Hasbro says it will begin selling gender-neutral Easy-Bake ovens after meeting with a 13-year-old New Jersey girl who had campaigned for them.
McKenna Pope, of Garfield, N.J., got more than 40,000 signatures on her online petition at Change.org.
She began her campaign after finding only pink or purple Easy-Bake ovens. She wanted to buy ovens in other colors as a Christmas gift for her four-year-old brother, Gavyn Boscio.
McKenna said Hasbro is doing everything she wanted, including featuring boys in ads for the toy. “They really met most or even all of what I wanted them to do, and they really amazed me,” she said, adding that her brother Gavyn thought the new design was “awesome.”
Never doubt the ability of 13-year-old girls to change the world.
Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:
ALT
For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.
So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?
Cool.
So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?
Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?
Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?
Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?
Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.
Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.
Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”
Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.
Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.
Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.
If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.
I always think of Tom Stoppard describing the experience of having English Lit classes analyse his work as being like going through customs, confidently stating he had nothing to declare, and then watching the customs agents open his bags to reveal, like, weapons and smuggled diamonds and all sorts of contraband that he MUST have put in there but can't remember.
I love that because it points out that not everything a work tells us is deliberate, but it doesn't deny the validity of the analysis. The customs agents didn't invent the diamonds. The diamonds are THERE. And the author didn't make a conscious choice to pack them. It's a both/and.
catch me googling "how to partake in the butch tradition of having a lanyard/ring of keys clipped to your belt when you don't have a job or a car and so most of the things on your lanyard are just decorative keychains"
Carabiners and lanyards are also used as an extension of yourself within the butch/femme community. I also don’t have a job or a car, so my carabiner consists of two house keys, a locket and a keychain (both from my boyfriend) and then another keychain that i bought myself. Have fun and decorate! You’re butch either way :>
This is honestly such a genuinely kind and validating response, like I didn't expect actual advice but this is very much welcome information, thank you!
My mom accidentally joined a grieving support group (long story, she's not grieving tho) and she's missing it this week while visiting me and she's VERY concerned that Lorraine, who very kindly offered to bring a baked good like mom usually would, will NOT bring the correct kind of dessert, she says citrus tarts aren't "griefy" enough
ok so the way my mom accidentally joined a grieving support group when she's not grieving is this:
She's Catholic and has two churches. One is her Real Church but it's far from her house and tbh all the nice priests have died and the new priests are either lackluster or extremely conservative so sometimes she goes to the Other Church which is closer and more liberal but which she won't join permanently because she doesn't want to "cede the territory" of her Real Church to the conservatives (this is all backstory for flavor don't worry about it). Other Church once announced they were looking for volunteers for, like, a grief squad? Basically if someone was having a funeral but no one showed up to attend, the church would call in the squad and they'd mourn for the dead person and pray (which is important for Catholics because we believe you need that oomph to actually get to Heaven, don't worry about it). Anyway mom thought that was a nice concept so the next time she went back to Real Church she asked the head usher if they wanted to put together a similar squad there. The usher was like, oh we have one of those! It's every Wednesday night, you should join.
The miscommunication: the usher didn't understand the purpose of the squad mom was describing, just heard "grieving and mourning" and went to the next closest thing. Because my mom showed up to the Wednesday meeting and discovered a group of widows and widowers who are there to, like, discuss their own losses?
Why didn't my mom just leave when she realized the mistake? Great question. She had baked a cake (chocolate) thinking that would be appreciated (apparently funerals without real mourners are very short and boring) and she didn't want it to go to waste.
She stayed in the support group!! And has been attending! For a full YEAR.
She explained to the group leader that she isn't a widow and doesn't have anyone to grieve but all they said was "well everyone's lost somebody. Or will." So now my mom goes to the weekly meeting with her baked goods because she 1) doesn't want to be rude and leave the group and 2) apparently grieving people are the Most happy to get cookies so she gets to practice all these bonkers recipes shes wanted to try.
In mom's opinion the best kinds of dessert for grief is chocolate and caramel, or any kind of crunchy candy confection. Lemon and cream is "not mournful enough." She's absolutely wild I love her
