‘Hannah’ on Liberal Conspiracy has taken her lead from Polly Toynbee (alarm bells are ringing…) and written a post bemoaning the ‘girlification’ of young girls. It’s really not worth reading, as you should be able to see from just the opening paragraph, but since I’ve never ‘fisked’ anything before and it seems like a fun pasttime, I thought I’d give this load of twaddle a once over, to see what falls out.

(It’s going to be quite long, so click on more to read more!)

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By ‘girlification’ [Polly Toynbee] means the relentless way young girls are targeted from the minute they’re born with pink toys, pink clothes, pink accessories, princesses, Barbies, Bratz, makeup and heels. The way they’re encouraged to judge each other on the way their look and how much they weigh and pick at ‘flaws’ in their own appearances from a progressively younger age.

Tell me about it. Those poor girls being ‘targeted’ the minute they’re born with pink things! My heart bleeds or them that they have parents willing and able to actually buy them things to play with. The poor dears. When they grow up, how they shall resent their parents for giving them toys to play with.

Anyway, I don’t know what parenting school you went to where they said you should teach your child to judge people by their appearance…

As I don’t have children of my own I don’t get year-round exposure to this sort of thing but you can’t fail to miss it at Christmas, when the television is filled with adverts for the year’s ‘must-have’ toys and gadgets.

Oh! Okay, so you don’t know the first thing about parenting, you’re just looking in high street shops and judging. I see. Highly mature of you.

Boys get to be superheroes, pirates and soldiers, work with their hands and go on adventures. Girls get to be princesses and learn to be ‘just like mum’ by playing with toy kitchens and home appliances.

Those poor girls. All they ever wanted was a helicopter for Christmas but their oppresive parents keep giving them Barbies! How will they survive?! Of course, it couldn’t be that lots of girls ask their parents for girly stuff, creating a market for pink dolls houses and Barbies.

No. Sorry. Just me being an idiot there.

And, of course, I’ve never seen a boy play kitchens or shopkeepers or hoovering – they stick to their soldiers and pirates and heroes. Ahem.

When my sister and I were young, my mum had no problem with us playing with dolls or the toy kitchen we received one Christmas from our grandparents. But she also made sure we owned toy cars, miniature gardening tools and a farmyard complete with animals, barn and working chute for bales of hay (this was the best). I distinctly remember acting out scenes from favourite Disney films in the playground at school where we’d all fight over who got to be Ariel or Cinderella, but we loved playing Robin Hood, pirates and adventure-based games.

Oh, so you do know that girls can play ‘boys’ games? So what are you complaining about? This is exactly where ‘non-parents’ show themselves up. How many playgrounds have you been in recently? How do you know what games little girls and boys play in primary schools? Unless you’re a primary school teacher, which I hope you aren’t given your lack of knowledge about children, the only way you’d know what games kids play is by watching them through the gates. Which is, well, creepy.

Thinking back I remember there being much less of a divide between ‘boys’ stuff’ and girls’ stuff’ than I see today when I look in children’s clothes or toy shops. All girls’ clothes and toys were not pink or purple when I was a child. If being a girl is about worrying about your appearance and weight, wanting to be a princess or ‘famous’ and playing games which involve housework, how do girls who don’t fit this ‘norm’ feel?

They’re not now, unless you happen to pink-purple colour blind. Apparently, your memory of however many years ago, when you obviously spent a lot of time perusing children’s clothing and toy shops to assess their gender diversity, has been untainted by the intervening years?

Can I digress for a moment and ask, since you are obviously the authority on these things Hannah, when Kayleigh asked me this morning ‘Can I please watch The Little Mermaid‘, should I tell her ‘no, you must watch a Pixar film or else you’ll grow up like a girl, little girl’ or should I take my lead from her and let her do the things she wants to do, regardless of what gender stereotype they happen to fit?

I don’t think that liking the colour pink or pretending to be a princess is going to damage young girls.

No. That would be crazy talk.

I do believe that promoting this ‘girlification’ as the only way for a girl to be is going to cause damage.

Yes. Darn those promotions they keep targeting at parents which tell them they _must not under any circumstances buy blue clothing for girls or kitchens for boys. Darn thems all to heck.

