Good Enough Page 9

  On the bright side, things are beginning to change. Producers of toy catalogues have begun mixing things up with their pages, which now depict boys playing with dolls and girls playing with trucks (admittedly, this is still only in Europe). In England, the large toy store Hamleys has recently ended its toy apartheid by scrapping their separate floors for boys and girls and their respective blue and pink signs, and also in England, two women have started the ‘Pinkstinks’ movement (pinkstinks.org.uk), which campaigns aggressively to rid the world of pink only for little girls. Change is in the air.

  In the meantime, I’ve learned to make peace with pink. At the time of writing I’m expecting another daughter, so I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this is pretty much going to be my life for the next decade. I may not like it, but I know there will come a day when my girls will walk the streets looking like teenage hookers and I’ll do anything to have those sugarplum fairies back again.

  Is pink harmful for little girls?

  Q&A with Emily Kane, author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls

  Why are little girls so bloody obsessed with all things pink?

  I would argue that little girls learn from the everyday pressures and feedback around them that they are expected to like pink, that liking it is part of the successful execution of the social role of being a girl. Adults surround them with it, peers reward them for liking it (and/or stigmatise them for not liking it) and it comes to feel appropriate as a result. Just as children pick up the language and gestures of their culture through an active process of watching, listening, acting, reacting, responding to the feedback they receive, they also learn the expectations for their gender.

  Are marketers showing great irresponsibility by pandering to this?

  I think it’s understandable that marketers respond to it, but marketers also help construct it, so it is indeed a chicken and egg situation. If they began to shake up the ‘pinkification’ and offered more variety of colours to both boys and girls, and fewer toys and clothes that were strongly gender marked, the learning process I described above would begin to look different.

  Is there really any harm in allowing your daughters to colour their whole world pink for a while?

  Absolutely! The harm is that we further reinforce the socially constructed belief that boys and girls, and thus men and women as well, are distinctly different categories of people. This gender binary confines everyone, whether they identify as male or female or prefer not to identify in those categories at all. Colours and activities and attributes/styles that differentiate and segregate boys and girls reinforce that binary, which many people understand as biologically determined when in fact it is largely a social construct. This creates a feedback loop that I refer to as the ‘gender trap’ in my book. People are trapped by the assumption of biological determinism, by the social stigma and negative reactions they receive if they deviate from gendered expectations, by the unconscious actions that reproduce typically gendered outcomes, and even by the resigned sense of inevitability some parents feel. (‘Oh well, why bother, she’ll just end up being given pink gifts anyway, there’s no fighting it!’)

  What can parents do?

  Parents alone can’t resolve this tendency, so I’m not suggesting that if parents just stopped letting their daughters colour their worlds pink all would be easily solved. But parents can at least contribute by suggesting other colours, too, by offering a wider range of opportunities and options to their daughters, and equally important, by paying close attention to the range of opportunities offered to their sons as well. We often focus on allowing girls new options without realising that unless we broaden the range of possibilities for boys, too, those girls will grow up responsible for traditionally female domains plus traditionally male ones in a double shift.

  What effect do gender-specific toys such as beauty and domestic items for girls, and trucks and guns for boys have on our children?

  They cultivate very different skills, capacities and interests in a manner that problematically prepares girls for domestic responsibilities and care work and excessive focus on appearance, while it prepares boys for greater action and spatial skill and sense of themselves as subjects acting rather than objects of someone else’s gaze. These differences then reinforce pre-existing structures of occupational sex segregation, division of household labour and care work by gender, and relatedly, reinforce the gendered wage gap, women’s difficulties competing in male-dominated careers, etc (including the link to what social scientists call the motherhood penalty, that makes it difficult for women to combine demanding careers with parenthood while men are not nearly as constrained in that regard).

  What are your top five tips on reducing the amount of pink in our daughters’ worlds?

  1. Don’t ban it completely, as there’s nothing wrong with the colour, but rather with its ubiquitous presence in girls’ lives; try to ensure that a full rainbow of colours surrounds your daughter, pink being just one of many.

  2. Where it feels appropriate, ask friends and relatives who give gifts to please avoid focusing too much on pink (you can’t do this alone, as a lot of the pinking process will happen through things others give to your daughter!).

  3. Try to explain the social pressures that create the expectation of pink as the signature colour for girls, suggesting that it’s a fun colour but that we’d rather not limit our lives to any one colour, especially one that is so arbitrarily assigned on the basis of gender. For more ideas on how to think about those social pressures and their costs, maybe even read my book The Gender Trap!

  4. Try to find some items of clothing, toys and other objects you know your daughter finds exciting or pleasing but that you can get in another colour, so your attempt to surround her with more colours is carried out through items she’ll be happy to have.

  5. This is the hard one! Try to introduce a bit of pink into the lives of boys around you, so that we begin to break down the gender segregation of colours (which won’t work if we only change the palette of girls’ lives – we also have to change the palette for boys).

  I blow a small fortune on children’s clothes

  We meet in a car park in the middle of the day, my friend Lara and I. Camped out in the front seat of my car reading a magazine, I see her out of the corner of my eye roaring up in her silver Mercedes before coming to an abrupt stop in the middle of two car spaces. As always, she steps out all blow-dried blonde mane, tight dress and spiky heels; and as always, I hyperventilate slightly as I reappraise my own look: jeans, ballet flats and ponytail. How the hell does she continue looking like this when she has two small children clutching at her all day? How??

  Smiling broadly, she motions for me to open up my boot, which I do, and she walks over and quickly deposits three large IKEA bags in the back and slams it shut. To anyone else watching, it would seem as though we’re doing a drug deal of epic proportions, but it’s not quite what you’d expect. Lara, a compulsive shopper, is merely donating some of her daughter’s designer baby clothes to my pregnant self. But I’d say with her expensive tastes, the value of the bags’ contents is probably up there with a small waterside apartment. Not that it means anything to her of course; she’s ridiculously wealthy. ‘If there’s anything you don’t want in there, just throw it in the bin, sweets!’ She doesn’t even flinch.

  When I get home, I upturn the bags across my living room floor with reckless abandon and my heart stops beating briefly. Spread out across my unworthy rug are piles and piles of nothing but miniature high-end designer gear for babies 0 to 12 months. Baby Armani and Gucci shoes in an array of classic colours are heaped upon one another like the aftermath of the bargain shoe bin in Best & Less, while Dior, Ralph Lauren and Burberry rompers and dresses curl into one another like tumbleweed. Every piece is immaculate as though Lara’s daughter didn’t so much as poop in them, and it all appears to be ridiculously expensive. Jesus Christ! I think. Designers actually make this shit for babies now? Is t
his what I’m supposed to be dressing my kid in? Does Bonds not cut it anymore? And OH MY GOD, will other parents judge me for dressing my kid in Bonds? I continue staring at the loot, unblinking, not moving until Lee arrives home shortly after. ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ he asks, motioning to the piles of clothes and shoes still lying on the floor, untouched. I give him the backstory, fingering a delicate lace Dior dress in my hand as I speak. ‘Can you believe parents are spending $400 on a pair of booties for their newborn that the baby might wear once or twice when so many children in the world don’t have anything?’ I ask, outraged at the injustice of it all. ‘Yeah, it’s bullshit,’ he agrees, then quickly adds, ‘so let’s just sell this stuff on eBay and put the money aside for our baby’s education.’ Yes, this makes sense, this is Yoda-like, but the thought of having my stash taken away fills me with a panic I cannot articulate.

  I stare at him for a moment and then fling myself like a child on the nearest pile, shouting, ‘NOOOO!’ Inexplicably, regardless of the all the disgust I’m feeling – both with myself and the world in general – I want to keep the clothes for my baby, who will otherwise be crawling the cruel and judgmental Earth in nothing but simple cottons. ‘I’m keeping them!’ I scream. ‘Okay, so it’s not fair that this is happening, but these clothes have already been purchased and given to us so what’s the harm in letting her wear them until she grows out of them and we go back to Bonds?’ I roll around in the clothes like a bogan rolling in their gold coins after a big pokie win. Once she outgrows this stuff, I’ll quickly move her back into more socially just, commie clothing, I tell myself. Ha! Famous last words.

  To my undying shame, once designer threads are hanging in my daughter’s wardrobe, everything else there looks, well, frankly, a little shithouse by comparison. I can’t explain what’s happening to me, but I’m suddenly filled with a desire to add to this designer load. I begin taking my morning coffee in our local playground, to clock what the local mums are dressing their kids in, and as I’d suspected considering the demographic, there’s not a Kmart dress in sight. Babies are dressed in Country Road and Ralph Lauren and the preschoolers are running around complimenting each other on their outfits. ‘Oh this? It’s from Seed,’ I overhear one little girl say to another, who nods her head approvingly. Fuuuuuck! I think to myself. When did kids become so aware of what brands they’re wearing and why is it even important? When I was their age, there was no such thing as brand awareness, designer stores and diffusion lines for children. None of it existed and no one cared.

  But you have to move with the times, right? And what’s the harm in splashing out a little on your lovely baby, your firstborn? I tell myself as I check my bank balance before I bow down on the altar of rampant consumerism. ‘They’ll be investment pieces that I can hand down to my baby’s future siblings,’ I hear myself say to the disinterested teenager working the Country Road counter as I swipe through my credit card to pay for a large bag of crap I’m not even sure my child will need. ‘What’s the harm in adding a little bit of glamour to an infant’s life anyway?’ I mutter as I enter my PayPal details on yet another UK site selling cute and overpriced clothes for little ones. With reflux keeping me up until all hours of the morning, I stay up sourcing wildly inappropriate items for babies such as silk dresses (‘She’ll wear a bib so it will be okay’), cashmere cardigans (‘I’ll take it off her before I allow her to eat’), and a silver sequinned dress that will no doubt make her look like a disco ball (‘She’ll need a dress for party season’). Soon, packages from Monsoon, IKKS, Jacadi and Catimini begin arriving on our doorstep. So much so that even my local postman turns on me. ‘It’s great that you’re doing your bit for the world economy, love,’ he says one day as he hands me yet another soft parcel from an international destination, ‘but one child does not need that much clothing – it’s a waste.’ I can feel his scorn and I feel ashamed but I cannot stop. Even when I run low on cash, I look to cheaper avenues such as eBay and sale sites like Ozsale to get a hit – not unlike a junkie who’ll shoot up speed cut with Ajax when she can no longer afford heroin and times get tough.

  Truth be told, this isn’t my first foray into Designerville. A couple of years before, I viewed this nonsensical world from the other side when I worked on a story and accompanying photo shoot for a women’s magazine on parents addicted to buying designer clothing for their children. In fact, this is when I first met Lara. She freely admitted during our interview that her 18-month-old daughter had more than 300 pairs of shoes, most of them baby Armani. Then she wheeled in a large suitcase and opened it up to reveal a treasure trove of tiny leather shoes. I should have despised her on the spot, but as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t. She was as sweet as sweet can be and we got on like a house on fire. Besides, she wasn’t even the most extravagant of the parents there that day. One dad travelled the world for business and spent most of his free time sourcing high-end designer gear for his son. Fair enough, you think, everyone’s entitled to do what pleases them. But what really killed me was that he only allowed his four-year-old son to wear each said item ONCE. ‘Well I don’t want anyone to think we’re povvo!’ he laughed between shots as I daydreamed about strangling him with the studio telephone cord.

  If he sounds like a dickhead, that’s because he is, but sadly he is not alone – not even close. It seems many of us are afraid of being perceived as ‘povvo’ because we’re all shopping like mad for our kids like we never have before, with the average British three-month-old now laying claim to an average of 56 outfits, and one in eight kids having more than 100 outfits to their name at any one time. These stats fit in quite nicely with research from IBISWorld, which revealed cashed-up Aussie parents spent $1.3 billion on children’s clothing in 2011, a figure that has remained much the same since 2005 despite the economic downturn. My girlfriend Chris, an avid NW reader and mum to a 14-month-old girl, has her own theory on the need to shop till we drop for our kids, pointing the blame squarely at our obsession with celebrity culture. ‘Every time I see Harper [Beckham] in a Jacadi dress or Burberry coat, I can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy that cuts through my heart,’ she tells me when I pry over her latest (exxy) purchase. ‘I mean, why should their kids have a life filled with specially commissioned Hermes bags and private jets and my kids get Kmart wash-n-wear?’ She angrily swallows a chip and stares at passers-by in serious contemplation, the thought that Victoria Beckham is a multi-millionaire a gazillion times over and she isn’t not once crossing her mind.

  Okay, Chris is a bit dramatic, but she certainly echoes a popular sentiment doing the rounds of the Western world. Two in three parents now say that when they are confronted with an image of a popular celebrity and their child in the media, they feel a pressure to provide the same expensive items for their own children. Little Knox chewing on a $40 teether? Boom, they instantly want one. Baby Mason rocking a Juicy Couture hoodie? I’ll take five in various colours! This might help explain a British study which revealed a third of all mothers would spend 100 pounds (approximately A$170) or more on a single item of clothing for their child, even though they know the child will soon grow out of it (the average outfit is worn just 12 times before it is discarded). In comparison, they would only spend a measly 200 pounds (around A$340) a year on clothing for themselves. Their biggest fear? That other parents will judge their parenting skills based on how they dress their children – because clearly nothing says ‘I beat my kid with a wire coat hanger for fun’ quicker than a shopping bag from Target.

  Still, it’s not all doom and gloom from the world of childrenswear because if you’re popping out munchkins around this time, you’ll discover that regardless of the price range, options for dressing your child are now endless. Yep, buoyed by an increasing birth rate and the rise of older, wealthier parents with a higher disposable income, the childrenswear market has skyrocketed in recent years while other clothing sectors (womenswear, menswear) have been as dead as a doornail. Discount online retailers have reported their
sales of baby and childrenswear have doubled in the past year alone (there’s a good chance I may have been responsible for this), while eBay reported a growth of 16 per cent in this sector. In bricks-and-mortar shops, mums and kids can go shopping for outfits at Witchery, Seed, Country Road and Leona Edmiston, while high-end designers such as Stella McCartney, Moschino, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Oscar de la Renta (who sells rompers with mother-of-pearl buttons for US$195 among other things), are hedging their bets on this fledgling market and expanding their ranges. But don’t worry – even if you don’t have the cash flow to buy your little princess a miniature Hermes Kelly or Birkin (it can be arranged), all is not lost. Even large budget chain stores such as Target have designer lines from brands such as Ksubi and Collette Dinnigan at a fraction of the cost of the original label so your child won’t miss out on all the fun of mass marketing and brainwashing – yay!