rebeccakuder

Something I can’t believe I’m blogging about

Hey Jessie, why is my child singing this cloying song?
Hey Jessie, why is my child singing this cloying song?

I finally remembered to google the lyrics that my five-year-old daughter has been singing lately: “Hey Jessie, Hey Jessie, it feels like a party every day!”  In this song, “Jessie” is pronounced with attitude: “Jess-say!”

We don’t have cable.  My daughter doesn’t watch the Disney Channel; she barely understands what a television Channel is.  She learned the song from another nursery schooler.  WHY ARE LITTLE GIRLS SINGING THINGS LIKE “IT FEELS LIKE A PARTY EVERY DAY”?  Okay, any day probably does feel like a party when you’re five, when you can wear your pajamas to school and draw on your skin and be silly.  I don’t think this song is about that kind of party.

And I’m not convinced that’s a human singing.  It’s probably a machine.  Part of the big shiny plastic machine that chews up the natural self-esteem of children, and spits it out in shapes that are no longer recognizable.

(p.s. to followers of my blog: I’ve not been blogging lately because I’m renovating an old house and preparing to move.  Lots to share, when there’s time.  Stay tuned!)

rebeccakuder

Weddings, and what they might be

Bride Role Play costume by Melissa and Doug
Bride Role Play costume by Melissa and Doug

Today I took my daughter to our local independent toy store, Mr. Fub’s Party .  We go there regularly for balloons and sometimes more expensive treats.  It’s a great store, and so precious in these days of the mauling malls and Toys-R-Us.  Today’s trip was so she could use the coupon they sent for her birthday (10% off any one item).  I told her I’d buy whatever she wanted as long as it cost less than $30.  (She already has three Groovy Girls but she’d been eyeing a fourth, and I assumed that would be her choice.)  Instead, she chose the Melissa and Doug Bride Role Play costume.  I walked around the store with her for a few minutes, repeatedly asking, “Are you sure that’s what you want?” and “Don’t you want something more interesting, or something to build?” and while she was tempted by a couple things that I consider infinitely “more interesting” than a white wedding dress costume (fits age 4-6!  Start them early!) I decided this dress was okay for several reasons:

1. I wanted to keep my promise to let her choose whatever she wanted.

2. At least this wasn’t another doll for the stable of a million dolls.

3. She loves costumes–loves all things theatrical, not only dressing as a princess.  She has four pairs of wings, and she wears them each, depending on what the occasion calls for.

I bought the white wedding dress for her.  (With the discount and tax, the total was still under $30.)

I’m comforted by a conversation she and I had afterward we left the shop.  I reminded her that brides can wear whatever color they want (and that her mother wore red velvet).

“I know,” she said, “I’ve seen your pictures.”

I named each color in the rainbow of colors from which a bride might choose, including grey and brown and black, and also mentioned stripes and dots.

“I want to wear stripes and dots and ‘giraffe blobs!'” she said.

And I was comforted further by another conversation we had, after she asked what the “he” is called that marries the bride.  I reminded her that there might  instead be two brides, or two grooms, and that if people choose to get married, they can wear whatever they want.   I told her that I know a woman who married another woman and they both wore white wedding dresses, because that’s what they wanted to do.

“I know!” she said, to all of the above, and then decided to marry me instead of the original plan to marry her father.

Oh, that the world of her world will continue to be so open and free, and moreso.

rebeccakuder

Rainbow on her forehead, sadness in my belly

This is not the kind of makeup kit I’m talking about.

After school today, my almost-five-year-old daughter informed me that two of her friends (very close to her in age) have “make-up kits.”  One of them, she said, brought the kit to school.  Soon after she got home, my daughter drew all over her own face, “putting on makeup” with her washable markers.  I didn’t tell her not to draw on her face.  I decided to focus on natural consequences–let her see how hard it is to wash even washable markers off her face.  (After her bath, there was still a rainbow on her forehead.  This made her happy.)

I know the markers will fade.  But it’s impossible for me to overstate how much I object to children her age having anything called a “makeup kit.”  These friends of hers are sweet and wonderful, and are dear to her.  Their parents are dear to me! Still, I’m feeling angry and truly nauseated at the thought of girly makeup kits for children.

