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 5 2012, 04:59:49 UTC 5 years ago
May 5 2012, 19:10:48 UTC 5 years ago
When I was looking for a new cellphone a few years back, I settled on a slim, flip-open style in a kind of gray-blue. The sales-rep asked if I'd like a different color.
"Maybe; what do you have?"
"Pink."
"Oh, GOD, no!"
My response was reflexive and unthinking, and the sales rep didn't deserve the blow-back. I actually like pink, have several pink-patterned shirts. But some things don't need to be pink*, especially when it's the only alternative. If there had been five colors, one of which was pink, fine. But to have ONLY gray-blue and pink reeks of sexism.
(*I am less happy with pink when the object is hard plastic, like a cellphone, or a feed-bucket. When I bought a new one recently, there were several colors in the stack, with pink on top. I really didn't care what color, but that pink just looked wrong. I went a couple of buckets down the stack and got a red one.)
I completely agree with you on the saturation of pink in 'girl stuff'. I have a four-year-old great-niece that I sometimes buy clothes for, and it's so hart to find colors other than pink or lavender. And the pictures on the shirts are infuriating -- boys have choices of dinos, or puppies, or trucks, or baseballs, or footballs, or-or-or. Girls have choices of kittens or butterflies or fairies or ballerinas. Grr...
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May 6 2012, 00:44:38 UTC 5 years ago
Working in the kids section at Macy's, I realized that if I ever have a girl, I'll have no choice but to shop in the boy's section. *sighs* When a friend of mine found out she was going to have a girl, she attached bows to some caps and socks she'd already bought for the baby. That's not as bad as another friend, though. While she was pregnant with her son, her mom gave her some varigated yarn with white, navy blue, and raspberry pink and my friend, totally serious, told her mom she wasn't sure if she wanted to make something with it because there was pink on/in the yarn. *headwall* I so wanted to chew her out for being extremely rude to her mother and for making a big deal over a color. What, are you afraid it'll turn the kid gay or something? Or that there's a chance a touch of pink might lead people to think your baby's a girl? GIVE. ME. A. BREAK!
May 6 2012, 01:57:39 UTC 5 years ago
I think that points up how easy it is to become immersed in our culture; unless one is self-reflective (by nature or exposure to 'unpacking' articles and posts), it's easy not to recognize that we're responding to cultural 'programing'.
As a speech therapist, I have a number of Tangle Toys to keep fidgety hands busy while another student is responding. Visually, I like patterns, and the toys come with random colors. I took them all apart, separated the colors, and made patterned combinations.
One boy invariably selects the pastel pink / pastel blue / clear combination. Every single damn time, I have to stop myself from commenting on that selection. Not that I would say something shaming, but even a comment like, "It's refreshing to see a boy who likes pink," might make him self-conscious about it, or give one of the others an excuse for teasing. (Which I would immediately squash, but the damage would be done.)
It's hard to fight the weight of our own indoctrination, even when we know better. For those who don't, I guess we become teachers when the opportunity presents, and bite our tongues when that would be inappropriate.
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May 6 2012, 02:43:41 UTC 5 years ago