thoughtfulThere is nothing wrong with you.
Everything I see, everything I read, everything I hear, is geared toward telling you that something is wrong with you. You're too fat. You're too thin. Your skin is terrible. You look too young. You look too old. You're too smart, you're too dumb, you talk too much, you don't talk enough, you're broken, you're flawed, you're bad. And all those things are lies. They are exaggerations. They are designed to pick on the things you feel insecure about, and convince you that you will never be happy unless you force yourself into their standards of perfection.
They will tell you that you are weak; that girls can't deal with spiders or do math or love snakes or run nations or be scientists. They will tell you that you must be indecisive, flighty, more interested in the interests that are chosen for you than the ones that you choose for yourself. They will tell you that you have to change yourself to suit them, and then they will keep moving the goalposts, so that you're never done changing, and you're never allowed to be you. And they are wrong. They are so, so wrong, and you are better than the lies they tell you.
If you are a girl, you are a girl. Period, finish, end statement. It doesn't matter what you look like or what you enjoy doing. It doesn't matter what your assigned birth sex is or was. It doesn't matter who or what or why you love. All that matters is that you love, and that you accept that you are you, and you are awesome.
It's okay if you love pink. Some girls genuinely do. I genuinely do. Once, we would all have been viewed as cross-dressing and weird for liking pink, which was a male color. Times change. If you want to own your own pinkness, do, and don't let anyone tell you that makes you less of a feminist.
It's okay if you hate pink. You're not denying your gender or letting down the side, or anything else like that. You're a person, and there are a lot of colors out there to fall in love with. I recommend orange, green, and anything that sears your retinas.
Frills and lace and high heels and makeup are all fine. So are denim and combat boots and tattoos. So is everything between those extremes.
Collect dolls or knives or books or interesting rocks. Watch horror movies or romances or cartoons. Run races; go to spas. Eat cake or lettuce. Buy yourself a toy light saber and make your own wooooom noises while you wave it around; build a cardboard castle and chuck plush mushrooms at your would-be rescuers. Live your life, the way you want to live it, and understand that no one can kick you out of "the girl club" for doing it wrong, because you're not.
You're doing it exactly right, and I love you for that.
Corn maze love,
Me.
May 4 2012, 16:09:33 UTC 5 years ago
I will admit that there's better female role models in today's media, if you look for them. This is a friend's Facebook status from yesterday: "The girls this afternoon, watching Dr. Who with me while I'm sewing. Gray: "Next time we play, I'm gonna be River." Evelyn: "This one, or the Firefly one?" They've got it lucky. I always got stuck playing April O'Neil from Ninja Turtles. She was always the one getting tied up and had to be rescued. Lol, my "badass" character I always wanted to play wasn't even a girl, and not many of my friends wanted to play Indiana Jones with a female Indy. So when they're slaying reavers and riding back to Serenity on their My Little Ponies, it makes me smile."
May 5 2012, 05:23:00 UTC 5 years ago Edited: May 5 2012, 06:10:16 UTC
I do want to comment on a bit of nuance there, though. I'm a member of a Lego club, so I've heard a bit about this, and also paid a fair bit of attention to what's actually in those pink Lego boxes.
Lego's done some excessively-gendered "girl" sets in the past that were pretty clearly "bad" -- they had lots of special-purpose parts that were only useful for the "girly" purposes, they didn't have many of the general-purpose parts (which, admittedly, was a problem with the sets in general for a while), the figures weren't compatible, and so on.
This time, in many ways, they got it
about right as they could given the context.Edit: After readingAnd the context was that they found that, by and large, parents were treating the general Lego sets as "only for boys" and were not buying them for girls. Basic Lego hasn't changed (much), but apparently the average toy-buying public has.
So, what does Lego do with this? Keep making "non-gendered" toys that only get bought for boys? That doesn't seem like the right answer at all.
What they are doing is making what are pretty much standard Lego sets but in pink and purple and green and light blue, and putting them in pink boxes, and putting them in sets that ostensibly build somewhat "girly" sorts of things. But inside those boxes are lots basic bricks that aside from the colors are just like the ones in the other sets and just as generally useful, and the thing on the cover of the box (whether ice cream store or fire station) has very little to do with what anyone is going to be doing with the bricks in a month. It's like a disguise to get perfectly good Legos past sexist toy-buyers into the hands of girls who can then easily do completely non-gendered things with them.
The thing that really drove this home for me was looking at some of the "basic bricks" boxes in Target yesterday. There's a blue box, and a pink one. They're almost exactly the same bricks inside. They don't actually say "for boys" or "for girls" on them as such; the pink one is simply labeled Pink Brick Box. That's very different from last time they did something like this.
And the other thing that will happen, at least some? Kids who really like Legos are going to look at the sets that are ostensibly for the other gender and say, "Hey, I want more colors! Maybe I can buy this set from the other side of the aisle too." Yes, even the boys; I'm pretty sure I would have, as a kid.
(Incidentally, the one difference in some of the "pink" sets -- but not the "Pink Brick Box", interestingly -- is that they've changed the minifigures. My understanding is that this was a direct response to focus groups with actual girls, who didn't like the fact that the standard ones are really very stylized. So Lego made some new ones, which are ... well, still cartoony, but rather less stylized and iconic. And they are the same size as the old ones and can share hair and headgear and things with them, so they mix reasonably well rather than resulting in incompatible sets.)
Now, I'm not saying that all this pinkwashing is non-problematic, at all. The fact that people look at today's Lego sets -- many of which are no different in gender presentation than the ones contemporary to that advertisement (and, in fact, the non-pink basic "Brick Box" is almost exactly the sets advertised there) and think of them as "only for boys" is a big problem indeed. And the fact that all of the pink boxes that are "themed" have sort of female-gendered themes is a bit problematic, too; I hope that broadens once they establish that it's "okay" to buy these for girls. But, given that the context is what it is, I'd rather have Lego making the "pink" sets than not.
And, bringing this back to the initial post: I'm really glad that some girls whose parents would never have bought them the "normal" Legos will get some of these, and make spaceships and ninjas out of them.