In Katha Pollitt's terrific essay on gender roles and children, "The Smurfette Principle," she talks about how young girls are routinely expected to filter their cognition and experiences through what boys do. Her core example, Smurfette, is a blonde, fluffy little thing who whines a lot and is just one flavor of the many flavors of Smurf (mostly blueberry, one supposes).
Pollitt proposes something fairly interesting: that children learn what gender means at least partly through media. Though some of the situations Pollitt outlines have been alleviated somewhat (there are now two, count 'em two, female muppets on Sesame Street), the general trend continues.
Or did, until Dora. Finally, a strong, smart, capable female protagonist who engages kids attention! Maybe boys won't grow up to be such bloody little misogynists! WooHoo!
My son, now 8, loved Dora. He loved the maps (still does adore maps), the useful Spanish lessons, the whole thing. Watching him watch her, I though that maybe, just maybe, the gender gap was being brought together, even a little. Nevertheless, I talked him out of a Dora backpack on the first day of kindergarten, with a pang of liberal guilt. I didn't think it would do him any good to get beaten up on the school bus.
As his Dora-watching petered out, his sister's picked up, and now SP is a fan, too.
But apparently, having a mixed gender viewership is not good enough, or something.
Dora's popularity with both boys and girls is apparently so threatening that it needed to be neutralized with a parallel male character, I guess so boys wouldn't end up thinking too highly of girls. Dora's brother? cousin? Diego now has his own show, different than Dora's, with animals he heroically rescues. Kids love it, and Diego is, if anything *more* commercialized and licensed than Dora.
So we're back to little girls funneling their identity through boys again. But unless it's a two-way street, it just pisses me off.
5 comments:
I'm sorry to admit it's something I probably would have been less noticing of were it not that I had a daughter, but now I can't help seeing this everywhere.
Whenever TLC's little friends come over, if they're girls, they'll just pick some movie, any movie without a stink about what type of movie this is. If it's a boy who comes over, heaven forfend if the movie should be a "girl's movie."
(Granted, much of what is sold and marketed to girls as "girls' movies" are princess dreck, but that's simply not the case at our house--save for those damn My Little Pony videos.)
Would Hermione Granger and the Sorcerer's Stone have been the book that launched a publishing empire? I rather doubt it. Boys often won't watch/read things with female leads while girls are willing to do the reverse. What's that about? Where and how precisely does that attitude get picked up?
I know one of the little boys who comes over somewhat regularly used to watch Strawberry Shortcake with my daughter without much complaint, when he was two-ish. Two years later and he refuses to even entertain the prospect, and if I put one on instead, he goes off to the other side of the room and plays with toys.
And this from a boy whose mother just loved it when he used to dress up in her clothes and try to wear her high heels.
I think you kinda made your own bed there, Mary.
If you had been willing to buy your son the backpack, and if other parents of sons who also wanted Dora gear had let them, there might've been a crack in the glass playground. And maybe not.
Did you see my post below? Have you seen that book before?
With the fervor of the recently converted, let me again recommend whole-heartedly, The Backyardigans.
It has, for many episodes, male to female parity. It lets the girls play the adventure roles as often as the boys. It's actually rather cleverly written, entertaining enough that I watch it myself rather than just using it is temp. baby sitter while I wash dishes or make dinner or something like that.
And just look at this list of musical types featured in the episodes.
Ina,
Oh, don't I know I made my own bed (although I refuse to consider myself personally responsible for Diego--bleah). There were some other circumstances on the table: Rosie was a newborn and the grandmother was visiting, so it wasn't just me and him at the backpack rack.
I don't know the book you sang so beautifully below, but as I noted, I think we (and by "we" I mean "I") do a much better job giving girls permission to cross gender lines than boys--after all, tomboy isn't a slur the way sissy is--which I expect is related to all kinds of residual misogyny about what "girls" are like, and stray homophobia.
I liked parenting girls--I have one nearly done--but parenting boys I find a lot more vexing.
I sometimes think they overthink these things. We do as well.
Toy sales might have played a factor too.
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