Columns

Girl Power

By
Glenna Heckler-Todt

Is it just me, or do you ever feel like you have to choose your words carefully or you could be dooming your daughter to grow up thinking that girls have to act a certain way to be accepted? I’m for women’s rights, and I believe that a woman can do anything a man can do. I make a conscious effort to let my girls know that they shouldn’t take a backseat to any boy. Then they turn around and floor me with statements like, “that’s a boy toy” or “I’m a girl, so I’m the nurse”. So I begin to think, “Am I unconsciously teaching them that they can only do certain things or act certain ways because they are girls?”

When talking about gender bias, it’s not uncommon to hear women say that when they were growing up they were always told to “be nice” and “act like a lady”. I hear these statements echo through my brain every time I’m at the library and Katy takes a block from someone and I say, “be nice.” Then I back track and say, “No, be polite,” and I think to myself, “is that okay? Will she grow up and go on a talk show in a froofy hot pink dress and say, ‘I grew up thinking that I had to be polite because I was a girl.’” Or when my daughter Madeleine sits spread eagle in a dress and I tell her to close her legs, am I inadvertently sending her the message that she should act like a lady? Where is the line between teaching your daughter politeness and good manners (the basics that every child should be taught) and unintentionally teaching her gender bias?

My first failure was allowing Barbies into my house. That bubble headed, big boobed figurine portrays a body biologically unattainable by the majority of women. My girls love Barbies! When I play Barbies (as I’m often begged to do), I have to refrain myself from making highly inappropriate comments like “You know, Barbie’s had implants” or “If Barbie can be a doctor, anyone can.”

Parents of boys have it easier as far as self-esteem and self-image are concerned. I’ve never seen a boy look at a male model on the cover of a magazine and say something as self-defeating as “I’m ugly because I don’t look like that.” But then again, boys aren’t marketed toys like Barbie that undermine their self-esteem. There’s nothing demeaning about a Tonka truck or a Thomas the Tank Engine. I could easily say, “ban the Barbies,” but that’s only a small part of the larger world that works against our girls.

The thing that galls me even more than the Barbies are the television shows that purport themselves to be girl friendly and depict girls doing things that traditionally boys have done but also subtly send a contrary message. One show in particular comes to mind: the Disney Channel animated show Kim Possible Kim Possible. Kim Possible is a teenage James Bond. One minute she’s in geometry class and the next she’s saving the world from an evil genius. While it is good to see her use her brains to solve a crisis, and when needed just kick butt, she also has a micro-mini waist and far from teenage bust line, which makes me wonder if teenage boys do the animation for some of these shows. On one hand, Kim Possible is a heroine in a role that traditionally would have been a boy role, but on the other, the show is sending a more subtle message that you can kick butt and save the world as long as you look like Heidi Klum while you do it.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Heidi Klum or being feminine; I’m saying that there is a fine balance between feeling okay about wearing a dress or even a bikini and also seeing that it’s okay to play baseball, be a math whiz, and dream of taking over the world without being demeaned because you like or want to do any of those things. That it’s okay to be a size sixteen and love your body as much as it’s not okay to be a size six and think you’re fat. That it’s okay to want to paint your nails and want to do a lube job on your car. I guess ultimately what I want is to raise two girls who when faced with a jerk that says, “You can’t do that because you’re a woman,” will stand up and do whatever it is that jerk told them they couldn’t do, and not only do it, but do it twice as well as the jerk who challenged them.

It sounds like a tall order I’m setting up for them, and sometimes I feel like I’m doing as much damage as the media. What I really want them to know is that I support them in whatever they do, and I believe they have the ability to do whatever they set their minds to. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter as much what I think as much as it matters what their dad thinks. Because like it or not, a lot of us form our self-image by what the man in our life thinks of us. I’m just glad that my husband feels as passionately about gender bias as I do. But I’m also a bit skeptical about his motives. He’s a man living with three women who goes to work and works with twenty women. Perhaps he doesn’t feel as strongly about gender bias as he does about self-preservation, or maybe it’s just that he’s played too much Barbie.