Dressing Your Child
Mar. 9th, 2006 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegund[This started out as a comment in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cangetmad's journal, but it spiralled out of control so I moved it here.]
The gendering of children's clothing is a big elephant-in-the-corner.
Gender-aware parents, in my experience (yes, that's limited, and yes, "gender-aware parents" is a fairly crude categorisation), like to aim for "gender-neutral" colours and styles. This is relatively unproblematic for boys, but because female=marked, it generally means that girls dressed thus are assumed to be male.0 You're responsible for labelling your girl, in other words, so that the unwary bystander is not confused.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Both the traditional "boy" stuff and the "gender neutral" stuff are most likely to be read as male; only the "girl" stuff is unerringly read as female. The iconography of "boy" stuff includes vehicles, sports, war, fierce animals (plus dinosaurs and monsters), traditionally masculine professions (firefighter, driver of large vehicle, construction worker), rough or transgressive behaviour (the pirate/burglar axis). The iconography of "gender-neutral" stuff overlaps with the "boy" stuff but also includes houses, trees, fruit, toys, school, zoo and farm animals, and not-so-fierce animals like mice and dogs (cats are for girls). The iconography of "girl" stuff (or so I've gathered - and do please tell me what I'm leaving out) includes flowers, baby or toy animals, princesses, fairies, ballerinas, sexual precociousness, emotional instability, untramelled consumerism, and the state of being the property of one's father.1 I also reckon that the clothes themselves are more of a thing in the "girl" space: they follow adult fashion and style, and they have frills and trimmings. Some "boy" clothes have interesting pockets or lift-up-and-see flaps, but that's not the same thing. The message is that "girl" clothes are "decorative" in a way that the rest are not. (Catering to the male gaze from day 1.)
Let's just pause for a second or two to think about the implications of these iconographic distinctions for how we train our children to see themselves in the world.
OK, got that? Good. We move on.
Non-gender-aware parents broadly follow the rules.
Gender-aware parents of boys range over the "boy" and "gender-neutral" spaces, with perhaps an occasional foray into "girl" if they're particularly motivated. I've yet to meet a boy whose parents dressed him in pink frills - and I'm confident that you understand, without my attempting to articulate it in my ongoing sleep-deprived state, why that's so. Most of them, I'm pretty sure, also avoid the "war" end of "boy" space.
Gender-aware parents of girls inevitably inhabit the "girl" space, unless they steadfastly refuse all gifts and hand-me-downs. They are also free to choose "gender-neutral" and "boy" clothes, but only if they're prepared to negotiate people's assumptions that their daughter is male. The only other option is to try to steer a course through "girl" space that avoids the "daddy's little princess" T-shirts and the pink bikinis. (Bikinis. For toddlers. I mean ... gah.) That (plus "gender-neutral") is what I think I'll aim for if I have a daughter. I'm uncomfortable with the outright rejection of things female, for reasons that should be obvious. But as far as I can tell, it's not always easy to find "girl" clothes that aren't emblazoned with the ick. (Oh, look. Dressing a girl is harder work than dressing a boy if you're at all into challenging stereotypes. Colour me gobsmacked.)
[ETA (an aside): Another little kink in the story is that from what I've seen, there tend to be more "girl" clothes for sale than "boy" clothes - or perhaps it's just that they're more prominently and imaginatively displayed. So we have, for girls, a restricted range of messages but a super-abundant supply. Way to channel future women into the roles that consumer society wants them to play.]
But isn't it COMPLETELY INSANE that dressing one's child in gender-appropriate clothes should be this problematic? Isn't it UTTERLY WACKED-OUT that a significant proportion of clothes designed for little girls carry messages that range from embarrassing to nauseating? Isn't it interesting that here as elsewhere, pretty much anyone who thinks about the issues wants to move out of the socially prescribed "female" space and into the "neutral/male" space as quickly as possible, and that females who venture into supposedly "neutral" territory are likely to be interacted with as though they were male?2
There's nothing inherently undesirable about the kittens, flowers, metallic textiles, and various shades of pink and purple that mark clothing out as "girl". Dressing your girl in orange denim dungarees and a white cotton T-shirt with dinosaurs on the sleeves is not inherently more responsible than dressing your boy in a fairisle twinset in heathery shades, stripy tights and a navy A-line knee-length needlecord skirt. And yet the latter is (all but) unthinkable, while the former is (more or less) unremarkable.
