Popular culture has a way of turning modern women into villains. It equates women’s independence with arrogance, and their modernity with shamelessness. It ends up strengthening the good woman/bad woman dichotomy – the dichotomy that pits women against women. Here are a few simple ways that a good girl/bad girl dichotomy is created in society and in pop culture, looking in particular at South Asian media.

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Every day, our children are shown the gender box they are expected to live inside of and are encouraged to shrink down the parts of themselves that don’t fit that narrow mold. If we truly want our children to succeed in this world, they need our help to smash open the very boxes we’ve constructed for them – to claim their place, their voice, and their power. But how?

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The premise is that women are their own worst enemies, focusing on their worst physical qualities. A sketch artist draws them based on their descriptions, then redraws them based on the description of others. When they see the side-by-side comparison, they realize that they’re more beautiful than they thought. That may sound inspiring, but it doesn’t work for a number of reasons. Here are five.

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I believe shoving children into the culturally created gender binary can be crippling and try to do gender neutral parenting instead. So when someone gives my 1 year old son a toy hammer and tells him it’s time he toughens up or insults a toy vacuum as girly, we have issues. Here are a few methods I’ve developed to help alleviate the stress that our gendered society can pose on a family.

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If you’re a parent of a school-aged child, it’s likely that you’ve been affected by bullying. With approximately 30% of students reporting being bullied and far more being peripherally affected or even traumatized by bullying, it’s a weighing concern on parents’ minds. That’s why I wanted to offer a quick read for parents who are concerned about it.

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