For the daughter of a Free-to-be-You-and-Me loving gal there are an awful lot of glittery shoes and frothy skirts and fashion girl stickers and some serious Disney Channel action going on around here. My newly minted four year-old-daughter’s all about “my favorite colors, pink and purple (puh-ple).” Now I read Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter as soon as it came out, no waiting for the paperback edition. I gave my boys dolls and the girl plays with trucks and trains. I am not, by nature or political inclination, a pretty princess kind of a mom. I bristle, in fact, at the notion of boy things and girl things (and don’t get me started about books “for” boys or girls). But I have always honored my young kids’ preoccupations. When my eldest boy loved the Wizard of Oz, I got him oh-so-many things Oz and when the next guy was all construction all the time, our playroom doubled as a garage.
I’ve written about feeling somewhat uncomfortable when indulging the little girl in dresses or nail polish—conforming—even though such things—a dress, nail polish, long hair—filled me with some subversive pride when a boy of mine wanted the same. If you’re a boy who loves cars, the world markets you little cars, big trucks, vehicles on shirts and socks and underpants. If you’re a girl who loves princesses, the marketing holds. It’s a bit more complicated when the boy loves princesses and the girl loves trucks; it’s crossing over, and there are labels attached from tomboy to sissy. Making that stretch you channel your 70’s Free-to-be self, and prioritize your child’s interest above the marketers’ messages to go with popular and approved versions of girls and boys.
Some little part of me—ME the gender-neutral preferred, kid television eschewing feminist mama—feels the tiniest bit proud of myself for just letting the little girl dress up in her finery and stare at the Disney Channel. I will have to wait to say more about the intense awfulness factor of Austin and Ally or Good Luck Charlie for another day. I am terribly surprised by this unexpected, if guilty, pat on the back I’ve been giving myself recently.
Watching (just after getting her hair brushed)
It is, frankly, so out of character. These Disney shows are the cloying, fake, overly artificially sweetened and food colored chemical cotton candy-esque version of television. So, I can’t quite put my finger upon the part of me that is giving it a blind pass. Reading this past week about Sofia, the latest Disney princess, a toddler that happens to be a bejeweled princess for no obvious reason save for the billions+ industry that is Disney Princess, I am just a little more horrified at myself (although Sofia doesn’t appear on Good Luck Charlie).
I think that I have some other guilt underlying my let-girls-be-girls lassitude; I think it’s my non-glitziness that has me handing over the fashion girl scratch magic stickers and coating her fingernails with purple glittery polish. I read the middle two truck-obsessed boys so many books about diggers and scrapers and cement mixers I could recognize them when they rumbled down the street. Honoring that interest was relatively simple: I read and learned along with them. I don’t see myself getting any how-to books on beauty, though. I wonder if there’s a little bit of appeasing her in order to keep some of this at arm’s length from myself.
I believe I will have to think about this some more.
