Apparently, I’m the Only One

One of the bloggers I read occasionally writes about his six year old daughter. This may come as a shock to those who know me, but I don’t mind (mostly because he tends to be more about being a good father than about “my pwecious babygirl”). His latest installment in “trying to be a good parent while working 60 to 80 hours a week” involved her handing him a list of things she wanted for the upcoming holiday, most of which consisted of Barbie toys.

Cue the comments section filling up with people going all anti-girly-consumerism. Which, I have to admit, I kind of agree with. I was of an age to want Barbies when they came out with the one that said “math is hard” (and some other stupid shit, but that’s what I remember). I was pissed off over it, and I was six or seven, because I liked math. Well, that’s not true, I didn’t like math as much as I liked reading or science, and I wasn’t particularly good at the speed tests, but it was one of the places my tendency towards meticulousness flourished. I might not be the first one to turn my paper in (this was a big deal to me when I was in second grade) but I was sure all my answers were correct. And nothing pissed me off more than someone telling me that I (or the rest of my gender) was stupid.

But back to the topic at hand: the notion that girls shouldn’t be allowed to play with things that are “girly.” That somehow one Barbie or dress-up set will ruin the entire women’s lib movement and send us all straight back to the bad old days of corsets and arranged marriages and not being able to vote. I don’t buy it, and my reasoning is two-fold: children like playing make-believe, and will use anything they can get their hands on to do it (don’t give your boys toy guns? They will use sticks. And your red tablecloth is just as good a superwoman cape as one purchased at the store); children think they want what they perceive other children as having. They are not stupid, they know that Barbie and whatever are status symbols. The toys I begged hardest for were often the ones that ultimately never got played with.

I don’t think it has as much to do with what the child is playing with as it does how they play with it. And that’s where the parent really comes in. I think if you teach your daughter that she is strong and smart and capable, a pretty princess outfit won’t undo that. I certainly got all my girl friends to dress up as princesses with me. Then we slew dragons and invaded Nazi camps as spies and took them out. If we don’t teach our little girls that they aren’t allowed to fight and think, then there’s no harm in them doing it in fuchsia tulle, or using America’s Most Ridiculous Example of the Idealized Female Form to act it out.

Of course, as I got older, I acted out other things with my Barbies. . . but that might need to be another post ;)