self worth and to encourage a healthy sexuality. It's difficult to combat an entire culture with media images of sexuality, most of it inappropriate and disrespectful towards girls and women, invading nearly every facet of day-to-day-life.

It's difficult to draw the line and tune into warning signals our girls give us. My goal, and forgive me if I'm a fallible mother who finds the cultural and beauty myths difficult to interpret myself, is to give mothers a place where they can come and get a perspective that's a little different from the mainstream. Give mothers a place to sound off about cultural sexualization and how that's influencing their daughters. I intend to provide some tools to help mothers communicate with their daughters about sensitive issues.

It is our job, as parents, to interpret culture for our daughters.

by Tracee Sioux

The absurdity of abstinence-only "education" and I do use the term education loosely, confounds me. It's so blatantly anti-girl.

The logic is so extremely flawed. The practice is entirely ineffective in preventing big social problems like teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

From the girl's perspective, and I do believe girls should have inalienable rights just like any other citizen of this country, they have a right to know the biological facts of their body.

I understand the argument that parents want to tell their children to not have sex. I'm all for that right. It's a good thing to encourage girls not to participate in sexual activity. But, parents aren't the ones paying the consequences are they?

To leave girls uninformed about the consequences of sex is neglectful to the extreme.

If a girl is old enough to pay the consequences of pre-marital sex - and she's old enough for that as soon as her period, which occurs between 9 and 14-years-old then she is old enough to understand how her reproductive system works.

If we educate girls about their bodies they will be better able to decide not to have sex. Accurate information results in sexual and reproductive responsibility.

*Girls a right to know exactly how sexually transmitted diseases are spread.

*Girls have a right to know exactly how babies are and are not conceived.

*Girls have a right to a basic understanding of their own biological reproductive systems.

*Girls have a right to understand their fertility.

*Girls have a right to understand the function of their breasts.

*Girls have a right to understand their monthly periods.

To withhold biological information about the reproductive system is to encourage teen pregnancy and spread of communicable disease and misinformation supplied by teen boys and sexual predators. Withholding reproductive information also results in women not understanding the biology of fertility which leads to lots of heartbreak when they find out they've waited too long to conceive naturally.

Babies and STDs are not a consequence of sex in this millennium. Babies and STDs are a consequence of girls and women being uneducated and misinformed about their own bodies.

Take two minutes right now to be an activist for girls' health by sending a letter to your representatives supporting Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Christopher Shays (R-CT), along with Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), introduced the Responsible Education About Life (REAL) Act (H.R. 1653/S. 972). It's a bill that promotes abstinence - and abstinence really is a great thing to promote - but also supplies medically accurate biological information about the reproductive system.

Thanks to the American Association of University Women for supplying this easy letter which encourages our leaders to pass girl-empowering legislation.

The most interesting thing about Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton, to me, is that they look the same. Same hair, same skin tone, same fashion. Just very much the same. One of them is half-African American, but which one? Obviously, you know which one because you hear about them constantly, but if you didn't it would be hard to tell.

It's interesting that women all want to be the same color, only not the color we are.

Dark skinned women buy bleaching products to lighten the color of their skin to be more beautiful. While white women poison their skin with sun damage and tanning beds to look darker to be more beautiful. (I'm really regretting the tanning, now that I'm fighting melasma with bleaching products so I have one skin tone.)

Does this mean that Hispanic women, who presumably have the ideal medium brown skin tone, feel most beautiful? Or do they have skin-tone issues too?

I like the Olay tag line, Love the skin you're in.