[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] I’m thinking of taking my child to the beach. The active little toddler loves water. The cups and buckets in the house are causing a huge mess, but the Pacific Ocean should be enough to satisfy his needs. So this morning I set out to get him a bathing suit (or, more tactfully, a swim diaper).
As with all in America, the options were seemingly limitless, at first. Again and again our capitalist system promises choice, but does not deliver. Once the question of gender was introduced, my swimsuit choices quickly narrowed. The only gender-neutral option was a white polyester diaper. For a reusable item that may one day hold baby poop, this did not seem like a good idea. I was hoping for a dark green or brown that would last through toddler abuse and multiple washings. Alas, that wasn’t to be. My options boiled down to ruffles, sparkles, and acres of pink or blue swirls. When I asked the clerk for some “gender neutral” options, she kindly pointed out that the pink sparkles were for girls and the blue swirls were for boys – finito, end of discussion.
So, disgustedly, I slapped my credit card on the counter of the baby boutique, and charged another blue item to my account. And no, the choice wouldn’t have been better at the next store or the next. I may abhor shopping, but my few trips into baby land have firmly held up stores’ commitment to the gender divide. If there is something in the gender neutral category – the options narrow to yellow, sometimes a yellowy green. No one looks good in yellow. A world of color out there, and the bottom line is: easily dirtied, sunny, yellow?
There Is No Relief
When my baby was born, I loved the clothes I had inherited from friends. There were lots of one-piece outfits in brown, and green, and tan – colors that suited him wonderfully. But once he got past clothes for babies over three months old, the gender divide rule.”
It’s the same everywhere: a paltry side for boys, with clothing labeling him a “little worker,” a “little sheriff,” or the most offensive, “Daddy’s little wingman.’” And of course you can’t forget the camouflage, cars and sports themes. Then there’s the girls’ side of any store. It looks, as one of my friends says, like a fairy threw up. Glitter, sparkles, sequins and ruffles, in pink and purple, and pink again. If I had a daughter, I’d be mightily offended that my daughter only had “princess” status to aspire to. I’d be looking for something non-offensive in the boys section. Then I’d be back in the same loop of few choices and more indecision.
Blue is not my favorite color. I’m so tired of dark blue, light blue and even powder blue – pants, mind you, or even in leisure suits that make my son look like he crawled off the set of the Sopranos. To the extent that I can, I’ve branched out: orange, green, red. But then my baby often gets mistaken for a girl. Truth is, I don’t really mind. It’s just that I can’t figure out what happened to the varied, gender irrelevant, sturdy kids’ clothing of my youth: rugged overalls, thick cotton tee-shirts, sweaters and white, blue or grey sneakers. When I was pregnant, I imagined that I’d be able to find clothes like this everywhere. But, b’gosh, Osh Kosh has become as gender split as the rest. They sport as many ruffles as the next store. Their website, like all others I’ve encountered, requires you to pick boy or girl before you can even see the clothes. Why there isn’t some gender-neutral category you can choose, I don’t know.
Could Marketing be the Culprit?
The most cynical part of me suspects it’s all about marketing. Should your first child be a boy or a girl, you’ll buy plenty of either pink ruffly stuff or blue police state imitations, and your next child, if of another gender, will not be able to get those hand-me downs. In a consumer-driven economy, you can’t underestimate the capitalist drive.
But I suspect it has more to do with our society’s need to push people into roles. Whether it’s race or socioeconomic or gender, we do it all the time. I can’t step foot anywhere without someone confirming that, indeed, he is a boy – right?
The amber necklace that my son has worn since he first began teething, along with his yellow, orange, or green clothing options, apparently sets him firmly in “could be a girl” range in the minds of many. I recently had a long ranging conversation with another family at the park who kept calling him she. Except for the disconcertion of a different pronoun, I didn’t correct them because it shouldn’t make a difference. I think at the tender age of fourteen months, and for quite a few years to come, gender, shouldn’t matter.
But it must matter to some of the folks around me. Almost every person I encounter in the drugstore, in the park, everywhere, asks me his gender first. I can’t figure out why it’s important. One can say “your baby is ___ (insert adjective here),” but apparently getting the pronoun right is critical to their sizing him up. I just don’t know why.
My husband recounts a childhood filled with mock punches, wrestling matches and other greetings (all from adults) that, as a girl, I never experienced. Fortunately, no one yet has greeted my baby in this way, in my presence at least. But if that is really why they want to know whether he is a boy, maybe I’ll take a cue from J Crew and paint his toe-nails pink.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
