Some call them the princess wars. I prefer calling them the pink wars.

Princess or pink.  Does it matter? When you’re blessed with giving birth to a baby girl, you know you’re going to have to decide eventually which side you’re on. Mothers, you know what I’m talking about. This isn’t a war of choice. It’s a war that’s thrust upon us. Some of us choose to fight. A lot more choose appeasement.

Let’s not fool ourselves. If we choose to engage, the pink wars are nothing less than a fight for the hearts and minds of our daughters. The battlefield is made up of one uncomfortable confrontation after another, staged mostly in the privacy of our homes. (Although skirmishes often erupt during shopping expeditions that place us in discomforting proximity to the pink aisles in stores, supermarkets, and pharmacies.)

This is a fight that takes commitment and stamina. It takes uncompromising stubbornness. It’s a war waged on a psychological battlefront that demands a battery of strategies. Most of all, it’s a war that demands that we steel our hearts and resist the tears and the pleading and the anger.

I can imagine some of you reading this and thinking, isn’t this war-metaphor thing a bit overstated? Unfortunately, it’s not.

At the center of every battle in this never-ending war is saying “no” to pinkishness. It’s learning to say “no” to toys, clothing, and school supplies designed as sugary, girly confections and marketed as essential accessories to those who are willing to pay the price to allow their daughters to live inside the princess bubble. Don’t forget that these objects of desire are honed to perfection by designers, marketers, and psychologists employed by an industry that earns more than $4 billion a year. And the goal? Of course, the goal is to exploit for financial gain our girls’ fragile longings for belonging—for their need to fit in. By the time most American girls reach the age of five, most families have thrown in the towel and become active enablers of their daughters’ addiction to princess and pink.

Believe me.  Resisting the seductions of the pink-princess industry can be the most challenging part of a parent’s job. When my daughter was at the exploitable age, this meant saying “no” to Barbie. “No” to Spice Girls. “No” to Disney princesses and the whole Disney empire. (If I were asked to nominate a single entity for committing heinous psychological crimes against the humanity of girls, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to point the finger at the Disney Corporation.) I said “no” so many times that, at a certain point, my daughter surrendered the fight and the pleading stopped.

Did my daughter satisfy her cravings in other people’s homes? Probably. But in our home the lines were drawn. My husband and I erected a wall between our family and the battery of stereotyped images and objects thrown at us. Our Pink Curtain held back a marketing juggernaut that most families seemed to ignore.

My daughter didn’t know it at the time, but I saw myself as a sentinel standing guard, protecting her from forces intent on trivializing her childhood. My daughter didn’t know it then, but she and I were actually in the fight together. We were comrades in arms staving off a cultural and marketing tsunami that could have overwhelmed us—but didn’t.

Did my daughter like what I was doing at the time? You bet she didn’t. The price she paid was isolation. She didn’t know how to talk pink. She wasn’t allowed to dress pink. Her behavior was never pink enough to gain entry into the pink crowd. But because of all of that, she was—and now is—her own person, fashioned by her own choices, unique personality, and quirky upbringing.

Yes, for a while she paid the price. For a time, she became an outsider, just like I was when I was growing up. But what can I tell you? I survived. My daughter survived and thrived. She found good friends and a community of like-minded women. She is now a confident, smart, self-possessed, freethinking, creative woman. Did she become who she is today because of our family’s commitment to our own brand of anti-pink/anti-princess politics? Not entirely. But, yes, partly.

Our family’s battle was fought in the 1990s. To this day I believe we may have been the only Barbie/Spice Girls/Disney–free zone in our Brooklyn neighborhood. Now that my daughter’s in her twenties, she’s declared her intention to become a proud veteran (and victor) of the pink wars herself—when and if she’s lucky enough one day to experience the joys of having her own daughter.

Now that we’re in a new century, haven’t things changed? You must be kidding.  In the 90s, I thought we’d fought the pink war to end all pink wars. What a fool I was. Did I think it would end there?

In fact, the war goes on and gets ever more insidious all the time. The pink-girly-toy complex has joined forces with powerful media outlets spewing out nonstop girly garbage. Marketing of children’s play is more gender segregated than ever before. If you can stand it, stroll through the aisles of any big-box store and take a close look at what populates the pink aisle. It’s enough to give a twentieth-century feminist a case of the hives.

And what about Barbie? Shouldn’t she have disappeared into obscurity by now? Sadly, Barbie is still the most potent symbol of how corporations make money by convincing our daughters that their destiny is to mold themselves to fit into a big-boobed, narrow-wasted fantasy box. Mattel’s new #unapologetic Barbie marketing campaign, launched on the swimsuit-issue cover of Sports Illustrated, says it all, doesn’t it?

