Princesses, Passports and Priorities: An Open Letter

It's been a while since I had to post on the perils of gender-stereotyping and child-rearing, but I feel obligated to make this letter I recently sent to my school district an open one since this is an issue confronting many parents in many communities.  I don't at all enjoy sending these kinds of letters and, to be frank, I'm disgusted that I have to in 2012. 

We received an email on April 9, 2012 from our school district inviting us to two separate events: a father-daughter dance (for princesses!) and a mother-son challenge (for problem-solvers!).  While both of the events undoubtedly have merits in their own right, and I have learned since that the organizers might allow children of either gender to attend either event, the way they are juxtaposed and the wording on the registration forms makes crystal clear that boys only are to attend the problem-solving event (the form has spaces for "Number of sons" and "Name of adult") while only girls are to attend the Father-Daughter Dance.  While it seems one could bring a parent of either gender to these events, there's not really room for interpretation on which students are allowed to attend each event.  So unless your son wants a corsage and your daughter wants to sign up as a "son", I'm not really buying that these events are actually open to either gender. Everything in the language says otherwise.

As parents who hope to raise strong, confident, independent children, we feel we have enough problems dealing with social and political pressures that replicate gender stereotypes and sex-based discrimination without having to deal with the outright celebration of explicit gender bias in our schools.  This is our family's response to that message.  The original message from the district is below it; I left out the contact info for the program coordinator, as she is the advisor to a student group which organized the event - I want to make clear that my concerns are not intended to personally criticize this educator or her program.   I have since heard from the district and am pleased to report that they are taking these concerns very seriously and using them to reconsider how they might conceive of these events in the future, and how to use them as a teaching moment for the student-organizers involved in this year's planning.  The damage, however, has been done.  Just today my daughter received pink and blue fliers in her mailbox at 4K, inviting girls to dance and boys to be challenged.  The conversation on how to address this is difficult and necessary, and I'm happy to know I'll have a say in it.

I want to preface this post with a big caveat though:  we love our public schools and really have no major problems with our school district or its administrators, which is why I found this message all the more jarring, disturbing and unacceptable. I am not sharing our concerns here to attack the coordinators of this event or the district, but to raise a very important concern about how important it is that we hold ourselves accountable, and to a very high standard, for not reproducing stereotypes and gender discrimination that negatively impact our children and our community.  

To those who would argue that these are "innocent" events and no harm is intended, I'd like to point out that this message comes on the heels of our governor quietly signing away the Equal Pay Act, and a Wisconsin Senator publicly stating that the reason women make less money than men is that "money is more important for men."  Women in Wisconsin make 78 cents for every dollar men make.  Our schools should be doing all they can to help prevent this gap from widening as they prepare our daughters for the workplace.  Instead, the district is promoting "fun" and "harmless" events that seem in clear violation of its own non-discrimination policy, as well as State and Federal anti-discrimination law.

I encourage local parents who feel the same to share their own thoughts with the district administrator, Dr. Tim Culver. And I encourage parents elsewhere to look careful at the materials they receive from their schools and hold them to a high standard.  I hope that sharing the letter my husband and I sent prompts discussion, but more importantly that it encourages more parents to stand up and say that it's not acceptable, even if we have the best of intentions, to send messages to our daughters that they cannot compete intellectually with our sons.  I do not doubt that this message was sent "accidentally" - but that does not mean it was not sent, and the damage has been done.  If we want to change this, we have to start by voicing our concerns.  I hope you will share yours. Here are ours:

 9 April 2012

Dear Sun Prairie Area School District Administrators,

We are writing because we received an announcement from the Sun Prairie School District today inviting us to participate in two events, and we have very serious concerns about these events and the way they are presented to parents and children that we would like to share with you.

Let us say first that we appreciate the efforts of the District to organize fun events that bring the community together, encourage participation of families, and provide affordable activities for students to attend.  We are active members at our neighborhood school and always look forward to participating in these events. We also know that a lot of time and effort goes into planning them, and we are grateful to have such a dedicated and caring staff in our district.

We do not understand, however, why these two specific events are designed and coordinated around gender stereotypes and gender discrimination which seem at odds with the District's policy and platform of inclusive neighborhood schools.  According to the District's non-discrimination policy, which is the first thing we see in our Elementary School Handbook, "No student may be discriminated against in any school programs, activities or in facilities usage because of the student’s sex, color, religion, profession or demonstration of belief or non-belief, race, national origin, ancestry, creed, pregnancy, marital or parental status, homelessness status, sexual orientation or physical, mental, emotional or learning disability. Harassment is a form of discrimination and shall not be tolerated in the district. It is the responsibility of administrators, staff members and all students to ensure that student discrimination or harassment does not occur. (SPASD Policy JB)."  It is unclear to us how these gender-restricted events do not violate this policy.

