Harry Potter Alliance Conjures Pink Toenails Against Bullying

A few weeks ago, clothing store J. Crew ran an ad showing company president and creative director Jenna Lyons painting her son Beckett's toenails. The tagline read: "Saturday with Jenna: Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."

The far-right promptly had conniptions. Dr. Keith Ablow of Fox News worried about  "homogenizing males and females" and "psychological sterilization."

But one of the best responses to the far-right has been from the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a nonprofit that "takes an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights." HPA says the fact that almost every major media outlet ran a story about the ad was "an act of bullying":

1-It bullied and stupified the general public into believing that a non-story is worth paying attention to.

2-It bullied a mom and her relationship with her five year old son and even implied some horrible, untrue things.

But most of all, 3- It reinforced an environment conducive to violence, depression, and suicides amongst gay, bi-, and transgender teenagers.

HPA has therefore launched Toemaggedon, a campaign encouraging people to post on the Toemaggedon Facebook Wall a picture of their toes painted pink, blue, or any other color. (No word about whether you get bonus points for painting in Hogwarts House colors.) It's a simple idea, but one that has the potential to raise awareness at just how silly, paranoid, and dangerous it is to make these non-issues into issues.

And while their third point seems exceedingly strong, I can't disagree. If we as a society make a big issue over a boy who, in play, paints his toenails pink, what message of shame and self-doubt does that send to children and youth who are more deliberately going against gender convention?

As Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times adroitly pointed out, the outward trappings of gender have changed over time, not every behavior is a "Sign of Something," and we shouldn't be so afraid of gay people, anyway.

So paint your toes, post a picture over at Toemaggedon, and sign the petition below to thank J. Crew for the ad.

Photo credit: Sharona Gott