Monday, September 1, 2014

The Irony is, They Aren't Teaching Girls Equality

They're giving them a complex about it. My daughter (she's 5) sang this part of a song this weekend for the first time "boys can *insert whatever action* and girls can too!" So she'll skip along and sing "boys can skip and girls can too!" or "boys can jump and girls can too!" etc. I asked her where she learned this song and she said it was at school last year (SK, she starts grade 1 tomorrow, which seems insane but that's for another topic). Now, on the face of it, this seems like a great message to be sending little girls. And my initial though actually was in this vein "oh, cool, they start early with the equality now, that's good." Something to that effect. I mean, a main focus of my parenting style is to avoid limiting her; encourage her interests and objects of curiosity- never repress them.

Not long after this though, my (fuckin unstoppable and often annoying) need to question goddamn fucking everything woke up from its nap and started the process. It's tentative conclusion? That this might be doing less teaching about equality and more introducing the idea of gender inequality, leading to an immediate (and gender wide) inferiority complex. The central question here then, if my goal is to find out if I am on the right track or not, is simply is there an inherent, ingrained idea of gender inequality amongst young children which necessitates this kind of teaching, or does the post feminism practise of teaching equality from a young age actually just introduce the idea of inequality in them and do the opposite of what it tries to?

What do you think?