Our daughter will not be attending the "Father-Daughter Dance" because we do not think this is an appropriate or necessary way to bring parents and children together for a school-related event. If you're going to leave education out of it altogether, why not have a Family Dance where mothers, fathers, sons and daughters could all participate and enjoy a fun and fancy event together? We understand and respect that Disney princesses are very popular, but our family chooses to try to avoid these highly unrealistic and offensive stereotypes and support a nurturing environment where our daughter can grow up to be more than a "princess" whose main objective in life is to marry a handsome prince. We would expect (and even demand) that her school would be the one place we could count on to help us encourage her to have higher aspirations as well. Instead, she is encouraged to "bring a camera."

Even more disturbing, however, is the juxtaposition of this event with the "Mother/Son Challenge," which sounds infinitely more fun, interesting and engaging for kids of any gender. For this event, boys are encouraged to bring their moms (or a "favorite adult") and use their brains to solve puzzles that allow them to complete a passport, win prizes and have fun.  Both our son AND our daughter would love to do this, just as our son, minus the "Disney Princess" elements, would love to attend a family dance. But what kind of message does it send to our kids and our community that while the girls are twirling about and getting their photos taken with the Disney Princesses, boys are completing problems and exploring the high school? By pairing these events together in such a way, you are sending this message. And we do not accept it.

$10 will buy our daughter a corsage, or it can buy our son a passport.   We'll take the passport for both of them, please, and we hope that the District will carefully consider the lasting and dangerous implications of organizing events around dated stereotypes and gender biases.  Our district claims to have a policy that does not discriminate on the basis of gender, but these events not only discriminate on that basis, they actually teach our kids to discriminate on that basis, and solidify tired, outdated stereotypes that have no place at all in our schools, much less our century.

We hope that you will take our concerns seriously, and pass them on to others who may be involved in planning such events.  These stereotypes are damaging enough in themselves, but compounded even further when one considers how many kids in our schools live in single-parent homes or have non-traditional families and are therefore automatically excluded or alienated from such events. We are confident that many other parents share our point of view and would rather have the District promote and organize events for the entire family than events that encourage discrimination and reinforce dangerous and damaging stereotypes.

Yours sincerely,
The Bourenane Family

Dear Parents and Guardians of Boys & Girls in Grades 4K - 5, Reservations are now being taken for the Annual Father-Daughter Dance to be held Saturday,  April 21st, 2012 from 5:30 -7:30 pm.  The "Disney Princesses" will again be at the dance, so make sure you bring your cameras!!  Tickets are  $10.00 in advance which includes one child. $2.00 for each additional child – this includes a raffle ticket, snacks, drinks, & a corsage for each girl.  Information and the RSVP form is available on the district website. PLUS, this year there's a special event for moms and sons, too with the Mother-Son Challenge Day.   This will also be held Saturday, April 21st, but in the morning from 9-11:30 am. Boys in grades 4K – 5 are invited to a day of fun with their mom or favorite adult.  The child/adult team will travel to different parts of Sun Prairie High School solving problems and completing puzzles. With each completed station, the team receives a stamp on their passport and will be entered to win prizes!  Tickets for the Mother-Son Challenge are also $10.00 in advance which includes one child. $2.00 for each additional child – – this includes a raffle ticket, snacks, drinks, & a flag for each team.   Information and the RSVP form is also available on the district website. The link for the Mother-Son Challenge is here . Thank you and we hope you can attend one of these great events!

Why Disney Princesses and Ballerina Dora Are Not Invited to Our Play Dates

An open letter to parents of girls, and the people who buy them things:

Since I can't escape my midwestern upbringing, I'll open with an apology: I'm sorry I hate Disney Princesses and fancy-pants Dora so much. I feel really bad about that, almost guilty, I really do.  I think they're fun and sweet and I love magic and make-believe as much as the next mom. I do.  I like ballet. So I'm sorry if what I'm about to say hurts your feelings, or makes you feel like a bad parent, or gives the impression that I think I'm a better one than you are. Because most definitely I am not.  I'm not writing this to be judgy. But I am sick and tired of having to justify and apologize for my refusal to allow these things into our home, and I think it's time we have a more frank and honest conversation about them if we're ever going to move past this debate. And I think it's time for us to work together and stand up against the marketing machine that makes all of us - parents, daughters and sons - complicit in the princessification of femininity.