Let me be clear: I’m working under an assumption that the makeup kits in question are not the harmless face painting kits that children use for dress up and Halloween.  I am assuming they are the Princess or wanna-be-a-woman-too-soon type.  I could be wrong.  I told my daughter I’ll get her a face painting kit so she can pretend to be a cat, and so on.  She was thrilled.  She loves fantasy play, and loves to dress up, choosing not just princesses and fairies but many other creative beings.  I feel a whirl of victory that, despite her being in the midst of a “Princess” phase, and being named Merida, she has chosen to be a dragon for Halloween.  I’m working on a homespun dragon costume.  We’ll see how it goes.  I studied theatre.  I completely support the budding actor/director/playwright that my daughter is.  Storytelling and imaginative play are crucial to her psyche, as they are to any child’s development.  Storytelling and imaginative play are crucial to all humanity, actually!  Theatrical makeup and play is not the kind of makeup about which I rant.

What’s making me feel sick is how  “we” undermine and curtail childhood in ways that might seem harmless, but are not.  I’ve worked hard to keep Disney Princess as gone from my daughter’s frame of reference as possible.  Those pink frilly whispers slip in, sure.  After all, we live in the commercial world that is the U.S., and plenty of her friends are allowed to access commercial media.  But my daughter doesn’t watch TV, and isn’t allowed piles of plastic,  soul-killing merchandise.  This afternoon as we hiked in the woods across the road, my daughter carried her beloved baby doll, and told me there are two kinds of Barbies: the kind one of her friends has, and the kind she was carrying.  Another small victory willowed through me.

I’ve sometimes written about these issues on my blog.  My daughter’s name is Merida, named well before the recent princess in Brave.  I know I will continue to face these challenges, in waves, as she grows up.  Right now, these chippings away of the important things of childhood make me want to cry.

Yes, I have a sense of humor.  No, I won’t release my power of choice when it comes to how I raise this future-woman.

Tomorrow I’ll buy her face paint.  I hope it will satisfy her need to play.

rebeccakuder

Beasts of the Southern Wild

And I thought Buffy was a hero.

I used to see movies at the cinema all the time.  Since becoming a mother, I see a movie at a cinema once a year, on a good year.  Maybe.  The last movie I saw was “Black Swan” so it was actually a year and a half ago.  I’m not kidding.  The year before that, it was “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Tonight I saw “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”  My neighbor, who owns the Little Art Theatre, had said it was a film like nothing else.  Another friend, the writer Laraine Herring, told me I should see it because it features a child narrator (played by then five-year old Quvenzhané Wallis) in a magical, mythic world.

I’m not going to say much about the film.  Watching this film during yet another deluge on Louisiana was wrenching.  But considering how often I see a movie at the cinema, I’m glad it was this one.

It’s playing again tomorrow night at the Little Art Theatre.

(And when did we stop clapping after a movie?  Was it when we began to retreat into our VHS/DVD/internet bubbles for home viewing?  Every year or so, you will hear me clapping in a public cinema.  Feel free to join me.)

rebeccakuder

“One of the savers”

Wilbur, Charlotte, and some of her work

I am reading my four-year-old daughter Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White.  I had forgotten how great the book is–easily one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

The first line: “‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”   Seriously, I can’t think of a better hook.  When I took it from the shelf last week, my daughter was hesitant to read what, a year or so ago, she had with odd prescience named “the bacon book.”  I said, “I’m just going to read the first line.”  I did.

E.B. White’s hook worked.

I love reading this book aloud because it’s so easy to read aloud.  E.B. White did his work well.

Today, after reading her the chapter where Wilbur et al prepare to go to the Fair, my daughter acted out part of the story.  She needed a spider, and I remembered my husband’s wonderful Steiff spider, now known as “Charlotte.”

My daughter (“Fern”) quickly made a tent for Wilbur and Templeton (because, she informed me, they were going to kill Templeton, too).  She said that Charlotte was “one of the savers.”  Fern and Charlotte were saving Wilbur and Templeton.

So another reason to love this book: from it spins the truth that it’s not only males who do the saving around the farm.  Females do, too.  Children who hear animals talking are taken seriously by most adults, even the medical establishment, in the form of Dr. Dorian: “Children pay better attention than grownups.  If Fern says that the animals in Zuckerman’s barn talk, I’m quite ready to believe her.  Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more.  People are incessant talkers–I can give you my word on that.”

I can’t wait until bedtime, so I can remember what happens next.

rebeccakuder

Sexism in a bird map?

In case you were wondering what an immature female Baltimore Oriole looks like...

