Something sort of weird happened on the way to sharing a picture for the #WeStandWithWendy campaign.
A couple years ago my friend Lady Katza from Peanut Butter Macramé took a picture of her daughter. She had made a gorgeous Little Red Riding Hood costume for her daughter, and completed the costume with a bloodied axe and a wolf’s head.
Her daughter was 8 in the picture; unmistakably prepubescent. There was little question of context for herself, her husband, or for me. In this storytelling, Red had saved herself with a Huntsman’s axe. She did not need saving. The girl in the picture was wide eyed, with her innocence still visibly intact. She did not look menaced or menacing. She looked determined, and young. It was, ultimately, a picture of female innocence that was capable, and not the least bit helpless.
It was the kind of story-in-a-picture that upends paradigms, in short.
We loved it.
A few years passed. Years full of assault to women’s rights and women’s autonomy. Steubenville. The Paycheck Fairness Act being rejected by every single Republican representative. State after state falling down in upholding Roe vs. Wade.
Texas front and center.
State Senator Wendy Davis’s now famous filibuster blew our minds. We stayed up late into the night, completely riveted.
We watched as the Texas State Senate ended Ms. Davis’s filibuster on technicalities. We watched as other Senators picked up Senator Davis’s mantle and continued her filibuster. We watched as the Texas State Senate closed them down, too. Then we watched as the outrage filled the Senate, and the people in the gallery picked up the mantle and ran the final minutes of the clock down. Then we watched the complete disregard for their own State’s Law with which they took the vote anyway, and passed the bill that would deny not only the rights that had been established with Roe vs. Wade, but also general healthcare for women in Texas. We watched as the record was fraudulently changed to show that the vote had happened within the time limit. Then we watched the bill dissolve under the world’s scrutiny.
Then we watched Texas Governor Rick Perry do what all knew he would, and schedule a second special session to again pass a bill that had been denied passage by the people of Texas.
This isn’t really about that, though. I mean, all of that matters, but that’s not even what I’m talking about here.
Orange was the new color. We donned orange to stand with Wendy Davis. Lady Katza mentioned the picture she had of her daughter and thought it would be an interesting picture to submit, were the color to change from red to orange. It was a picture of a girl with courage, determination, strength and no fear. She did not need to be saved. She was saving herself.
I agreed. It was late, though, and she had to go to sleep, so I turned to Laura Ross at @laurarossdesign.com to help turn Red’s clothes orange for us. Laura obliged happily. Red was now orange, and some subtle highlighting was added.
I sent the result to Lady Katza, and in the morning she tested the waters by posting the original pic to her FB feed.
Then the weirdness started. The photo was picked apart. Red was recast as Lizzie Borden. Lady Katza was unsure whether it would be a good idea or not to post the picture at all, let alone with orange and text. Was this actually a strong picture, as we thought?
See, the thing is, there’s no context for this picture in our culture. This fits no archetype. A woman who violently defends herself is sexualized and fetishized into Lara Croft type tits-and-ass caricatures. We, as a culture, slut-shame away her frightening power.
That just wasn’t possible with this picture. This picture shows a little girl who is not menacing or menaced. She is competent, unafraid, and still in full possession of her innocence. The only other example we could even come up with was Hit-Girl from Kick Ass. That was kind of startling.
Of course people were going to create a menacing context for the picture, there was no other available context with which to view it.
Well then. We just need to change that. We need to create stories where the girl saves herself. We need people like Senators Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte to be strong examples for us. We need Brave’s Merida, and no, thanks, we don’t want her slimmed down, given bigger boobs, a tinier waist, and made into a simpering Disney Princess that needs her complementary Prince. We need a Little Red Riding Hood that doesn’t wait for a Woodsman to save her, but saves herself.
We are ready to stand, and we will not sit down, and our daughters are ready, too. We will be brave. We will be heard. We will stand.
pollychromatic 
July 3, 2013 at 5:47 pm
That picture is totes adorb. Don’t feed the trolls.
Laura@laurarossdesign.com
July 3, 2013 at 6:53 pm
This is fantastic. Another example: Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Young, kick ass and competent.
July 4, 2013 at 6:31 am
Reblogged this on Mythic Bios.
July 4, 2013 at 8:40 am
I have to say that while I agree with practically every point you make here about the sort of restrictive roles girls/women have at their disposal and how this needs to be countered, I also felt that you overreacted to that one FB post. Obviously there may be some context here that I’m missing, and part of that context may be the current discourse in the US – but perhaps my main beef is this: yes, girls taking care of themselves, girls that don’t need to be rescued, all of this is great. A girl with a bloody axe, carrying a wolf’s chopped-off head, her face smeared with blood is rather dark. This doesn’t invalidate all the empowering rest, but it’s not neutral. At the very least it plays on the contrast between the innocent-looking girl and the strongly implied bloody violence, and in the terms in which you present it, it seems like empowerment = the ability to do violence against those who threaten you, as if power and the ability to look after yourself necessarily meant becoming a killer. It’s a great picture and a great costume, but the way it presents empowerment is not neutral. It’s not innocent. (And that’s fine, really, because the whole ‘innocent’ spiel is problematic in itself.)
