Gender-specific toys, clothes, behaviour and music

[ailbhe]

Many of you are familiar with my long-standing rants about the British and how they need to colour-code their babies so that they can tell which sex they are. And how much I dislike pink, too.

I have recently begun to wonder (or possibly to realise) whether Linnea gets away with "worse" behaviour because she looks like a boy. The specific example I'm thinking about is from when we were out in a restaurant with some friends and their daughter, who was wearing a dress and tights - Linnea was wearing something Linnea-ish, which usually means gender-neutral trousers or dungarees. And gender-neutral means "boy" to most people. Anyway, the friends' toddler and Linnea were both running around between courses. Our friends were asked or told to pick their baby up and keep her in her seat - and we were not. Possibly the other baby was behaving more badly than Linnea, but I couldn't see it, myself - they were both running around the pathways at the edge of the restaurant, like a few other children during the course of the evening, and neither of them were yelling (though the one who was incarcerated in a higchair started yelling fairly quickly). The only difference we could see was that Baby A looked like a girl and Linnea looked like a boy.

Similarly, in playgrounds, people admire "his" speed, strength and agility, while cautioning their own daughters not to run or climb.

We wondered about Barbies and toy guns before she was born; I decided (unilaterally, like most decisions about Linnea - they seem to be filed in Rob's brain as "mummy's jobs" along with working out when clothes no longer fit and the weather is cool enough for another layer) that she can have guns and Barbies as gifts from other people if she asks for them. She won't be getting them from us. If she wants guns she can make 'em from bits of stick, and if she wants Barbies she can learn to make her own rib-cracking corsets and file her nipples off with emery boards, but I'm not paying.

(Ask us again in 6 years time - no parenting plan survives contact with the enemy).

I have a nasty suspicion that if she was a boy I'd buy her a Barbie less reluctantly. I am also pretty sure that if she was a boy I'd be less reluctant to dress her in pink. But she does have a pink coat! So I overcame that particular prejudice when confronted with 50 pence-worth of charity-shop washable warmness.

Boys don't sing the same nursery rhymes as girls. I have yet to perform a proper study of which ones the parents of boys sing, but I have heard a mother say that "that's a girl's book" about a book with a nursery rhyme in it. I don't know which rhyme it was though.

Comments

[webhill.livejournal.com]

That sounds very odd.

I dressed my son in a lot of gender-neutral stuff and a lot of boyish stuff. People still frequently called him a girl. My girls wear either hand-me-downs from my son, or very girly pinky purply stuff - and even in the pinkest of pink, half the time people call them boys (um, as babies. Obviously it gets more obvious later. My middle daughter wears long pigtails and likes to play princess...). Just yesterday at the pediatrician's office my 10 month old was complimented for being such a handsome boy. She was wearing a pink/red/dark pink/brownish pink striped outfit with pink leather boots!

On the playground, my daughter (age 3) is much more active and agile than my son (age 5) and no one has ever commented that she is "boyish" or "not girly" because of it. Similarly no one has said my son is not manly enough. People admire my daughter's speed and agility, and always have, as she speeds by in her princess outfit or clambers up the railings in her mary janes. People offer to help my son as he looks worriedly at the ladder to the slide, too.

No one has ever ascribed masculinity to my daughter because she is a "tomboy" on the playground, that's for sure. and I definitely don't hear people cautioning their daughters not to run or climb! Surely that is what the playground is for??

Oh - my kids generally sing the same songs. Right now, the favorites are "hinay ma tov u ma nayim" (pardon my complete failure to correctly transliterate the hebrew!) and "the poo poo train is coming" which is something their father taught them... but they are also quite keen on "down by the bay" and most of the sesame street repertoire.