Pink or Blue?

I wrote this a couple of years ago, but it still rings true in terms of my occasional discomfort with my usually-proud liberal tendencies:

While waiting for my husband A to renew his driver’s license at the bureau of motor vehicles last week, I took our two sons into a discount department store in the adjoining strip mall. As an inveterate impulse buyer, I was attracted to a rack of ugly, thin beach towels dyed garish, bright colors. My three and a half year-old son C was similarly drawn to a nearby display of white beach towels imprinted with cartoon characters, such as Clifford the Big Red Dog, one of his PBS favorites. Before letting on to him, I had already decided to relent and buy him one if he asked, in spite of some discomfort on my part about the ethics of marketing products to young children. For who could really argue with the wholesome goodness of Clifford, the hero of a series of children’s books as well as the television series that does, after all, run on the unassailable public television station. (Besides, C runs around the house all the time wearing nothing but one too-small Cookie Monster slipper, and I don’t really have a problem with that). However, after looking over his choices, C said, without hesitation, “I want the Dragon Tales one.” Fine, you say, Dragon Tales. Although it is somewhat insipid and Carebearsesque, and I’ve always found it difficult to determine exactly what makes it educational, except for some vague agenda it seems to have around teaching emotional intelligence, it’s relatively inoffensive. But the quality of the program was not my problem; the crux of the issue was that it was a Cassie towel. Little, pink Cassie, the shy female dragon who loomed large on this towel that is taller than my son. What, I immediately thought, will the neighbors think?

There is an exquisite torture awaiting all the young liberals like myself who espouse gender neutrality and who promote androgyny in the rearing of children. Hell is, after all, other people: those well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) strangers, acquaintances, and even friends who pass silent or vocal judgment on our parenting. Children who are discouraged from being limited by strict interpretations of gender roles will have to withstand disapproval from peers and their parents, and it is only through experience and a thorough assessment of what you and your child can tolerate that it is possible to decide how much or how little to buckle in the face of pressure from without and to what level to submit to contemporary norms. Finally, I have reached a point in my life where I think I am willing to subject myself to some discomfort with the opinions of others, but I can vividly recall my childhood fear and loathing at the idea of being different from other kids; it is the idea of C having to explain the pink towel to his friends that bothers me.

I remember very clearly a fascinating experience I had as a college student, long before either of my children arrived, working at a summer job as a cashier at an outlet store in Freeport, Maine. A young father was standing near the counter next to the stroller his twin son and daughter occupied, showing them off to me and to anyone in the vicinity who seemed interested. I did not object to the boasting; they were, indeed, very cute, and it seemed a testament to his love and infatuation with them that he wanted the world to recognize their beauty. What turned me off was their wardrobe: the boy was dressed in a miniature Yankees uniform, little blue baseball cap and all, and the girl was decked out in a frilly, lacy, satiny, pink-and-white dress with matching bonnet. If that was not a loud enough statement of gender stereotyping, the father was saying simultaneously, sotto voce, “And, you know, he’s all boy. He’s got a really strong little grip. And she’s just the sweetest, gentlest little girl. She just loves to cuddle.” I was alarmed by what I saw as not just reflecting but directing the development of their personalities based on some stereotype of what girls and boys should be. I added this to my ever-growing mental list of things not to do as a parent and went back to my work. Through that experience, other similar ones, and my own personal cultural critique, I came to the conclusion that I would prefer to do less programming of my children in terms of their traits related to gender and let them find their own way.

Of course, it’s not so easy now to pass judgment on others and take the moral high road myself. I have replaced too many windows already at too much expense to throw any more stones. As my real-life children get older and assert their individuality and my easily manipulated, hypothetical children recede, I find myself forced into making daily choices about what behaviors and ideas to reinforce as reflective of my values, which to ignore, and which to discourage. Early on, C picked up an enjoyment of cooking through imitation of his father, who cooks almost all of our meals. For his last birthday, he asked for and received a toy stove. For Christmas, he wanted a dollhouse. We encourage him in the pursuits he seems to take pleasure in without regard for traditional gender roles. Recently, I heard A refer to C in conversation with a friend as “all boy.” I laughed nervously, and said, “Well, if you mean the kind of boy who sleeps with his baby doll and likes to cook.” A smiled sagely and said, “Yeah. All boy. His kind of boy.”

Would it be okay with me if C came to identify himself on the female end of the continuum? I don’t know how I’d feel about it, but I hope I could be supportive. And I can’t help but want to save him from that kind of internal confusion that would only be complicated by external reactions to it. George Sand, an excellent eighteenth-century French writer who is now famous mostly for cross-dressing and having an affair with composer Frederick Chopin, wrote a novel about a wealthy young orphan who is brought up in an isolated estate as a gentleman, only to find, at age eighteen, that she is biologically female. The story ends in tragedy, and the implication is that it must be so when one is so confused about gender or truly gender-less in a gendered world. True androgyny is an unattainable and, perhaps, undesirable goal in contemporary culture as it was in France two hundred years ago. It seems that everyone, no matter what his or her level of traditional femininity or masculinity, comes down at least slightly on one side or another, the old character of “Pat” on “Saturday Night Live” notwithstanding. Of course, I bought the Dragon Tales towel and tried not to betray my ambivalence about it. “Are you sure that’s the one you want?” I asked, nonchalantly (I think). “Yes, mama,” C impatiently replied. He knows me and my wavering on such important decisions as buying four dollar towels and clearly wanted to put any debate to rest quickly. So, I picked up the towel, put it in the cart next to my younger son E, said, “Okay,” and moved on.