Check this out: http://triggur.livejournal.com/172902.html. Further story at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2004-08-26/naked2.shtml. Whoop! I wanna work for them!
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A (young female) blogger asked some time ago for opinions on young women referring to each other, among themselves, as "chicks". I didn't much care for it, but I couldn't put into words why.
This afternoon the TV was on in the background again, and there was a very old (and very bad) movie on. Jane Fonda was playing a character who was definitely mature, late 20s or early 30s perhaps, more than capable of taking care of herself, punching out the bad guys and all. She was also attractive. The bad guys kept referring to her as "the girl". "Where's the girl?" "The girl has the notebook." "You let the girl get away?"
That was the 60s, when men were "men", and women were "girls" - but only if the woman was a sexual object. When she became "too old", or too unattractive, a man would no longer refer to her as a girl, but as a woman. That led to 80-year-old men referring to 70-year-old women as "girls". Jay's father, in his 90s, still calls the 80-something wives of his friends, or the women on his elder hostel tours, "girls". It sounds weird. In my world, a "girl" is a female who is not yet capable of making her own decisions, who is still guided by her parents. Parallel to "boy". Those of us in the feminist movement worked very hard to get away from the dismissiveness and sexual connotation of "girl".
So there's my objection. Young women calling each other "chicks" is ok with me only if they refer to all women as chicks. Their friends, women of their mother's generation, their mothers, their grandmothers, and their great-grandmothers. Anyone it's possible to relate to. If they put an age or attractiveness cutoff on the term, then they are sexually objectifying themselves! They should have more respect for themselves.
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I read an article in the local newspaper some weeks ago about a crow that had died. They think he was the oldest crow on record. (I forget how old he was.) He had fallen out of the nest as a chick, was injured, and had never been able to fly. He'd been raised by a local family, who had passed him down the line. Eventually, the last surviving family member was unable to keep him, so in I believe the 1980s or early 90s, he was given to a family friend. By this time he was very old, and mostly blind.
That's when NY state got involved. As long as members of the original family had him, he'd been "grandfathered", and was not subject to the more recent laws about keeping wild animals. But now that he was with a new family, the laws applied. He was declared a "wild animal", a ward of the state, and the state took him away from the family. The law said that he had to be rehabilitated and released to the wild. But since he couldn't see and couldn't fly and couldn't survive in the wild, the law said that he should be euthanized.
The family got an injunction and then sued the state for return of the bird. No one could believe that the wildlife officials could be so stupid. And this was the way it was presented in the newspaper article.
I remember this case. Of course, the officials weren't really stupid. It was the law that was stupid, they didn't like it either, and this was the perfect case to expose the stupidity of the law. It was the plaintiffs and the defendants combined against the stupid law. The judge gave the bird back to the family, which satisfied the people of the county (who had contributed gazillions to the legal fund), but I never did hear whether the law got changed, which was the real purpose of the lawsuit.
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