The Oyster's wardrobe, predictably, is pretty exclusively "boy" or "gender-neutral". The only "girl" clothes he has are some new socks from H&M: he's worn the plum and the turquoise but not the pale pink yet. (Non-clothing is different: he has several pink/purple/flowery/kitteny plates and cups, and two dolls (which he's just beginning to interact with now), and I'm vaguely on the lookout for a teaset.)
I can't really see myself greatly expanding his collection of "girl" clothes.3 And that, in a way, frustrates me. No, I am not going to moan about how my SON is being DISCRMINATED AGAINST OH EM GEE. But there's certainly a sense in which I do feel restricted by social expectations of his gender. I mean, I happen to like pink and purple, and I think some shades would look good on him. (He hasn't expressed much of a colour preference, FWIW, apart from definitely liking red.) Also,niallm and I are both besotted with him, and if we were into "angel" as a concept, then "daddy's little angel" wouldn't be an entirely inappropriate T-shirt message. Um. Apart from the possession thing, obviously. (Incidentally, aren't angels sexless? How did they become female in the children's clothes market?)
All of which suggests to me that we're probably socialising him in ways that may cause him difficulty later on when he encounters the hard-man stereotypes. Ho hum. You can't win. I am both disconcerted and (oddly) comforted by the thought that his immediate family provides only one component in his socialisation. And in the end, he'll have to navigate his own route through the gender jungle.
0ailbhe's daughter is in the habit of referring to herself as "boy" - as in, "boy get down now", presumably because so many other people do.
1 These last are (as you can appreciate) the ones that really cause me to incandesce.ailbhe recently recounted seeing two sets of vests in Primark: the boys' ones said things like "astronaut", "pirate", "fireman" and so on, while the girls' ones said things like "shopaholic" and "drama queen".
2cangetmad, you still on for starting that feminist baby-clothes business?
3 And isn't it also curious that his wardrobe appears to be ENTIRELY my domain, and notniallm's at all?
cangetmad's journal, but it spiralled out of control so I moved it here.]The gendering of children's clothing is a big elephant-in-the-corner.
Gender-aware parents, in my experience (yes, that's limited, and yes, "gender-aware parents" is a fairly crude categorisation), like to aim for "gender-neutral" colours and styles. This is relatively unproblematic for boys, but because female=marked, it generally means that girls dressed thus are assumed to be male.0 You're responsible for labelling your girl, in other words, so that the unwary bystander is not confused.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Both the traditional "boy" stuff and the "gender neutral" stuff are most likely to be read as male; only the "girl" stuff is unerringly read as female. The iconography of "boy" stuff includes vehicles, sports, war, fierce animals (plus dinosaurs and monsters), traditionally masculine professions (firefighter, driver of large vehicle, construction worker), rough or transgressive behaviour (the pirate/burglar axis). The iconography of "gender-neutral" stuff overlaps with the "boy" stuff but also includes houses, trees, fruit, toys, school, zoo and farm animals, and not-so-fierce animals like mice and dogs (cats are for girls). The iconography of "girl" stuff (or so I've gathered - and do please tell me what I'm leaving out) includes flowers, baby or toy animals, princesses, fairies, ballerinas, sexual precociousness, emotional instability, untramelled consumerism, and the state of being the property of one's father.1 I also reckon that the clothes themselves are more of a thing in the "girl" space: they follow adult fashion and style, and they have frills and trimmings. Some "boy" clothes have interesting pockets or lift-up-and-see flaps, but that's not the same thing. The message is that "girl" clothes are "decorative" in a way that the rest are not. (Catering to the male gaze from day 1.)
Let's just pause for a second or two to think about the implications of these iconographic distinctions for how we train our children to see themselves in the world.
OK, got that? Good. We move on.
Non-gender-aware parents broadly follow the rules.
Gender-aware parents of boys range over the "boy" and "gender-neutral" spaces, with perhaps an occasional foray into "girl" if they're particularly motivated. I've yet to meet a boy whose parents dressed him in pink frills - and I'm confident that you understand, without my attempting to articulate it in my ongoing sleep-deprived state, why that's so. Most of them, I'm pretty sure, also avoid the "war" end of "boy" space.
Gender-aware parents of girls inevitably inhabit the "girl" space, unless they steadfastly refuse all gifts and hand-me-downs. They are also free to choose "gender-neutral" and "boy" clothes, but only if they're prepared to negotiate people's assumptions that their daughter is male. The only other option is to try to steer a course through "girl" space that avoids the "daddy's little princess" T-shirts and the pink bikinis. (Bikinis. For toddlers. I mean ... gah.) That (plus "gender-neutral") is what I think I'll aim for if I have a daughter. I'm uncomfortable with the outright rejection of things female, for reasons that should be obvious. But as far as I can tell, it's not always easy to find "girl" clothes that aren't emblazoned with the ick. (Oh, look. Dressing a girl is harder work than dressing a boy if you're at all into challenging stereotypes. Colour me gobsmacked.)
[ETA (an aside): Another little kink in the story is that from what I've seen, there tend to be more "girl" clothes for sale than "boy" clothes - or perhaps it's just that they're more prominently and imaginatively displayed. So we have, for girls, a restricted range of messages but a super-abundant supply. Way to channel future women into the roles that consumer society wants them to play.]
But isn't it COMPLETELY INSANE that dressing one's child in gender-appropriate clothes should be this problematic? Isn't it UTTERLY WACKED-OUT that a significant proportion of clothes designed for little girls carry messages that range from embarrassing to nauseating? Isn't it interesting that here as elsewhere, pretty much anyone who thinks about the issues wants to move out of the socially prescribed "female" space and into the "neutral/male" space as quickly as possible, and that females who venture into supposedly "neutral" territory are likely to be interacted with as though they were male?2
There's nothing inherently undesirable about the kittens, flowers, metallic textiles, and various shades of pink and purple that mark clothing out as "girl". Dressing your girl in orange denim dungarees and a white cotton T-shirt with dinosaurs on the sleeves is not inherently more responsible than dressing your boy in a fairisle twinset in heathery shades, stripy tights and a navy A-line knee-length needlecord skirt. And yet the latter is (all but) unthinkable, while the former is (more or less) unremarkable.
The Oyster's wardrobe, predictably, is pretty exclusively "boy" or "gender-neutral". The only "girl" clothes he has are some new socks from H&M: he's worn the plum and the turquoise but not the pale pink yet. (Non-clothing is different: he has several pink/purple/flowery/kitteny plates and cups, and two dolls (which he's just beginning to interact with now), and I'm vaguely on the lookout for a teaset.)
I can't really see myself greatly expanding his collection of "girl" clothes.3 And that, in a way, frustrates me. No, I am not going to moan about how my SON is being DISCRMINATED AGAINST OH EM GEE. But there's certainly a sense in which I do feel restricted by social expectations of his gender. I mean, I happen to like pink and purple, and I think some shades would look good on him. (He hasn't expressed much of a colour preference, FWIW, apart from definitely liking red.) Also,
niallm and I are both besotted with him, and if we were into "angel" as a concept, then "daddy's little angel" wouldn't be an entirely inappropriate T-shirt message. Um. Apart from the possession thing, obviously. (Incidentally, aren't angels sexless? How did they become female in the children's clothes market?)All of which suggests to me that we're probably socialising him in ways that may cause him difficulty later on when he encounters the hard-man stereotypes. Ho hum. You can't win. I am both disconcerted and (oddly) comforted by the thought that his immediate family provides only one component in his socialisation. And in the end, he'll have to navigate his own route through the gender jungle.
0
ailbhe's daughter is in the habit of referring to herself as "boy" - as in, "boy get down now", presumably because so many other people do.1 These last are (as you can appreciate) the ones that really cause me to incandesce.
ailbhe recently recounted seeing two sets of vests in Primark: the boys' ones said things like "astronaut", "pirate", "fireman" and so on, while the girls' ones said things like "shopaholic" and "drama queen".2
cangetmad, you still on for starting that feminist baby-clothes business?3 And isn't it also curious that his wardrobe appears to be ENTIRELY my domain, and not
niallm's at all?
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Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 06:29 am (UTC)I was thinking about exactly this problematic yesterday because my brother's offspring is due to arrive some time in July and I'd like to give them some sort of maternity/paternity present. And hey; I've always been know to give smart clothes, so I thought I'd stay with that trend. Not knowing the gender of the future baby, I started thinking about what might be fairly gender neutral, and I realised, much to my horror, that everything I could think of would be labelled "male" unless it was pink and fluffy!
For infant clothes, white is really the only non-gendered colour unless you move into primaries (which I won't be giving... I don't do primaries very well at all!), and white's just rather dull in many ways. Black = not an option; it's a baby, not a corpse. Even if you take sand-colour or brown, it'll be perceived as male, and it's really rather frightening how the male default is still so dominant, even in my own mind.
So I've decided I'm going to buy them a book instead! The clothing seems such a labyrinth that I won't even attempt to negotiate it for the mere sake of a present, and toys of any kind would be a silly gift, since my sister-out-law's mother owns a toy store. A book, preferably slightly subversive in tone and something with pretty pictures in bright colours as well as text that will make me laugh out loud. (I gave Goats Are Good to a friend when him and his wife were expecting... Hillarious book!)
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 09:09 am (UTC)I have actually been known to cry about this, when my daughter and I were dressed IDENTICALLY - matching orange long-sleeved tshirts from H&M, and blue denim jeans. Um, I didn't have a big cloth nappy shaped bum, but you can't have everything. We both had dark leather ankle-boots.
And everyone thought she was a boy. Not one person thought I was her daddy, though. Gah.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:01 am (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:07 am (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 06:35 pm (UTC)I don't remember ever being taken for a boy, but then I always had long hair. I quite liked skirts and dresses, too, once I could choose for myself. I did go through a dangerous obsession with colour co-ordination when I was about eight: I remember one outfit in shades of variously shocking pinks and purples, and another in which everything was either a sort of bluey-leaf-green or pale pink.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:24 pm (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-11 05:23 pm (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:38 am (UTC)She mainly made our small-child clothes herself, because she didn't like what was in the shops. We wore a lot of dungarees and no pink. All five girls.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 11:03 am (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 11:33 am (UTC)But, as I mentioned below, people did still occasionally think I was a boy! Especially when wearing my stylish wine/beige velour top and my jeans. Though yeah, it definitely seems like there was a lot more non-pink, brightly coloured kidwear available in the 70s.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:07 am (UTC)Oh, exactly. My daughter has lots of pairs of cord trousers and jeans. So do I. T-shirts, zip-up jumpers, hoodies, similarly. We really do dress pretty much the same, and yet - she's a boy and I'm her mummy.
Oh, one more thing about girls' clothes, though - they're not just frilly and shiny and bizzarely labelled, they're also more often made from synthetic fibres and potentitally itchy and uncomfortable and environmentally unsound.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:37 am (UTC)I don't like most pink, so I dress Linnea in dresses - not pink ones if I can manage it - to establish that femme is not bad. I do also feel terribly relieved that I won't need to make any decisions about gender assumptions all day.
She has girly shoes now her feet are small enough. Girls' H fittings are narrower than boy's H fittings. *seethe*.
I did once consciously NOT correct someone who thought she was a boy. She was playing on a pink bike in the Early Learning Centre and a girl in a pink dress came up and said "You can't play on that, that's for girls!" so all I said was "Pink isn't just for girls, why don't you play on the blue one over there?" and felt terrible for letting someone think she was a boy. My *first* instinct was to say "It's ok, she IS a girl." Oh, the shame!
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 10:48 am (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 11:02 am (UTC)I have told people outright that they assumed she was a boy because she's not wearing any pink, though.
It's all so *tiring*. Dispiriting. Miserable. Infuriating, which feeds back to tiring.
And oh god what will I do if the tadpole is a boy? How can I raise an equal-opportunities boy? I have no idea how to go about it. I can't just dress him in girls' clothes, because they're almost all so hideous that I won't dress *anyone* in them. Praps I'll buy him a vest that says "shopaholic" or "supermodel".
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 06:43 pm (UTC)Sweet! I dare you! :-)
My little brother used to get mistaken for a girl quite often when he was maybe 3, 4, 5, because my parents weren't organised enough to keep his hair short. As far as I remember, he would've mostly been dressed from the "gender-neutral" range. This makes me think that at least some of the "default boy" thing may have to do with short hair. Which is just as annoying, perhaps, but rather simpler to solve later on...
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:21 pm (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:59 pm (UTC)And, ooh, if I ever do use that line, I'll be sure to let you know.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:34 pm (UTC)And this is where German rules, because it's perfectly acceptable to say "What's its name?" because it's das Baby. I've always wondered whether there's a significant difference in perception of gender in a language where everyone can be referred to as neuter for the first two years of their life.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:56 pm (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 09:57 pm (UTC)Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 11:26 pm (UTC)I loathe and detest all the girly girl clothes that are around, and cannot understand why there isn't a market for nice sensible clothes that come in a variety of colours.
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 06:29 pm (UTC)Clothing is such a minefield!
Re: Going off on a tangent....
Date: 2006-03-10 07:15 pm (UTC)I know someone - a very strange someone, in a 'psychiatric nurses find her more disturbed than patients on locked wards' kind of way - who, even though her daughters are now teenagers, is still remembered by her ex-workmates for being given baby clothes and dyeing them all black.