Pink Toes & Princess Boys: Fox News Fail

On April 9, I posted on my FaceBook that I thought the new J. Crew ad was kinda cool. At the time, not many people cared enough to even comment:

Actually, I hadn’t even heard of it until a right-wing asshat media organization put out an APB:

Then, on April 11 – taking their cues from the right wing as usual –  Fox News began dutifully pushing right-wing propaganda under the banner of “news”:

Fox allowed Dr. Ablow to rant on and on about how allowing boys access to feminine styles will mentally cripple them. Ablow – who pushes a lame pop psychology technique called “street therapy” – is not, in fact, a psychologist. He was actually trained in forensic psychiatry, NOT gender or sexual theory.

On April 13, ZJ had his say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn_1jReD99E

Finally, after Ablow’s comments were picked up by other news outlets, the Daily Show with John Stewart called BS.

Now there’s a FaceBook event called Paint Your Nails Pink scheduled for 4/22/2011 in which about 6,000 people – men and women – will paint their toes the dreaded color neon pink:

After all the hullabaloo, I thought I’d do some of my own fact-checking. The issue here is that a forensic criminal psychiatrist claims that allowing boys feminine expression will cripple their masculinity. Lets see…

Well, obviously wearing a dress and having log hair didn’t destroy FDR’s sense of gender identity. How about…

Well, apparently wearing a dress and having someone curl his long hair didn’t seem to break Ernest Hemingway’s gender identity either.

Maybe the issues is that these men of yesteryear were somehow impervious to having their gender identity destroyed by expressions of femininity. Maybe the men of today are somehow psychologically frail.

So, lets look at how a modern man might express his gender if he’s exposed to neon pink and painted toenails:

Hrm… well that seems odd.

It’s kinda looking like the forensic psychiatrist might not have known jack about gender theory and was simply using the weight of his credentials to pass off his personal bias as actual science. Kinda seems a little unethical to me.

In any event, it doesn’t seem to matter now because J. Crew seems to have caved to the right-wing and pulled the ad which used to be located here.