SPARK!! Courtney Martin and Geena Davis

I am a mother of a bright, kind, wonderful, beautiful 10 year old girl. (click here from FB) Thankfully she has zero interest in boys, has not asked to get her ears pierced, dresses like a 10 year old should, and has rarely watched anything more that a PG rated movie. That said I worry... I worry about the highly sexualized society we live in, and the pressure on girls to grow up way to fast.

I recently wrote to my friend Courtney Martin, a brilliant young feminist writer, about this issue, begging her to please do something !!!!!! Not surprisingly she said.. "we are" and directed me to SPARK.

"SPARK is both a Summit and a Movement designed to push back against the increasingly sexualized images of girlhood in the media and create room for whole girls and healthy sexuality. SPARK will engage teen girls to be part of the solution rather than to protect them from the problem."

They have an upcoming summit in NY on October 22nd, and I wish I could be there. Their keynote speaker is the most wonderful Geena Davis - Actor ( of course ) but also founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. I have had the opportunity to meet with Geena many times and I will tell you, this woman is the real deal. She is leveraging her celebrity to bring attention to these issues and I lift her up as someone who should inspire as all. If you have not signed up for the Institute's media alerts, do so now. It is an awesome service.

More on Courtney... (pictured)

"Courtney E. Martin is a writer, teacher, and speaker, living in Brooklyn. Her latest book Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists was just published to critical acclaim. Seal Press published her first anthology, co-edited with J. Courtney Sullivan, entitled Click: When We Became Feminists, last spring."

I am on a whirlwind trip to Washington ( for fun), Boston for the "Closing the Gender Gap Conference", then NY for a bunch of meetings. More next week.