This morning, my four-year-old daughter spread out her “bird map” (the Peterson FlashGuide to Backyard Birds–a laminated fold-out with illustrations of various birds), gathering characters for a play scenario.  She has lately been fixated on the name “Oriole” (which came about when she misheard someone who said “Ariel,” referring to the Disney Princess) and the name “Oriole” has stuck.  (If you’re new to my blog, I’ve ranted here and elsewhere about Disney Princesses.) It’s been a refrain for her pretend names.  So this morning, she perused her bird map for the Baltimore Oriole.  As she often wants to play that she’s the mama and one of her dolls or stuffed animals is the baby, she looked for pictures of the mama and “girl” Orioles.  She asked which picture was the baby girl.  There are drawings of adult male and female Baltimore Orioles, and an “immature” male.  But no immature female.  Quickly switching species, she asked if there were any other baby girl birds shown.  We looked.  There were none.  There were other youngsters listed as simply “immature” and a couple other “immature” males, but no females.  I told her she could pretend one of them was a girl (maybe it was, after all!) but she did not want to pretend, she wanted to find a real girl bird.

As she became increasingly frustrated, I told her I would look on the computer to find a picture so she could see a young female Oriole.  I did, and found the image you see above.

I assume the lack of immature females depicted on the Peterson FlashGuide has to do with conserving space, and most males birds being more colorful and showy, so the “before” and “after” images of males are more dramatic.  Perhaps male birds are more relevant for serious birdwatchers.  (Following my daughter’s lead, I appreciate and admire birds, in particular certain raptors, but I don’t go with binoculars looking for them.  Nothing against it, it’s just that I am not even a novice birdwatcher, so I’m ignorant about these nuances.)

I do not mean this post to sound humorless: Sexism in a bird map?  Is she nuts?  But ever since today’s pre-breakfast grapple for images of young female birds, I’ve been increasingly troubled by not being able to easily find an avian model for my daughter to cast in her homespun theatrics.  I’ve been reading blogs lately that deal with the incessant sexism young girls are subjected to (notably Reel Girl and Peggy Orenstein’s blog) and while I know it might sound far-fetched to claim that a bird guide can disenfranchise human girls, the thought has stuck with me today.

It’s such a tiny moment in my daughter’s life, and I know she’s getting plenty of other things that will not tear her spirit down.  But that I even thought about this lack makes me sad.  Bird guides aside, we have a long way to go, baby.

rebeccakuder

What we are fighting against

What NOT to buy (Look for Corolle Mini Calins instead)

Here’s a video introducing “My First Princess” baby dolls by Disney.  I saw some of these dolls at Target today.  Oy vey!  I don’t even know where to start!  What’s next?  A Disney partnership with pharmaceuticial to develop and manufacture shots for each girl fetus in utero, ensuring her first word will be “Belle”?

Though my daughter loves her “babies,” Cinderella will not eat my daughter.  I just hope Merida doesn’t see these creatures at the store.

Want a better splurge?  Buy yourself Peggy Orenstein’s book.

And if you want a really cute baby for little kids, find a Corolle Mini Calin.  I think Corolle doesn’t make them anymore, but you can find them in various skin colors on eBay or other online shops.  They are machine washable and very sweet, perfect for small hands and imaginations.  Uneeda makes cute little babies, too.

rebeccakuder

Cinderella, what big, sharp teeth you have!

Because of my recent rants about princess stuff, a friend recommended Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein.  I finally read it.  It was great.

It was great even through the lens of Orenstein’s preaching to the cliched choir (me).  It was great despite how depressing it was to read what inspired the Disney Princess phenomenon–in 2000, a new executive at Disney went to see Disney on Ice, and noticed, to his horror, that the girls wore HOMEMADE princess dresses.  In the small gowns, rather than creativity at the hearth, he saw a missed merchandising opportunity.  Thus the Disney Princess brand was born.  (And now we have girls clad in shiny, generic, made-in-China garb, rather than homespun results of someone’s invention.)

I live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a bubble like Orenstein’s city of Berkeley, both places relatively more immune to over-the-top materialistic madness than much of the U.S.  This book was great because it was reassuring to read someone thinking about how to revolt against the default definition of femininity as only and always about what girls look like rather than what they do.  And not only is Orenstein thinking about how to revolt, she’s done her research.  She backs up her arguments.  As a journalist, she seems responsible in her work.  Her credibility as a person in the narrative is crucial to how therapeutic this book was to read.  Throughout, she’s grappling in plain view with the same questions other parents are.

