PinkPinkPinkPinkPink
NS July 3rd, 2007
I like the colour pink. I don’t wear a lot of it or often, but I do have an appreciation for it and certainly have a bit of it peeking out of my wardrobe. I don’t mind my daughter wearing pink either. Pink looks good on her most of the time and there are some cute clothes in shades varying from the faintest blush of pastel to a ‘so pink it looks like it belongs on Debbie Gibson’s leggings’.
What I do have a problem with is pink on every.single.item of clothing.in the stores. And even worse, the pink TOYS. It’s like the pink parade came through and rubbed its pinkness over every conceivable surface and left in its wake a message: Pink is for girls. Things that are for girls are pink. Girls should only play with items that are pink, and girly. The pinker the better. Boys don’t play with, wear or touch anything that was ever pink, intended to be pink, or even a too-light shade of red. Because boys are vastly different from girls. Boys play with boy toys which include but are not limited to….anything and everything that is not pink.
I can almost hear the voice on the tannoy in the children’s clothing department: Kids, we want to make damn sure that you know your gender (and therefore your place, and how you should think and behave) by the time you are five. Because if we don’t make sure it is ingrained in you at every moment of every day of your baby/toddler/preschooler life, you may just commit a sin and DO SOMETHING THAT IS NOT EXPECTED OF YOUR GENDER. But then when you get older, people will say ‘stop being a girl’ (i.e. stop whining/crying/talking about your feelings) and ‘be ladylike’ (keep your legs crossed so evil, bad men don’t try to corrupt your innocence, seeing as you are weak of body and they are weak of will) and ‘take it like a man’ (become a robot). And you will learn to divide up into groups based on your pinkness, or lack thereof, and eye one another with disdain and confusion. You will grow even older and start to be attracted to one another but at a total loss as to how you should relate and interact. Buy pink roses? Wear a pink dress? A blue shirt? A black jacket or a red tie to assert one’s authority?
Colours used to be the stuff of songs and rainbows, paintings and skies. I didn’t really give it a second thought. I wore all black one day, a pink shirt the next. I wore brown and black, had short hair, long hair, pigtails, combat boots, high heels…it didn’t matter. But now, raising a daughter in this pink vortex of advertising and suffocating gender stereotypes, I feel unsure and stifled. I don’t know whether to strip pink of its power and let her wear it as much as she likes, not giving it any kind of forbidden allure, or to keep it to a minimum so as not to instill these notions that her genitalia will ultimately decide how smart she is, how many bones she breaks, whether she becomes a doctor or a nurse, how often and for what reasons she allows herself to cry, or how she will be remembered in her epitaph.
There is an interesting article here about PFD (pink frilly dress) syndrome and how children, regardless of what gender stereotypes they are or are not exposed to and how equitably their parents treat them and their opposite sex siblings, often go through a stage, at around age 3 or 4, where there is a strong desire to assign gender to everything and categorize themselves and others according to their masculine or feminine traits and behaviours. The research shows that children feel a need to identify with a group and compartmentalize their learnings about the outside world so they can begin to make sense of it all. One way they do this is by hyper-stimulating the first ‘group’ they find they belong to. Oftentimes, this is gender. And the way children learn is by making very strong distinctions — ‘this is BAD’ and that is GOOD’; this is MEAN and that is NICE; this is what GIRLS do and that is what BOYS do. They often outgrow this urge to see strong, overblown stereotypes played out for memorization’s sake by the age of 5 or 6. Many times, toddlers obsessed with PFDs will turn into schoolgirls who refuse to wear it, once they realise what associations the colour holds.
I guess the questions floating around in my heard are: what is my responsibility, as a mother and as a feminist, to ensure minimal gender stereotyping from influencing the way I parent and the way I, and others, treat my daughter? How much power do we give to these stereotypes in our efforts to combat them? Is it better to ignore or address said stereotypes, and what are the negative consequences of each?
Eh. Screw thinking of pink. I think I’ll just go drink.
