Gender stereotypes or the princess and the spanner

Gender Stereotypes

I recently took my daughter to a ‘Princess’ themed party at the house of one of her schoolmates. Although I feel quite uncomfortable with the whole pink princess, Barbie thing, I didn’t want my daughter to miss out on anything. She’s only been at nursery for three weeks and I thought it would offer a good opportunity for her to bond with her classmates and for me to meet the other mums (her father takes her to school every morning as it’s on his way to work and, what with my work and other commitments, I only pick her up 2-3 times a week.

The ‘Princess’ dress was optional, but again, I didn’t want her to feel left out, so I duly went (to a charity shop) and bought her a ‘Snow White’ outfit to wear. I know I’m biased but she looked beautiful in it. Where is the harm in them dressing up? I thought. They are only 3-4 years old and most little kids like dressing up.

My daughter had great fun at the party; there was a bouncy castle and a trampoline in the garden. There was lots of yummy food - a good balance of cheese, fruit, humus, breadsticks and biscuits (so not all refined sugar). The birthday girl had a fairy tale castle cake - only to be expected at a Princess party.  There were party games; pass the parcel - so far, so reliving my own childhood, even to the point where there was no main prize in the middle (I thought it was only my mum who did that!), but then there was ‘pin the wand on the fairy’. Eh? The (American) woman who organised the games said; ‘didn’t you play this game when you were little?’ We played ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, I said. I overheard her telling a parent that when she did this game with boys she did it with swords instead of wands and played ‘pin the sword on the pirate’  I was stunned. WHY this strict delineation? Why wands or swords? What was wrong with the non gender specific pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, anyway?

When I was a child I played with my brother’s toys and with my own. I’ve heard people say that

kids will play with what they want to and no amount of efforts on the part of their parents to try and channel their energies in a certain direction will affect that. ‘Girls will play with dolls and boys with play with cars’. They say, or some variation of that. But really, what chance do they have when almost every toy advert shows boys playing with cars, building blocks and things like that and girls playing with dolls! Not just any old dolls but dolls bedecked in pink, pink and more freaking pink! Either doll babies or those unrealistic, anorexic girl-child dolls. What chance do they have when their parents tell them - this game is for girls, that one is for boys?

I don’t want to slate the pleasant American woman (not the mother of the birthday girl) as she obviously put a lot of work into organising the games for the party. Perhaps she was just following her own conditioning. But I’m just crying out for a bit of balance. Yes, my daughter(unlike me) loves wearing skirts and dresses, she claims that her favourite colour is pink and sometimes tells me she doesn’t want to wear trousers as she wants to ‘look like a ladee’, but she also loves kicking up leaves, hanging upside down, climbing things, taking things apart and trying to work out (often unsuccessfully) how to put them back together again. She loves running about and getting dirty and digging around in the mud. I’ve also seen my friend’s sons rush to play with my daughter’s doll’s house when they came to play at our house. (I don’t have a problem with Doll’s Houses but we didn’t buy this particular, pink one for her) I remember my young, male cousin asking us to paint his nails when he was a small boy. Both my daughters love playing with toy cars. I don’t believe that there is something in their genetic make-up which propels them towards one toy or another. So why the constant, external pressure to choose?

Why are the toys in a lot of toy shops catergorised by gender? They often have a boys or a girls section. You can refine your search in a certain well known shopping website (the one that sells everything) into boy’s or girl’s stuff. But isn’t this denying a huge portion of the population the chance to play with something they might enjoy playing with, just because it is deemed to be a ‘girl’ or a ‘boy’s’ toy.  It makes me glad that I had an older brother and I wonder if my parents would have just bought me ‘girl’s’ toys when I was growing up.

In an age where, despite the fact that they outperform boys in their exams, there are very few girls taking up a career in the STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) industries, the directing of girl’s energies into toys that teach them to care for things rather than to build things, seems particularly sinister.

Footnote: I guess this might all seem a bit hypocritical considering the fact that I posted a picture of my daughter in her costume on Facebook with the caption; ‘Our little Princess’. But the fact is I don’t want to ban her from dressing like a Princess or reading books or watching films about them or playing with particular toys, I just want her to be able to dress as a pirate or a monster or a superhero too!