Bringing the gender thing back into the discussion: the defender=killer of monsters role shouldn’t be reserved for boys/men, but whether you’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, personally I find heroes who find other ways to deal with monsters than killing them more interesting than warriors that solve problems by taking an axe to them. (Coraline was mentioned above, for instance.) Again, this doesn’t mean that the pic isn’t cool, but if the (context-less) “Lizzie Borden” comment can be read as a case of pathologising strong women, then the picture can be read as a case of power=the ability to do violence, to kill. I think that either would be bringing external baggage to the comment/picture.
July 5, 2013 at 2:40 am
I’m sorry I didn’t get to this earlier.
First, I’ll point you to http://matthewkirshenblatt.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/be-brave-be-heard/ because he does a good job of actually covering this ground.
I have my own rebuttals, though, and additions. Some of which I offered in comment over there, too.
The first is that I have no ability to look at this picture and take it as anything literal. It immediately hits me right in the amygdala. I don’t process it as a thing I would ever see, but rather as a thing I viscerally understand, simply because it is so clearly a picture out of the subconscious Dark Forest of the mind.
One does not actually expect Red Riding Hood to be truly real. It’s a morality play of several layers. The first being the simple dangers of the actual medieval forest. There is also the aspect of the dangers of strangers. They may look innocent and like any other adult human you know in the village, but always beware, as they may be a wolf. Don’t tell them too much of your business less they take advantage of the knowledge (Red told the wolf where she was going, and let him know of her grandmother’s presence and her own eventual whereabouts).
In earliest versions, there are some other possible versions that may or may not be about Red getting into bed with the wolf, too, and therefore possibly have to do with cautionary tales about strange bed partners.
Variations of the story exist from Germany, France, Italy and many other places. There’s an interesting version that Andrew Lang mentions where the hood is gold instead of red, and Little Goldenhood escapes when her magic hood burns the wolf’s mouth.
What I’m trying to say with this (that last bit is just interesting to me, because it defies the more closer to modern version we have where Red is saved by a woodsman or a huntsman, but is instead saved by her own hand through magic she owns) is that this story is super old. Collective Unconscious stuff, you know? So I can’t look at it this image and think of a literal girl, literally chopping a literal wolf, who had literally pretended to be her grandmother. My brain just kind of passes that on and goes straight to the meat of the myth.
The violence is not of a literal sort, in other words. It is metaphorical, and the parts of my thinking meat that deals with metaphors immediately comes front and center and tries to sort the image out.
And that is where my brain yells happily, “fantastic!” This Red Riding Hood is a metaphorical girl. She symbolizes strength and self defense. Again, she is not menacing or menaced as I said up above in my original. One does not get the feeling that Red here is going to chop anyone else up. She doesn’t hold the wolf as a trophy, as Matthew said. She simply holds it. It is something she did. Not something she is ashamed of, or overly triumphant about. Simply an act that seems intrinsic to her, as one can guess by the fact that she holds the wolf’s head close to her without appearing menaced by the fear it wielded, nor appearing to menace it.
This, itself, is an image that I would and have been familiar with in other hero stories and myths. The difference is that those stories were always about boys or men. An image of a girl who is not, to again belabor the point, is not menacing or menaced, and has emerged from mortal danger intact in such a way as to not be unbalanced by it (because if she had been unbalanced she would appear menacing or menaced).
I can’t apply literal values to it. Of course Real Red would need real therapy. This is horrific stuff when you look at it like that. Real Red wouldn’t have a wolf pretending to be grandmother, either. So if she had such an episode, Real Red should probably seek some counseling to begin with, eh?
So. That was the stuff I wanted to say last night in rebuttal to other stuff but didn’t get a chance to.
In direct rebuttal to you, I’ll return to the ideas that I just stated and say that this is a folktale. Red’s ability to protect herself has to be violent, because the wolf presents a violent threat. Would you have rather she called animal control? Should she have instead tamed the wolf with her wily innocence like a medieval maiden taming a unicorn with her virginity? No. She met the wolf’s implied danger to her mortality. She killed the wolf instead of the wolf killing her. It’s not dangerous violence. It’s metaphorical.
