“Women Managers Make Greener Business Decisions”: Report

Reader Sophie sent through this little business tidbit – a study has found that women managers and CEOs are more likely to make environmentally sound business decisions than their male counterparts. Here are the findings in not-so-easy-to-read tabled format:

If you’ve lost your microscope, the actual results can be found in this PDF report of the findings, which are part of a larger survey of green business practices.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the findings are accurate? Or is the idea of a “green” female manager just another way to flip the whole cigar-chomping man-in-suit stereotype of business on its head, in essence another way to brand female business leaders as the fairer, greener sex?

Black Canary Barbie: Bondage And Discipline And Sexualised Superheroines, Oh My!

News of Mattel’s new Black Canary Barbie doll filtered through most online outlets yesterday; for ease of reference, here’s Cosmopolitan’s take on it all, which is more or less identical to the rest of the “stories” – the piece is titled ‘Dominatrix Barbie’:

Move over, Astronaut Barbie – there’s a new doll in town.

Mattel has released a doll based on a character from the Black Canary comic book, clad in leather, fishnet stockings and thigh-high boots. The doll, to be released in September, has outraged Christian groups, who have dubbed the toy “S&M Barbie.”

The group Christian Voice said, “Barbie has always been on the tarty side and this is taking it too far. A children’s doll in sexually suggestive clothing is irresponsible – it’s filth.”

It’s not the first time the toy chain has come under fire for releasing sexually suggestive dolls. In 2002, the company launched Catwoman Barbie – dressed head-to-toe in leather and brandishing a whip!

(By the way, Cosmo, those boots reach her calves, not her “thighs” – Barbie’s vital stats are all sorts of wack, but not that wack.) Okay, anyway, got all that down? Good, let’s all hold hands and jump into the Barbie/superheroines/sexualisation debate headfirst.

Little Miss Abs

Today, the first news headline that caught my eye was this Telegraph (UK) effort. After I had recovered from that odd bit of anthropomorphism, I encountered this even more alarming headline: “Mum defends 10-year-old bodybuilder”.

(Picture: Daily Telegraph)

Maughan Wellham, of Thornton, NSW, is 10 and competed last weekend in the Ms Fitness Australia category of the International Natural Bodybuilding Association’s All Female Classic competition, held in Melbourne. She was the only child in the event, so they had to invent a new category for her, “Ms Fitness Kidz”. (Note the wacky zpelling.)

She’s nowhere near as creepy as the terrifying and notorious child bodybuilder Richard Sandrak, but child bodybuilders are always creepy because they superimpose an ‘adult’ conception of the body – deliberately honed, trained, hardened – onto a child’s body that we prefer to think of as innocent, unformed and in flux.

In fact, our culture’s ways of thinking about children’s bodies are severely limited. There’s the child prodigy’s body that inspires awe at its feats and moral panic surrounding pushy parents or coaches, the sick, disabled or injured child’s body that inspires sympathy and righteous anger, and the obese child’s body that inspires disgust and moral panic surrounding ignorant or helpless parents. Then, worst of all, there’s the sexualised child’s body that inspires a fervidly imagined paedophilic gaze and moral panic surrounding sexual precocity.

Maughan has been caught up in these clumsy ways of talking about kids’ bodies; just as at the tournament, there isn’t really a category for her. Her mum, along with event organiser Tony Lanciano, insist that it’s not precocious, creepy, unhealthy or symptomatic of bad parenting for a 10-year-old to be doing this: it was Maughan’s idea to compete and she trains for athleticism (the prodigious body) rather than for appearance (the sexualised body). “We’re not telling girls to start heavyweight lifting. It’s about fun and fitness,” says Lanciano.

Australian culture holds the virtues of sport to be so self-evident that we can bathe even the most unsavoury things (gang rape, drug use, domestic violence) in an acceptable glow if athletes are involved. But I think the issue was more neatly skewered by National Amateur Body Builders Association president Graeme Lancefield: