I’m a feminist. I’ve never said it or wrote it outright but certainly my beliefs for as long as I can remember have been in support of equality for women in all areas of life. It has always been a belief I knew I had but it has never been one that spent a lot of time thinking about. That changed when my daughter was born.
Having a daughter has completely opened my mind further to
the inequality that exists in even the littlest parts of our daily life and
that just makes me angry. We think of
inequality and we think of feminism and some people think of larger social
issues like equal wages or women’s fight for the right to vote in the early
1900s. What I didn’t think about until I
had a daughter was the fact that dress up clothes for boys are police officers,
fire fighters & doctors, while dress up clothes for girls are princesses
& ballerinas.
Can someone tell me why there are “Legos for Girls”? It’s legos for Christ sake! For all these years have we been playing with
boy legos and didn’t know it? Holy shit,
how did women like my wife grow up to be functional women while playing with
boy legos? My daughter is too young for legos but she plays with duplo blocks
and likes to make robots. Everything she
builds she says is a robot. According to
society I need to correct this immediately and help her build kitchens and
kittens with her duplo blocks.
Which brings me to another thing, why are robots for
boys? Why are robots, cars & trains
a boy thing? My daughter loves cars,
trains & robots and as long as she does I’ll continue to nurture that. Children don’t know boy thing or girl thing…we’ve
done that to them. Adults have decided
that a little girl shouldn’t play with a train and a little boy shouldn’t make
breakfast in a play kitchen.
Buzzfeed had an article a while back about 21 pointlessly
gendered products (found here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/pointlessly-gendered-products#.mlKq6zGApJ)
and honestly that list should annoy the shit out of you, I know it annoys the
shit out of me. They sell girl
microscopes…GIRL MICROSCOPES! I mean
what the absolute fuck does that even mean?
And as you scroll down the list you can see just how insane we are as a
people and how far we haven’t come since women gained the right to vote nearly 100
years ago.
I’m going to ensure that my little girl grows up knowing
that she can do anything, that “like a girl” is not a put down and that she can
play with any type of legos she wants.
