Peter Sagal rocks

My fondness for National Public Radio is quite well- known, even among people who have had the pleasure to personally listen. One of my favorite shows is Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, the news quiz show. It is, hands down, one of the funniest shows ANYWHERE.

The host of the show is Peter Sagal. I learned through the NPR group on my knitting community site, Ravelry, that Peter had "gone off" on the movie Horton Hears a Who. I did not have the pleasure of hearing his commentary (and I certainly have no intentions of seeing the movie, first because Jim Carrey annoys me more than just about any human being with the exception of our current U.S. president and, second, because I've read the book and do not need to see anyone's movie interpretation of it), I went to his web site and read the written transcript in his blog.

The essence of the commentary is that the Horton movie annoyed him because of the way it denigrated the 96 daughters of the mayor of Whoville while the one son gets all the attention and it's this one son that saves Whoville. As the father of three daughters, Peter takes issue with the way that Hollywood, in particular, keeps putting women in supporting - and traditional - roles.

Go, Peter, go! It amazes me that in the year 2008, we still encounter silly gender stereotypes. As the mother of a son, I am trying hard to raise him as a feminist, with the clear understanding that little separates the two genders except a few different body parts. There are no boy or girl colors, that boys and girls can be anything they want to be, yada yada yada.

At times it seems that we may have gone a bit too far. Aidan's pediatrician in NC was a female and he had little contact with male doctors. When we moved here to Hooterville (not to be confused with Whoville), he saw a male doctor for the first time in his memory. Aidan's eyes got wide and he [loudly] whispered to me, "Mommy! He can't be a doctor - he's a boy!" To his credit, the doctor just laughed and then told Aidan that boys can be anything they want to be, even doctors.

But back to my love of Peter Sagal. How wonderful to hear a father get incensed about what his daughters see in popular culture and to want, maybe even just once, to see a girl or woman be the hero so his daughters can see someone like them in the starring role.

Go, Peter, go!