I used to fight pink. Pink won.
My four-year-old daughter has always been a bit “girly”: she likes playing with baby dolls; she will always choose a dress over pants; and her most beloved hue is (you guessed it!) pink. Her obsession with all things traditionally feminine used to irk me – especially as she went from diapers to Pull-Ups and the horrid Disney princesses came into the mix.
I tried a trick with Layla that my parents used on me: for every tea set, I received a car-racing kit; for every Barbie, a Thundercat sword (which I admittedly still miss). But every dump truck that we bought for Layla, she turned, inevitably, into a mobile crib for her dolls. There was no escape from the creeping girlification of her world.
So I’m done doing battle against pink.
I’m not so sure anymore that I believe that pink’s even a bad thing. Because while there are clearly still objectionable toys being marketed to little girls – Rose Petal cottage, I’m looking at you – I understand that the rationale behind hating all things pink is that there’s something inherently wrong with being girly. Or being a girl.
In Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, author and biologist Julia Serano wrote:
[U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it – weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality – those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with playing with dolls, or liking to dress up in frilly clothes. The problem is that we’ve decided those things are “girly”, and that girly things are less worthy of our respect.
Don’t believe me? Think about how many parents – like mine – buy their girls “boy toys” for balance, and how few make sure their boys get a Barbie with every Tonka truck (or how many would find it “worrying” if their boys asked for Barbies).
Tania Lombrozo at NPR notes that research on gender identity shows that only 30-40% of girls older than kindergarten age continue to identify as traditionally feminine, with many calling themselves “tomboys”. But it remains unclear if that change arrives because these girls naturally grow out of younger interests, or because they’ve received the message that there’s more value to traditionally “boy” things.
That problem continues in adulthood: traditional women’s interests like fashion are derided as silly and unserious, while masculine hobbies like sports are apparently important and thought-provoking. (We should, at least, be able to agree that they’re both a bit silly.)
So I’ve made my peace with pink. If my daughter wants to dress to the nines in fuchsia sparkly tulle, so be it. She’s adorable and smart no matter what she wears or what she likes to play with. And I know as she gets older, she will have family around her who support her interests no matter what they are – and tell them that they have value.
But still: I was more than a little pleased when Layla went through her robot phase a few months ago. One step at a time, I guess.