Gender Norms Are Dumb

Yesterday Nicholas made his first visit to an American Girl store and had a good time. We didn't go to the mall aiming for the American Girl store, but my parents (and Uncle Patrick!) were visiting this weekend, and there's a long-running inside family joke that led us to stop by on our way out of dinner (it's a long story and not very interesting).

The American Girl store is a store full of dolls, doll accessories, doll clothes, and a "bistro" that includes booster seats for, yep, your doll. In other words, it's coded as a feminine space. Everything is pinkness and aimed at little girls. That also means that it throws the rhythm of the place just a little bit to have a boy walk in.

Nicholas, however, is 2, and so is completely immune for now to the cultural indicators about what he's "supposed" to like and not. Now, he asked for (and got!) fire trucks on the curtains in his new room, and loves airplanes and sports and all sorts of "boy" things. But he doesn't yet know that dolls are for girls. Or rather, that society has decided they are.

So he just plopped down and started playing with two little girls in the store when we got to the play area, and it's clear that playing with dolls is really good for him. He was working on a whole set of skills that he doesn't get much practice with while trying to feed one of the dolls a bottle, get it to sit in a chair, and push it around in a stroller. Now, he was a bit rougher with the dolls than the girls were—he would pick it up by the ponytail, or fling it around by a shirt collar—but overall he had a good sense of what to do (thank you, Alice!) and what he didn't was willing to learn.

And in the meantime I'm standing there watching him thinking that he's learning, and he's having fun. So who cares whether the toys are meant for him or not? (Though I will admit that so much pink in one room is a bit of an eyesore, literally.)

Then, as I started working on this post, I put on the women's World Cup quarterfinal between the US and Brazil.  Nicholas noticed, of course, and said, "playing soccer." Then he wanted to play soccer, so Sarah found a ball and passed it around with him in our "hallway." I'm not going to make an empowerment claim or anything, but he again didn't care, or notice, who was playing. And I guess I hope he never really does notice.