Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Baby High Heels

This is what I think.

Take a look at this picture:



The picture, admittedly a drawing, is a faithful reproduction of a scene from a hugely popular Swedish TV show for kids from the early 1960s. You can see two children here, the child on the left holding a rabbit, the child on the right looking at the other kid and standing in front of a dog.

The kid on the left is a boy, and the kid on the right is a girl.

You can see how incredibly similarly they are dressed. Both have the same kind of t-shirts, though his is striped and hers is red (not pink!). They wear the same kind of sandals. He wears shorts, and she wears - what do you call them in English? Overalls?

Her hair is a little longer than his. It's certainly not much longer. They have identical-length bangs. Both have straight hair, with no adornments or enhancements of any kind.

You may note, too, that the kids' body language is very similar.

This is what kids looked in Sweden when I myself was a young kid. I remember it well. Wasn't it hard to tell the difference between boys and girls? Oh no, we never had any difficulties with that whatsoever.

In the TV show that the picture refers too, two families meet. They live under rather different circumstances. In one of the families there are three boys, one six- or seven-year-old and a pair of eleven-year-old twins. In the other family there are three girls, one six- or seven-year-old and two older sisters, eleven and twelve.

The thing is that the two older boys and the two older girls become best friends. They do everything together. The girls are kind of tomboyish, and the four of them have all sorts of adventures together. Think "Stand By Me", except that two of the kids were girls instead of boys.



The youngest boy and the youngest girl from the Swedish TV show also became friends, but their personalities were more dissimilar, and they didn't do everything together.

The father of the three boys was a widower. He had a daughter too, a nineteen-year-old girl, Malin. Malin was very much a girl:



Malin did not seem to have a job, and she did not appear to go to any sort of school or college. Instead, she had assumed the role of her father's housewife and her brother's Mom. She cooked, cleaned and took care of the house, and she looked after her brothers. When she had some time for herself, she liked to swim and lie in the sun and look for a nice man. We were shown how Malin fell in love with a guy, and after a while she got married. The next season, Malin and her husband had a little daughter. The thing is that Malin went straight from being the housewife and mother of her father's family to being the wife, housewife and mother of her own family.

In short: In that TV show from the early and mid 1960s, the children were free to be themselves, to be as tomboyish or tender as they pleased. They were never told that they were not sufficiently girlish or not sufficiently boyish. They were not given super-feminine or super-masculine clothes or toys, because that sort of thing just barely existed back then.

But when they grew up their options were limited. Why did nineteen-year-old Malin stay in her father's home and take care of the household and her brothers? She did it because she had to. She did it because her father couldn't do it. And why couldn't he do it? Because he was not expected to. A father wasn't really allowed to be a "housewife" and a "mother" back then. Have you ever wondered why there are so many evil stepmothers in the classic fairy tales? It's because these fairy tales have their roots in a time when a father was not allowed to take care of his children by himself. If his wife died, he had to remarry quickly or leave his children with other other people. Today in Sweden and probably in most of the West, if a father becomes a widower, it is pretty much taken for granted that he will take care of his house and his children himself - and he can most certainly do so if he wants to.

To summarize, today men or women have so many more options than they used to. Men can do "womanly" things and women can do "manly" things. But maybe just because of that, people may feel increasingly scared that traditional gender roles will be erased. To counteract that, many children are given an almost ridiculously "gender-role enhancing" upbringing. Babies are dressed up in pink satin and lace or in black and white romper suits adorned with skulls. And tiny toddlers who haven't even learnt to walk can be made to wear high heels to remind them that they are girls. Because it is more important that they learn to be feminine than that they learn to walk.

A few days ago, there was an article in Time, Newsweek or the New York Times which claimed that the gender gap is windening. Men are becoming more masculine and women more feminine. Men and women are increasingly inhabiting their own separate universes. I don't think that is a good thing. And I think that the hysterical aspirations to be excessively masculine or excessively feminine are things that are bound to have negative repercussions on society.







[img]http://farm1.static.flickr.com/252/455830622_c2fc675794.jpg?v=0[/img]

Ann