In former versions of the tale, Red does not save herself. In some versions she simply dies. In others a huntsman saves her, in yet others a woodsman saves her. In some this archetypal Man saves her before the wolf eats her, in others, after by cutting open the wolf’s body. In only one variant found does Red not need saving, and that would be the Andrew Lang Little Goldenhood version.
Folktales and fairy tales are violent. They emerged from a part of human history when death came easy and often. We didn’t quite see such violences as are portrayed in Little Red Riding Hood as violences that are contradictory to innocence. Children died, parents died, brothers and sisters died, grandparents died. Accidents, sickness, and all manner of death were just a more commonplace happening, and not considered something that you could shield children from the knowledge of. How could you, even? So, the “innocence” of childhood is not one that is an absence of death in folktales or fairy tales. Nor is it even one that is the absence of violence.
I could go on, but I’m starting to get to dissertation length here. I think I’ve made my points, so I’ll let them lie for a while and see if any new wrinkles pop up.
July 5, 2013 at 1:49 am
That’s a marvelous photo in any colour. Great article, too.
July 5, 2013 at 10:03 am
pollychromatic, thanks a lot for your long, thoughtful reply. Again, I agree with you to a large extent (and, just in case this is forgotten in the process, the photo and costume are undoubtedly great), but there are one or two things on which I disagree, both with you and Matthew. With respect to the larger issue (on which I agree, as mentioned earlier), I think these things are relatively unimportant details; what I’m talking about is the FB discussion rather than the pic.
One thing I’d say is that while I see what you’re saying re: metaphor, I don’t think it’s valid to say the photo is obviously and only metaphorical. By definition, metaphor has more than one level, and one of those is the literal one. There are metaphors where the literal level has been worn down so much, it’s practically invisible (dead metaphors etc.). Photos, by their very nature, have a literal component, unless they’re photoshopped to within an inch of their life. The LRRH picture does hold the narrative you’re describing, but first and foremost it’s of a bloodied girl carrying an axe and the decapitated head of a wolf. It’s a relatively realistic picture, and that’s part of what makes it so effective: it’s not twee, it’s not (overly) stylised, it’s rather matter-of-fact. Here’s a girl who, most likely, has killed a wolf and chopped off its head. The rest is context – our knowledge of the story (or stories), the tropes, the sociocultural context. Obviously the context is massively important, but the literal level is still there. Girl, blood, axe, wolf’s head.
This connects to my other point: saying that “That’s obviously not how the picture is meant” IMO is a somewhat dodgy statement in the context of this discussion, for two reasons: 1) the moment you put something out there for an audience to see and react to, you have to accept that people may not have the same thoughts, feelings, reactions and associations as you, the picture’s author or the girl in the picture, and 2) it would be very easy to use the same reply to your initial response to the Lizzie Borden comment: “That’s obviously not how the comment was meant.” To some extent, I felt that your reaction to the simple, two-word comment overloaded that comment with external baggage in a similar way to how my earlier post overloaded the picture with external baggage. I didn’t make the LB association myself, but without more context (e.g. the poster having made sexist comments in the past, or something in the post openly criticising the picture as “not suitable for girls”) I think it’s somewhat jumping to conclusions that aren’t supported by the comment in the first place.
Having said that, though, as I mentioned in my original post it’s very well possible that the whole discourse is massively more loaded in the US, that LB is seen as more or less prototypical of the dangerous, murderous, pathological *woman*, and that positing a girl in a strong role is frequently pathologised. I have to say it makes my head spin that apparently it’s not uncommon (warning: entirely anecdotal evidence that may be totally off) for parents in the States to discourage boys from playing soccer because it’s not a ‘manly sport’, so the discourse may be considerably more heteronormative and toxic over there than I am aware of.
July 7, 2013 at 5:01 am
Oh hey. Just to be clear. This is a moderated blog. I moderate comments. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, and it takes some of the immediacy of a good back and forth that happens when things are less moderated.
But.
It’s my world. My thoughts.
I’m not going to ever approve bigotry, sexism, hatred, or anything else along those lines. You may disagree with what is or what isn’t hatred (and the comment in question that prompted this was an anti-choice comment that I felt was fairly hateful and not the least bit respectful of women’s bodily autonomy, nor even of having discussion over it). That’s fine.
Do it somewhere else.
Cheers!
July 7, 2013 at 6:07 am
Chesterton joined you in advocating that we need more stories of heroic “overcoming” for and about children, and we now add the plea for more stories about heroic girls. Let us teach our girls to overcome fear and stand up for themselves.
I remind you of the commonly remember quotation:
“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” G. K. Chesterton.
Actually he said,
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
G. K. Chesterton in his essay “The Red Angel” found in the book Tremendous Triffles
An online version of the book can be found at — http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=3143254&pageno=2