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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2yn5mev:
one-step-enough:
delicatepr1ncess:
Stop telling girls they have to be super heroes and not princesses. Stop telling girls that wanting to be a mother or a homemaker isn’t a real job. Stop telling girls that makeup isn’t art. Stop making fun of girls who like being in a relationship and looking for love. STOP telling girls that femininity is bad. I thought being a feminist and being a woman’s rights activist was about giving women the freedom to choose. Stop the internalized misogyny.
I had a professor/research mentor in college who was a very left-wing feminist. Like, we had to buy some supplies at a craft store for one of our experiments, and she made us drive to a Michaels 30 minutes away because she refused to support the Hobby Lobby that was only 10 minutes away.
Anyway, she was telling me once about friends of hers with two daughters, who were intentionally raising the girls in a gender-neutral environment. No pink clothes, no Barbies. Which isn’t necessarily wrong; certainly girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls. But, my professor was lamenting that despite the careful avoidance of anything overtly girly, by the time they were in preschool both daughters loved princesses, pink, dress-up. Much to their parents’ chagrin, they were both girly-girls.
And none of these very progressive people recognized how problematic their attitudes were. Certainly, we should not force girls to engage in traditionally feminine activities. BUT, perhaps more importantly, that doesn’t mean we should deride these activities in and of themselves. It is misogyny to condemn or ridicule something just because it is a stereotypically feminine activity.
Both of my sisters who are married have mothers-in-law who don’t agree with them about not buying constant truckloads of shit for children and enforcing heteronormativity and such. When my older sister found out she was pregnant with a girl, she actually put her foot down and sent out an email: NO. PINK. SHIT. She said it nicer than that, but she said, “This child will have enough pink stuff in her life. If you are buying something new for her, please please please, buy a color other than pink.”
It worked for the first… minute or so. Of course everything secondhand was a random mix, and often was pink, and that was fine. But it worked so well my other sister, upon giving birth to a girl a year and a half later, adopted the same principle, which was tremendously difficult to enforce with her own junk-shop-addicted mother-in-law. (But said child celebrated her first birthday in the most adorable, badass neon yellow tutu, which mother-in-law may have bought in protest about the no pink rule, but it turned out to be totally delightful.)
And now that said girls are three and five, their favorite colors are, of course, pink. (Well, the younger one likes yellow too, and the older loves purple too, but pink things are guaranteed paths to their hearts.) Both mothers understand that they don’t want to crush their daughters’ spirits, and always accept their choices when they express a preference and such. The younger one is a little less pink-obsessed. But the older one, who has two big brothers and is probably somewhat reacting to having to wear their hand-me-downs, is OBSESSED with shades of bright pink and pale lavender.
Are their mothers disappointed in this? No. Do they sometimes encourage them to pick a color other than pink? Sometimes. (Older child’s mother, when the girl wanted to paint her room pink, talked her into a pink base wall covered in rainbows, which looks awesome.) Are they ashamed of their daughters for “betraying” them? No, not at all. Do they wish their daughters liked blue or yellow better? Not really; not any more than, say, the older sister wishes her eldest son hadn’t chosen to paint his bedroom bright neon orange with neon green trim. (She talked him into maybe a gray base wall with the other colors in stripes, and he actually came up with a pretty cool design. He’ll still grow out of it sooner rather than later, but for now, he’s nine and it’s great, and when it needs repainting he’ll be big enough to do it his damn self.)
And many of the little girls I know are growing up excited to be princess super heroes. Their mothers are fighting the adults who tell them that thinness is important. There’s one mother in pre-K who sends her daughter in high-heeled shoes (I’m astonished; they make platform pumps for four-year-olds), but everyone else is politely horrified, and the pre-k insists on all children changing into slippers indoors anyway.
I think it’s far more important to agitate for legislation to protect the health, safety, reproductive rights, and access to education and protection from sexual assault for our daughters than to constantly police one another over what kind of activities we encourage them to. It doesn’t really matter one way or another what dolls we buy our daughters/nieces/nonbinary babypals if our sons– hell, their doctors and teachers and bosses– can assault and harass them with impunity and they’ve got to have their healthcare approved by a panel of moralizing judges and there’s no funding for it anyway and they can’t afford it because they legally can be paid less for the same work their brothers do.
