I'm a Feminist

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.