IN MY SHOES: Putrid In Pink?
Time magazine recently profiled twin sisters Abi and Emma Moore, 38, who founded advocacy group, Pinkstinks, to “spark a shift in a popular culture that they say puts girls "into a pretty little box" from birth, offering them toys that emphasize the importance of looking good and being feminine, while the boys are allowed to go exploring and get dirty.”
The Stiletto herself recoils at the rampant consumerism and sexualization of children’s apparel and playthings - it is not uncommon to find mainstream retailers selling thong underwear in the childrens’ department - and preferred playing with her brothers’ toys as a child (last item). But The Stiletto’s (some would say insane) love of shoes was hard-wired into her mitochondrial DNA, and she has yet to come across a girl who also didn’t love shoes from the time she was able to toddle across the floor. For this reason, The Stiletto takes a dim view of trying to force girls into playing with trucks instead of dolls, if that is not their natural inclination.
One woman who would agree with The Stiletto on this point is Jesse Ellison, who describes her upbringing as her parents’ “failed experiment with gender neutrality” in this Newsweek op-ed:
As a toddler, they dressed me in overalls and cut my hair in an androgynous bowl cut. I didn't have Barbies; I had wooden blocks. Even my first name is evidence of their experiment in gender neutrality. You can't imagine how many times I've had to explain, "No, not Jessica, just Jesse. Like a boy."
In 1978, the year I was born, feminists like my mother were embracing the notion that gender roles were entirely rooted in the way that you were raised. In the 1970s, the feminist fringe was giving up bras, shaving, and diets; they were lighting their own cigarettes and opening their own doors. It was the "new feminism," and where the first movement was concerned with legal equality, like the right to vote, these women were focused on de facto equality: asserting that it was nurture, not nature, that made women and men different. To bust out of gender oppression also meant to assert that there was absolutely nothing different about our biological makeup. …
But my parents' little project in gender neutrality (namely, me) was, from the get-go, a total failure. As soon as I could speak, I demanded they replace my overalls with a long, pink, lacy dress. Far from gender-neutral, I was emphatically, defiantly a "girl."
As Ellison puts it, for the new wave of women’s rights advocates, “femininity and feminism were no longer a contradiction.” And yet we worry about whether we are sending out mixed messages to our younger sisters and to society as a whole. Susan Brownmiller warns: "You have to be a babe, in addition to everything else. Looking like a sex object but also claiming the rights of women who are not sex objects - that's tricky." But then, women have outpaced men in educational achievement for nearly a decade and their earnings potential is finally catching up with the resulting skills gap, which has already started to affect what men look for in a marriage partner. Meaning that when men and women consider whether someone is marriage material, the same criteria will apply – if (s)he is a good provider, rather than looks good in a bathing suit.
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