Say "Duh!"

I was always a bit tomboy-ish. I don't know how much this had to do with the fact that my mother wanted only boys (poor thing had to try four times to get it right), or the fact that she liked to dress me in trousers and cut ALL my hair off ALL the time. Perhaps it was more of a case of me being the studious kind. I always had my nose in a book. I didn't like dolls so much, but I didn't play football either.

At university, I took all the feminism courses. I was offended if anyone suggested that men and women were fundamentally different. I was planning a big career and a lot of sowing my wild oats and no one was going to tell me what women were supposed to do instead. Umm, and then I met Babes at seventeen and then one day, fifteen years later, I'm a housewife with two kids. And I have absolutely no regrets. I'm still a feminist, it's just that my definition has widened a bit, to include personal choice and silly things like that.

But that was not what I was going to write about. This is: I think I just had another one of my gender-related opinions smashed.

Before I had children, I was full of talk of how I was not going to let their gender influence the way I treated them, and the way they played. I bought Jack dolls as well as blocks, and pink frilly stuff as well as trains. Babes said I was "trying to make him into a girl". I said "I was just not letting his penis dictate what he could do."

Jack didn't really care - he played with the dolls occasionally, loved dressing up as a girl (not so much now), but mostly he played with cars and blocks.

...and now I have a girl. I was still convinced there would not be so much of a difference. I mean, Jack would play with the dolls, he loved pink stuff, chose his own clothes - all so-called "girly" stuff, right?

Wrong.

Seeing Marie play with dolls - she "gets" it. She will talk to them, chide them, feed them a bottle, change their nappies (try to anyway). She just gets it. In a way Jack never did. And she's twenty months old.

So, yesterday, I bought her this:


It's a bag full of things for her dolls, with bibs and toys and plates and spoons and even a potty. And she will know just what to do with it. And for Jack we got a car transporter. The gender stereotyping! The awfulness!

Cute, though, right?

(By the way I am still by no means saying that ALL boys or ALL girls are alike. It's just that, on average, probably more girls might like dolls and more boys might like cars. I feel like I just reinvented the wheel and the whole of the internet is going "Duh!"

I'm also still giving Marie cars to play with, and Jack still gets to be the mother when we play families. Just in case you thought I'd gone all creepy and right-wing fascist on you.)