Over the next few years I hope to have children of my own. It occurred to me yesterday that it really worries me that any daughter or daughters I might have could end up being negatively influenced by the ‘cult of pink’.

Well, you know what you must do – if your future daughters ask you to buy a Barbie or a doll for them, or take a preference for pink clothing or pretty dresses, or (heaven forbid) watch Bambi you should nip that sucker in the bud.

It is, after all, far more important that your children conform to your view of how they should grow up than it is for them to be happy. That’s actually Sharpe’s First Law of Parenting, didn’t you know?

Of course it’s pretty easy to keep these influences out of your own house but what happens when your daughter starts school? Will that mark the beginning of preoccupation with appearance, weight and narrowing down her choices in life, all because of the marked division between ‘things for boys’ and ‘things for girls’?

What. Would. You. DO?!

Just imagine the horror, if your girls turned out to be girls.

I lie awake at night worrying about it. I do.

Probably simpler to just have boys instead. I mean, us males are simple, right?

I don’t think it’s a case of wanting to stop girls enjoying wearing pink and playing ‘princesses’

Of course not. You just want all the pink toys removed from shop windows so that embarrassing girliness isn’t on display any more. I understand. No, no, it does make sense. Honest.

but really making them aware that there are a whole range of choices for them in life and that being female doesn’t have the narrow definition toy companies and television shows would have them believe.

Wow, that sounds like a GREAT game! I’d love to play that one! After a few rounds of ‘hide and seek’, a bike ride in the park and a verse or two of ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, let’s all gather round the table so Mummy can talk to us about feminism and what it means to be a modern woman in a harsh, cruel world of male dominance!

Or we could have some ice cream. Your way sounds fun, too.

Recently it has come to my attention that Amazon sells magnetic words for children, aimed at helping kids aged four and up with their vocabulary. There are separate versions for girls and boys. A few of the ‘girl’ words: clothes, lipstick, want, pink, makeup, princess, diamond, tiara, party. Compare these to a selection of the ‘boy’ words: monster, racing, moon, helicopter, grass, dogs, forest, swimming, blue. I can’t believe they’ve used ‘want’, for one thing.

And the bloke at Amazon holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy the ‘girls’ one for your girls and the ‘boys’ one for your boys sure is pushy, isn’t he. I mean, what is his problem?!

Oh, I forgot, it’s an online shop.

Hey, perhaps you could buy both!

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Now for the serious point

She goes on to promote a campaign whose remit is to ‘inspire, educate, excite and liberate girls from the negative stereotypes which increasingly saturate the world around them’.

Whatever happened to letting children be children?

Children are far more complicated than the writer seems to believe. Young children are not products of society – they are products of themselves (and, as my Mother likes to say, ‘they bring their love with them’). You don’t have control over what kind of person your daughters will grow up to be – and it’s highly unlikely that they will turn out how you inwardly hope or expect them to. The trick is to accept that they are not an extension of you, and let them do their own things and direct you towards what they want.

My daughter was born just under a year after my cousin, which meant that we had a huge amount of boys clothes handed down to us, and for her first year or so, everybody who didn’t know assumed she was a boy because that’s how she dressed. Despite this, it didn’t take very long to find out that she is obsessively girly. despite my best efforts to get her interested in Scalextric, she likes kittens and ponies and pink fluffy things and Cinderella and Snow White (and also wellies and farms and chickens and Labradors, of course). By the mission statement of this ‘PinkStinks’ campaign, she is a negative stereotype who should be encouraged to break away from her genes.

But she also like The Nightmare Before Christmas, despite it being both too gruesome and too scary for somebody her age and gender (according to stereotypes). She loves Doctor Who, especially the Daleks. She likes Postman Pat, she likes riding bikes, she likes mud.

In short, she’s a human being, with her own tastes and her own will, and you are reducing her to no more than a statistic to be tutted over, saying that just because she likes wearing a pretty dress she’s somehow less than she should be and needs to be ‘inspired’ to ‘liberated’.

Somehow, I think you’ve got that the wrong way round. I think it’s you that needs to be liberated from thinking that a child is some sort of sociological construct, and that you’ll have the slightest bit of control over what kind of person your children will turn out to be. Because you’re in for a rude awakening – and I hope it happens before you’ve made messed up teenagers out of them by forcing them to live with your viewpoint instead of doing what they want.