So why am I writing this now? It's 2011. Most modern moms I talk to seem to be of the general sentiment that the feminist movement has come, and gone, and is now an offiicially historic marker in the rear-view mirror of childrearing. Our girls, we tell ourselves, can now Be Whatever They Want To Be. They can be anything!  Or, better yet, they can be everything! Doctor, dramatist, darling. Educator, explorer, entrepreneur. Baker, builder, beauty queen. Pirate, plumber, prostitute, parent, princess. The list is infinite. Let them dream. Give them wings (preferably fairy). They are free to become whatever they want!

Whatever they want. Ok.  What do they want, then? And how did they come to want it?  My own four-year-old daughter wants, I learned today, Ballerina Dora merchandise.  Having recently decided (after an in-house "field trip" at her school provided a week of ballet introduction) that she's going to be a ballet teacher when she grows up, she's been talking a lot about ballerinas and doing a lot of adorable twirling and leaping around here lately.  It's super cute. And I haven't discouraged it.  But she's not signed up for dance class (yet) and she doesn't own ballet slippers (although she does have a very sparkly pair of shoes her grandma bought her that make a convenient substitute).  And now she wants Dora, beloved Dora!, to dance into our lives and be a ballerina with her.

Dora used to be The Explorer. She wore a cutely uncoordinated t-shirt-and-shorts outfit and had a boyish bob suitable for climbing trees and searching for clues. She was curious, intelligent, eager. She shouted at us in Spanish (and look what we learned! Ayúdame! Help me! Abre! Open!). Then, in a pointless and unfathomable episode, she became...a princess.  Her hair grew longer.   She got much skinnier. She was begowned and bejeweled and sparkled for all to adore.  She took up ballet. And little girls, most tragically my own, fell even more in love with her.  Sweet, sensible, eager Dora has transformed from caterpillar to butterfly. Butterfly! She is beautiful, she is free, she can fly.

So...what's wrong with that? Beauty. Freedom. Flight. Sounds like everything we say we want to instill in our daughters: Confidence. Opportunity. Capability.  What's wrong with that?  What's so wrong with wanting to be a princess?

Everything.  It's a trap.

The "confidence" that comes with security in her "beauty" is an illusion. Aspiring to be beautiful - or, as is probably more accurately the case for our own young girls - being confident in their beauty (because we constantly tell them how beautiful they are, don't we?) - is the first step to being a princess, or a butterfly.  And the confidence is pretty wonderful, isn't it? Who's the fairest of them all? "I am!" our girls declare, and we can't stop smiling.  But deep down, I think we know that over-fostering this prepubescent confidence could backfire: when they enter locker rooms, without us, and stand in a long line of girls before the mirror, the entire universe of girliness will team up against us, just looking for reasons to undermine that confidence, and they could come out of it, angry, thinking, "You lied to me! I am not beautiful!"

And I'm willing to skip over the more tired and superficial aspects of the issue of beauty-as-everything, which I think we all pretty much have moved beyond - the part about how the beautiful princess needs rescuing by the handsome prince and how living happily ever after means never aging, or doing much of anything.  I think the moms I know are pretty much universally over this crap. They don't want to see the damsels in distress - they want Princess Fiona to come out, kicking ass and embracing her ogrish heart of hearts.  They prefer DreamWorks to classic Disney. It's more modern. Cooler. Realistic.  They tell their daughters that they don't have to give up their voices like Ariel did, that they don't have to just be a maid like Snow White or Cinderella. We tell them that whether or not their prince will come someday, they can still be happy. We tell them beauty comes from the inside, and that includes the brain. But we stop short of telling them not to be beautiful in the conventional sense. We stop short at not buying the hooped skirt, the long gloves, the tiara. The beauty is an illusion, we admit, but it's a fun illusion. A magical illusion. And who are we to deny our girls magic?  What kind of mother doesn't want her daughter to have fun? 

So...the beauty is not really beauty, and doesn't translate to confidence, but we go along with it anyway. Who am I to blow against the wind? Our society has superficial values, but we just have to make the most of it, and put the emphasis on making sure our daughters make the right choices. That they make the right decisions to be strong, empowered girls.

But can we even do that?  This is perhaps the most dangerous part, because I think many parents really fall for this brilliant marketing campaign: the idea that strong, confident girls have the freedom to choose what they want to be. But the brute fact is that this "freedom" is at best illusory and at worst a total scam: the "choice" to want to be a princess or not is not one of many viable options.  It's the default option: princess, rainbow, butterfly, unicorn. Go to Target, the exclusive vendor for the new Ballet Dora series. Walk down the "girl" aisle. And let me know what kind of "choices" you find.  Count how many items in the "girl" section could just as easily be moved to a gender-neutral area. Practically none. They make pink "girl Legos" now. Even books are gendered! 

