sometimes i feel like a lousy feminist. i have so much else on my mind these days, and plus i am sick of having the same stupid arguments again and again about why i don't like being treated like an imcompetent weirdo just because i am female. plus i am feeling pretty good about myself, so most days of the week you could probably tell me that you need a man to help you move some heavy stuff and i would hardly even bother to make you regret it.BUT
it still makes me furious when i see these stereotypes being enforced on kids. the other day i was at the store and i heard a woman telling her tiny little boy that he couldn't have the thing that he wanted because it had "girl colors". and ok, maybe i could even see warning a kid about something like that, in case they care. but this kid seemed plenty sure of what he wanted, and his mother (?) just kept insisting it was for girls. finally she made him "pick" something with spider man. it's for reasons like this that i dread the day river is interested in toy stores, or even helps shop for his clothes and has to navigate between the boy and girl sections. oh, and the girl colors in question? orange and green. this reminds me of the day that a woman told me she thought river was a girl because he was wearing brown instead of blue (if he'd had his pink jacket on, her brain probably would have exploded). i guess that means that girl colors now = pink, purple, yellow, orange, green and brown and boy colors = blue and maybe red. i have to say, those are some pretty awesome options.
My therapist and I talk about this a lot. Her son is 4 and he wears dresses to school and goes between girl and boy toys with ease. We've talked about how to deal with gender conforming/non-conforming. In her opinion you should tell your kid early and often that he/she will run into objections from other people when they are non-conformist, but let the kidlet pick.
ReplyDeleteSeems pretty reasonable to me. :)
I get really frustrated about this as well. We drove waaaay out to the suburbs the other day to buy Toby a potty-seat (because the babys R us out there was the only place that I could locate a baby bjorn seat, which was the most highly rated one online) and though the company manufactures these amazing potty seats in a whole range of fabulous colors - blue, orange, yellow, green - the only colors that the babys r us carried were white and hot pink.
ReplyDeleteWhy why why do people feel like they have to cover EVERYTHING that has anything to do with a girl in pink. We went to the playground after getting the seat (in white :P) and at least 75% of the girls out there were wearing pink in one way or another. And the whole princess thing! arg!
Toby has been requesting purple shoes lately - I'm on the lookout for a good pair. (without princesses) :)
A new book came out called My Mother Wears Combat Boots, and in it, the author suggests to anyone who thinks that gender-color-coding is not very damaging to try this experiment: Dress your baby in blue with images of trucks and boats etc. and see how people react to "him" during the course of your outings. Then another day dress the baby in all pink and see how different the reactions are.
ReplyDeleteThe pink/girl coding drives me up a wall.
When I had Thomas out at the EnP as a smaller baby, a woman stopped by to ask if he were a boy or a girl. He was wearing exclusively blue and carrying a blue blanket.
ReplyDeleteI mostly just dress him in whatever I like now.
connie