- Feminist Fury , Parenting 101
- Comments(8)
i think you can only acknowledge that you have very limited influence in this sphere – it’s part of how our brains are wired, and it’s a huge part of how our society is shaped.
all you can do is try to raise her in such a way that eventually she will feel free enough to challenge where those stereotypes fit in her own world.
but the single most important factor in how she sees women in the world? how she sees her mum
be a fantastic example and you can’t go wrong.
i’m sure you’ll come to this same debate with yourself over many things as she grows older and looks to you and paul to help her understand the world and her place in it. you’ve always been an individual, unafraid of being unique and completely yourself and i have no doubt you will empower amelia to be just as strong.
I so hear you on this. I hate the whole blue is for girls pink is for boys thing. When my friends have kids I go out of my way to find clothes which are green or yellow. I’m with Andrea in that I’m sure 99.9% of it is about teaching your child to be an individual – who they are. Ok so you need to teach her a bit of tact, too or it can make for a bit of a crap time in school when she tells her friends they are sheep but it’s still the best way to go!
Cheers
BC
Jen and Andrea, thank you. You’re very right. And I know this deep down inside but it’s one of the things that worries me. Not knowing which messages she will take to heart and which she will successfully evade is tough because it’s all about the unknown and letting go. Thankfully I don’t have to worry about that quite yet, but it’s never too early to start thinking of strategies and how I can be careful with my wording and own stereotypes and assumptions.
Babychaos, I would admittedly laugh a bit if my daughter told her friends they’re all sheep, but I know what you mean. No one likes a superior know-it-all who tells other people what they are lacking. That’s my job!
I find it strange that people have such a need to identify young children by their gender. Just yesterday I had Amelia in all black — black David Bowie t-shirt and black cotton trousers — with blue socks on. EVERYone I ran across said “oh, what a cute boy.” Now, I don’t mind one bit if someone thinks she’s a boy but they often look baffled as to why I would dress a girl in anything but pink or other identifying clothing typical of a female. People will say to her “you’re a little tomboy, aren’t you?” as if she’d have to be a ‘boyish girl’ to wear black or blue. Interesting stuff….
Pastels are the prevailing colors in Amelia’s size but she will soon move to the more bold spectrum. Like vegetables, you should offer a variety of colors. It makes life so much more healthy and interesting. It won’t be too many years before you won’t have much choice anyway – you will just be there to pay at the register! Your job as a parent is to make sure Amelia understands that she does have choices, that she finds her own voice in this world, and that she knows how to use that voice effectively. Happy Independence Day!
I bought Chuck a stuffed cloth doll at Mamas & Papas recently because she strolled right up to the mountain of (overpriced) stuffed toys, grabbed the doll, started calling her “baby”, and didn’t want to give her up. We tried swapping Baby for other stuffed toys to distract her, but she wasn’t having it. So we got her Baby.
My mother-in-law was over a few days later and commented that she’d been thinking of getting Chuck a dolly because she’s “at that age” where “little girls should get their first dollies.”
And that’s exactly the mentality I’m trying to avoid – I’m not giving her dollies (or little pint-sized Dysons complete with multicolored plastic balls to whirl around like dirt) because she’s a girl and she *ought* to have them. I’m giving her a dolly because she likes the dolly. And thankfully, she likes her books *far* more than her overpriced dolly.
I think with dolls it’s understandable, especially at this age, because they are beginning to recognize themselves as, well, babies. And so they want something that looks like them. It’s all about self-identification. But it shouldn’t be a requirement because some well-meaning relative thinks a girl MUST have a doll or she’s just not girly enough. And aside from the dolls, it’s actually the other stuff that is pink that bothers me. Like, why does a kitchen set need to be entirely in pink? Why does a push-along wagon have to be pink? They are not things that are inherently pink. In real life, you would rarely, if ever, see a Pepto-pink kitchen or a pink car. So why are 90% of toys targeted at girls pink?
i hope you still let her play with gas station baby doll even though she’s wearing pink! hee hee