And why am I thinking about this all these years later? It’s because I stumbled upon a new company founded by a young woman who trained as an engineer at Stanford University and became interested in designing a new line of toys for girls. Debbie Sterling founded Goldie Blox, a company manufacturing and selling interactive toys for what Sterling refers to as female innovators of the future. Sterling hopes her toys will engage a skill set that will inspire girls and give them the confidence to become scientists and engineers.

Unfortunately, all is not perfect in Goldie Blox land. For whatever reason, Sterling decided to embellish her innovative toys with girly colors and frill. (Go figure.) Still, take a look at Goldie Blox’s clever and funny video that shows girls how they can rise up and ditch their sparkle toys and become something more than just pink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZVCC83cDch0

The post Saying no to pink and princesses appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The other day, I overheard a conversation between a teacher and a few students; they were “discussing” another teacher who apparently allowed her four or five year old son to wear dresses and play with dolls. I should be clearer: when I say “discuss,” I mean condemning. They tried to put on a little act and brush it off as just being “weird,” but their words dripped with scorn, and they didn’t try very hard to conceal their revulsion. Then again, neither did I. At them.

The teacher was actually one for whom I have enormous respect, but this was simply not one of his best moments. According to him, our school district only allows staff members to voice one opinion of such behaviors (complete acceptance, I assume), a fact which he thinks is unconstitutional and “un-American.” Needless to say, I disagree entirely. If the school district is forcing teachers and administrators to harbor tolerance for students breaking gender roles and social constructs, then good for them. They managed to do something beneficial for once. Good. I mean there are laws that deny people the right to oppress other people; that’s egalitarianism, and that’s American. Breaking social norms and not letting society dictate your acceptable behavior. That’s American.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire idea of gender roles is absolutely preposterous. All they do is tell people what they can and cannot do. Manly. Ladylike. Disgusting. Repulsive. Heinous. It’s defining the capacity and limiting the abilities and behaviors of an entire population based purely upon a biological predisposition. Sounds unfortunately reminiscent of Jim Crow, no? Yes, obviously the level of oppression is not equivalent, but it the same basis of inequality and utter infatuation with the idea that some physical feature defines capacity.

I especially concern myself with the ridiculous notion of what is “ladylike,” mainly because it is what most directly affects me. The entire concept that women must be prim and proper is ludicrous. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich best said, “Well behaved women seldom make history.” The idea, then, that women must constantly act in a dignified manner is simply another means of keeping women “in their place,” which, I suppose, is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen making their darling- and apparently badly-behaved husbands a sandwich.

And men? They are forced to be constantly infatuated with their own sense of masculinity lest they lose it in a bout of softness that society deems too effeminate. They face—as women do—a constant barrage of idealized, Photoshopped celebrities from the media telling them what “real men” look like, and what they should aspire to be.

And what if they break it? If someone does something outside what is concerned socially acceptable for their gender, then what? Societal condemnation? Public censure? Our society is hypocritical if it says its members can be whoever they want to be, believe whatever they want, and act in any way they so choose, because it’s a “free country,” and then turns around and tells them they are inferior—that because they choose to blur the dictatorial lines between two groups they deserve the support of neither.

Consider the plights of African-Americans during the Jim Crow era who considered themselves worthy to associate with those outside their race and social class. Isn’t that systematic belittling the same as what that little boy faces because he acts outside the preconceived boundaries of his gender?

So, if the school district has to regulate what teachers let loose in front of their students, so be it. If this is the only way to stop this infection of iniquity and present at least one source of information that doesn’t belittle students for their refusal to abide by societal standards and one front offering solely unwavering acceptance, so be it. Soon, that little boy will succumb to the narrow-mindedness of our society anyway and grow up to perpetuate the idea that our sex defines our capacities. Let him live freely now, at least, and enjoy the bliss of childhood naivete when fear of public censure does not stifle him.

So. while those students scoffed sarcastically s they said, “Good parenting, Ms. ——,” I didn’t. That is good parenting. That’s being more concerned with who your child wants to be than who society thinks you child should be. That’s letting your child be happy, not just saying you hope he is, while preventing him from being so.

[Editor’s note: For younger readers who weren’t around to see it when it was originally created, here is a song from “Free to Be You and Me” that satirizes the boys-playing-with-dolls, gender-roles controversy from the 1970s. The voices are Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas.]

The post Are we really still arguing about letting boys play with dolls? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

1.

In a recent New Yorker article about actress Anna Faris, Tad Friend cites a test for gender bias in movies. The test, outlined by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the original idea), asks three simple questions:

Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man?

I was struck by the simplicity of this test and by its patent validity as a measure of gender bias. As I thought about it some more, it occurred to me how few of the classic works of literature that I teach to my high school freshmen would pass this test: The Odyssey? Nope. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass? Nope. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nope. Romeo and Juliet. Nope.