It’s overwhelming to consider how to fight the subtle and unsubtle corporate power of entities like Disney.  My four-year-old daughter saw the Disney Princess undies at Target, and it’s all she wanted.  She could not be easily dissuaded.  (I bought them.)  The other day at Goodwill, I steered her away from the shelf of half-clad Barbies in the toy section.  I lured her to the books, figuring that was safe and we could get out without her wanting to buy yet another “baby.”  (She has always loved her “babies” and it’s often a struggle to convince her she has plenty of plastic mouths to feed.)  In the book section, she found a shiny pink Barbie book called Little Sisters Keep Out.  She does not know what Barbie is, though she’d seen them on the shelf.  She saw the book’s cover and said, “It’s a princess book!”  Ironically, I had just finished reading Orenstein’s book the night before.   I stood there, holding my own literary find–a gorgeous illustrated Aesop’s Fables–and reminded myself I had grown up with Barbies, and I turned out okay.  (Yet, like Orenstein, my self esteem was not helped by Barbie, nor by Seventeen Magazine, nor that iconic, tarted-up teen, Brooke Shields.)  Like the “I grew up watching too much TV and I turned out okay” argument, my Barbie excuse thins when I think too hard about it.  I bought both books, though I refused to read the Barbie book to her.  I told her that I didn’t like the kind of story inside it.  She said, “I love it.”  I told her those kinds of stories say girls can only do certain things, like brush their hair, not run and jump and climb and do fun things like that.  “But they go to the playground,” she said.  (One picture shows the dolls sitting on swings.  She decided she would read the book to her babies.  She makes up stories about the plastic dolls in the photos, and we have a compromise.)

Now that we grownups realize what TV does to a young person, or what all-pink-all-the-time (not to mention the focus on how a girl-to-woman looks rather than how she feels) does to the feminine psyche, we have the power (the responsibility!) to make better choices.

Let’s!  Let’s.

For me, all roads lead back to Buffy.  A slayer, a killer of demons.  Always fashionable, sometimes wearing implausible slaying footwear (but hey, she’s the slayer!) she takes care of herself and by “takes care of herself” I do not mean a pedicure.  In a dark alley, Buffy is the one kicking ass.  The final paradigm shift of the end of the TV series still makes me cry, every time I think of it:

“From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Who can stand up, will stand up. Every one of you, and girls we’ve never known, and generations to come…they will have strength they never dreamed of, and more than that, they will have each other. Slayers.  Every one of us. Make your choice.  Are you ready to be strong?”

Buffy wasn’t taken seriously at first.  She grew from a blonde teen cheerleader to a strong woman who changed the (fictional) world.  She spawned a small academic field called Buffy studies.  (And yet I found a Buffy dress-up game, where you can change Buffy’s clothing as if she were a paperdoll on the screen.  Sigh.)  The size of the problem of raising a strong, confident female person amidst well-funded and deeply entrenched corporate sinisterness makes me tired.  I have no answers.  But Orenstein’s book gave me hope.  Maybe parents will read it and meet together, talk about alternatives to the madness.  Maybe this kid’s parents read the book.  Maybe this kid can help start the revolution.

Maybe we will start making our own costumes again.

rebeccakuder

Brave

sketches of Princess Merida in "Brave"

Before my daughter Merida’s accident, I might have (hyperbolically) called what happened today my worst nightmare:  Shopping at Target, I asked her which underwear she wanted to choose.  While I suggested Hello Kitty or Paul Frank monkeys, she grabbed the Disney Princesses.  I suggested several other options (“Look honey, these have the days of the week!”) but she was certain of what she wanted.  I bought them.

All her life, my husband and I have worked to keep her away from TV and mainstream junk.  I know, everyone says the Pixar movies are great, and I have seen a couple of them (not bad) but Merida thinks movies are the things we watch on youtube, most often short videos of the band Hot Club of Cowtown, or Mark Bittman cooking.

But next year, Disney/Pixar will release a film called “Brave“.  The heroine is named Princess Merida.  Princess Merida!  When I first found out about this last spring, I was horrified.  How dare they steal my child’s name?!  And how badly will they mispronounce it, adding to the confusion we already face each visit to the pediatrician’s office, when she’s called “Muhr-Ida” and other versions that are not her name.

Then came the accident.  Through the entire process, and still, my Merida has been unbelievably brave and strong.  A little warrior, future slayer.  (I’ve always wanted to raise a slayer, but that’s another story.)  Swirled in now with all the ambivalence I have about Disney and skewed, commercial images of what girls and women should be, I am now, strangely, okay with the naming of next summer’s princess.  I’ll take it!  If it gives my daughter a little pop culture validation that she is awesome and strong and amazing, who am I to argue?  I told Merida and a friend of hers about the movie, and was quickly convinced to take them both to the theatre next summer.  (It’s a date!  Robbie Coltrane does one of the voices, so it can’t be all bad.)

But next time she’s getting  the monkey underwear.