I have a hard time giving a fuck either way about Barbies, with that kind of bullshit going on.
one-step-enough:
delicatepr1ncess:
Stop telling girls they have to be super heroes and not princesses. Stop telling girls that wanting to be a mother or a homemaker isn’t a real job. Stop telling girls that makeup isn’t art. Stop making fun of girls who like being in a relationship and looking for love. STOP telling girls that femininity is bad. I thought being a feminist and being a woman’s rights activist was about giving women the freedom to choose. Stop the internalized misogyny.
I had a professor/research mentor in college who was a very left-wing feminist. Like, we had to buy some supplies at a craft store for one of our experiments, and she made us drive to a Michaels 30 minutes away because she refused to support the Hobby Lobby that was only 10 minutes away.
Anyway, she was telling me once about friends of hers with two daughters, who were intentionally raising the girls in a gender-neutral environment. No pink clothes, no Barbies. Which isn’t necessarily wrong; certainly girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls. But, my professor was lamenting that despite the careful avoidance of anything overtly girly, by the time they were in preschool both daughters loved princesses, pink, dress-up. Much to their parents’ chagrin, they were both girly-girls.
And none of these very progressive people recognized how problematic their attitudes were. Certainly, we should not force girls to engage in traditionally feminine activities. BUT, perhaps more importantly, that doesn’t mean we should deride these activities in and of themselves. It is misogyny to condemn or ridicule something just because it is a stereotypically feminine activity.
Both of my sisters who are married have mothers-in-law who don’t agree with them about not buying constant truckloads of shit for children and enforcing heteronormativity and such. When my older sister found out she was pregnant with a girl, she actually put her foot down and sent out an email: NO. PINK. SHIT. She said it nicer than that, but she said, “This child will have enough pink stuff in her life. If you are buying something new for her, please please please, buy a color other than pink.”
It worked for the first… minute or so. Of course everything secondhand was a random mix, and often was pink, and that was fine. But it worked so well my other sister, upon giving birth to a girl a year and a half later, adopted the same principle, which was tremendously difficult to enforce with her own junk-shop-addicted mother-in-law. (But said child celebrated her first birthday in the most adorable, badass neon yellow tutu, which mother-in-law may have bought in protest about the no pink rule, but it turned out to be totally delightful.)
And now that said girls are three and five, their favorite colors are, of course, pink. (Well, the younger one likes yellow too, and the older loves purple too, but pink things are guaranteed paths to their hearts.) Both mothers understand that they don’t want to crush their daughters’ spirits, and always accept their choices when they express a preference and such. The younger one is a little less pink-obsessed. But the older one, who has two big brothers and is probably somewhat reacting to having to wear their hand-me-downs, is OBSESSED with shades of bright pink and pale lavender.
Are their mothers disappointed in this? No. Do they sometimes encourage them to pick a color other than pink? Sometimes. (Older child’s mother, when the girl wanted to paint her room pink, talked her into a pink base wall covered in rainbows, which looks awesome.) Are they ashamed of their daughters for “betraying” them? No, not at all. Do they wish their daughters liked blue or yellow better? Not really; not any more than, say, the older sister wishes her eldest son hadn’t chosen to paint his bedroom bright neon orange with neon green trim. (She talked him into maybe a gray base wall with the other colors in stripes, and he actually came up with a pretty cool design. He’ll still grow out of it sooner rather than later, but for now, he’s nine and it’s great, and when it needs repainting he’ll be big enough to do it his damn self.)
And many of the little girls I know are growing up excited to be princess super heroes. Their mothers are fighting the adults who tell them that thinness is important. There’s one mother in pre-K who sends her daughter in high-heeled shoes (I’m astonished; they make platform pumps for four-year-olds), but everyone else is politely horrified, and the pre-k insists on all children changing into slippers indoors anyway.
I think it’s far more important to agitate for legislation to protect the health, safety, reproductive rights, and access to education and protection from sexual assault for our daughters than to constantly police one another over what kind of activities we encourage them to. It doesn’t really matter one way or another what dolls we buy our daughters/nieces/nonbinary babypals if our sons– hell, their doctors and teachers and bosses– can assault and harass them with impunity and they’ve got to have their healthcare approved by a panel of moralizing judges and there’s no funding for it anyway and they can’t afford it because they legally can be paid less for the same work their brothers do.
I have a hard time giving a fuck either way about Barbies, with that kind of bullshit going on.