The flip side of this, of course, is how we train our boys to fear and abhor femininity, but that's a topic worthy of its own discussion. I also have a 6-year-old son. And the "boy" aisle is just as bad - if not worse.  Every toy is a fighting toy. We have two major rules in the toy department at our house: no  Barbie/Disney Princess (and preferably no Disney at all, if we can help it) and no weapons as toys. And the no weapons rule was so much harder to enforce that I had to soften my stance on it when I realized no weapons meant no Legos. But I digress. Where were we...yes. Beauty. Freedom. And Flight.

So the beauty is illusory. The freedom is illusory. And the flight...the spreading of wings and being whatever she wants to be!...is a cruel, insensitive trap.  Why are we trying to dupe our girls into believing in a myth of gender equity and equal opportunity when we know damned well that women do not receive equal pay for equal work in this country? Women do not have equal opportunities to succeed in business or economics. Women do, when it comes down to it, still carry the burden of most domestic work and child-rearing, whether they "choose" to or not. And the glass ceiling, through which we now occasionally get the momentary, misleading and voyeuristic opportunity to peek up a woman's skirt, is still as solid as Disney on Ice.  So tell me: why are we telling our girls they can fly (if they really want to! if they just believe in magic!) instead of giving them the tools they're really going to need to build the wings? When Daedalus taught his son, Icarus, to fly, he gave him a very clear warning:  Fly too close to the sun, he said, and you'll come crashing down.  And here we are, crooning "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine" as our girls strap on the most adorable wings money can buy - made in China of the cheapest possible materials. Whose fault will it be when they come crashing down? Icarus was to blame for not heeding his father's advice. Our girls can rightfully blame us for convincing them they were immortal.  

Many of you are probably thinking I'm exaggerating, that our smart girls know the difference between fantasy and reality and can be princesses today and stock brokers tomorrow without blaming us - or Barbie, or Ballet Princess Dora or whatever. And you're right: all of our girls will grow up and make the adjustments they need to deal with social disparities and body-image issues, and gender roles, etc. They don't have a choice in dealing with all that. But I think it's high time, as parents, that we get honest about the role we really play in all this. Are we really deluding ourselves into setting up our daughters to fail? Are we really so easily manipulated by advertising that we can trick ourselves into doing this?  And how do we stop?

Look at what they continue to give us!  Look at what they've done to Dora!  She comes with a comb now.  She's almost unrecognizably dolled up. And her beauty, if we're going to call it that, has come at a very high cost: she traded in her curiosity for a tiara and some glitter. The most interesting thing about her - that she's The Explorer - has been "upgraded" to princess/ballerina. Not an even exchange, if you ask me. 

One of my sisters asked me why it bothers me so much that Dora "wants to be a ballerina" and I said it should bug all of us, that Dora suddenly would rather be a ballerina than a scientist. What message does this send? Girls can be anything...until they reach a certain age. Then cut out the smarty stuff and buy some eye shadow. But when you put it to the test, Dora isn't "choosing" to be a ballerina. She just comes in the box that way now, already wearing the tutu. We are the ones choosing to give our girls this new "choice."  Ballerina or princess? You pick!

Disney and Nickelodeon and Mattel and all the others continue to present us with these "choices" because we continue to buy it.  And they'll keep producing it as long as we keep paying for it. We are, in actual fact, the guilty party here: we are forcing them to keep producing this drivel through a mindless and self-justifying consumerism.  They're just toys. It's fun. I make up for it by buying tool belts and "boy" Legos. My daughter will grow up strong and confident and beautiful. She can be whatever she wants to be.

Parenting is hard work. Trying to raise kids who have values beyond materialism is a daunting task in a consumer culture.  But as far as I can tell, we have the ultimate authority here because we hold the purse-strings. We can control the market by taking a stronger collective stance on what kind of products we're willing to buy for our children. We need to stand together as parents and (1) speak up to say we don't WANT this kind of merchandise and (2) put our money where our mouths are by not buying it.  I think we can do it. If we do it together. Are you in?  

You can start here, by signing this petition and sharing it with your friends: Tell Toy Companies Our Girls Need More Choices than "Princess". Talk to your kids. Talk to your friends. Take action - with your dollars and your voice.

Dora Ballerina, by Fisher Price/Mattel. Available exclusively at Target!

Don't forget Ariel, who gave up her voice for her man...