What’s wrong with me?

2.

For the past two months, I’ve been working my way through War and Peace. I’m about three-fourths of the way through right now, and I’m both exhausted and exhilarated by the experience. Richard Pevear is not exaggerating when he writes the following in the introduction to his and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 2007 translation of the novel:

War and Peace is the most famous and at the same time the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one’s life forever.

Tolstoy, as a writer, is alive to seemingly everything, from the heights of military and political power to the most ordinary details of everyday life. As Isaac Babel noted, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

Yet even War and Peace passes Bechdel and Wallace’s test only barely. I’ve read 935 pages so far, and I’ve encountered quite a few female characters. Only occasionally have they talked to each other, however. Even rarer are the times when they’ve talked about something other than a man.

What’s wrong with Tolstoy?

3.

Decades after film critic David Denby graduated from Columbia University, he went back to his alma mater and took the Great Books course over again. He wrote a book about the experience. Near the end of the class’s study of The Odyssey, Denby became uneasy with the brutal treatment of the disloyal serving women, who are hanged by Telemachus after he forces them to clear out the corpses of their lovers recently slaughtered by Odysseus.

This brutal execution—which inspired Margaret Atwood to write The Penelopiad, a re-telling of The Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseus’ wife—is given tacit approval in Homer’s epic. Denby is appalled:

In Homer’s terms, of course, the women belong to Odysseus and Telemachus; the men’s property has been sullied, and as Odysseus’ heir, Telemachus has a right to exact punishment, and that’s that….

O evil patriarchy! I was outraged.

Yet Denby, guided by Professor Edward Tayler, comes to see his outrage in a different light:

A book like the Odyssey can never be simply appropriated by one social view or the other; it’s too complex, it bursts one’s little critique (which in any case is only everyone else’s little critique.) The slaughter of the suitors and the serving girls is a morally disastrous moment in Western literature, but having said that, one also has to say that criticism of the Odyssey on feminist and moral grounds is largely beside the point. It would be hard to say the poem suffers as art from its patriarchal assumptions.

So wait—is Bechdel’s test “beside the point”?

Is there nothing wrong with Homer, or with Tolstoy, or with me?

4.

In the past fifty years or so, more and more intellectual work has been done, both in the academy and outside of it, to lay bare the ways in which our society—our culture, literature, art, politics, religion, even the most mundane details of our everyday lives—are biased in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and class.

One response to that work has been to sneeringly reject it as bleeding-heart claptrap, as whining political correctness.

More sensitive souls have seen the insights of this work and used them to examine their own consciences—or the consciences of the literary works they admire.

No doubt this process has led to some salutary results. Some people may have amended their patterns of sexist, racist, classist, or heterosexist behavior. Others may have come to see their favorite literary works in new and illuminating ways. Consciousness, to one degree or another, may have been raised.

But this type of examination of conscience can also take on a less salutary aspect: a more defensive posture, a desire to absolve.

Scholar Jeffrey B. Ferguson, in an article in the Winter 2011 issue of Dædalus, speaks to this issue when he writes of the post-civil rights period’s “public drama of continuing black anger, the notion of ‘pulling the race card,’ and the seemingly bottomless need from whites for confirmation from blacks that racism no longer exists, or at the very least that they as individuals bear no visible trace of the unspeakable sin.”

On a literary level, I know how this works: Having been challenged at various times about teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that some parents consider racially insensitive, I have labored long and hard and, I like to believe, successfully, to prove that Huck is an anti-racist novel and that Jim is not a racist caricature but instead a moral hero.

And yet, when I think of Bechdel’s test, I realize that such defensive interpretations—both of self and of texts—are also “beside the point.”

It’s just a different point.

5.

When I realized that even War and Peace, a novel so vast, all-encompassing, profound, and moving, presents a seriously diminished portrait of the lives of women, I began to see that the deeper point of Bechdel’s test is not to accuse Homer, or Tolstoy, or me of being sexist.

Instead, the test reminds us that biases like sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism are the water in which we swim. They pervade our culture. They are our culture, and to such an extent that we sometimes forget about them until someone like Bechdel reminds us.

Instead of seeing sexism—or racism, etc.—as “unspeakable sins” whose taint one must avoid at all costs, maybe it would be healthier to accept that it would be virtually impossible for an individual not to be thus tainted—in other words, to see these sins as not unspeakable but rather common as dirt.

Then, aware of our common dirtiness, we can get down to the business of studying how things get dirty, how dirtiness causes problems, and how, struggle though we may, we can never get ourselves or anything else permanently clean.

The post Navigating the waters of our biased culture appeared first on Occasional Planet.