Toddlers as Live Barbies

06.02.2010

TLC has become my drug. It’s disgusting, foul, wrong on so many levels, and yet, I can’t stop watching it lately. Is there a Reality Show Anonymous group meeting somewhere? I need to join.

The latest disgusting show that I’ve sat through is called Toddlers & Tiaras. Just when I thought that Jon and Kate Plus Eight was rock bottom for the TV station…nope, I was proven wrong. In fact, it’s not just the show. It’s the fact that people do this to their little girls. Look at this picture:

How is this normal? If you’re going to put your kid in a pageant, why does she have to be a Barbie doll? Can’t there be a pageant about how fast a child can run? Or how about whether or not the kid knows her ABCs? I don’t understand the fascination with pageants. I sat through ONE (too many) Miss America pageants in my life – back in the 1980s, I think. It was painful not just because the contestants wouldn’t stop fake smiling or that they couldn’t put a sentence together, but I sat watching them feeling like shit because I didn’t have the kind of body they were strutting on stage.

Just look at these photos:

This isn't cute! Cute is a little girl in pigtails with jeans, Sketchers, and a cute T-shirt with, like, Hello Kitty on it. Cute is a little girl in a polka dotted dress. Cute is not a little girl with the face of a 25 year-old.

And if you watch the show, many of these girls are being taught that they are so special that they are to be waited on hand and foot and that every whim and desire is to be catered to because they are beautiful. Little girls as young as 2 are demanding and throwing temper tantrums because they don’t like something. And not your typical tantrum that 2 year-olds throw. It’s teenaged-level tantrums at the age of 2! It’s gross. One girl insisted on having a stage name that, OK, I get it. Many performers have stage names, but the way this girl was talking about her stage name vs. who she is in “real life,” kept me thinking about the fact that I think she actually had a multiple personality disorder. And if not that, then there was just something off about her. I don’t care what anybody says, sometimes you can just tell.

I know that I’m going to be up crap creek if I ever have a little girl who is a girly-girl. I will have great difficulty relating to her because I’ve always been a tomboy, getting my hands dirty and climbing trees. (Although I always made sure to have the right accessories with me.) Despite being overweight, I was into sports and am way too competitive – much to Rob’s dismay at times. I hate(d) shopping and it wasn’t until college that I discovered make-up. But even to this day I would rather sleep in than get up 30 minutes early to make-up my face.

But I AM open enough that if I did have a girly-girl, that I would do what I could to accept that and support that, but hell if I put her in a pageant. That might make me wrong but I really do think that pageants teach girls all the wrong things. Many of the moms and grandmoms on the show claim that pageants give their (grand)daughters confidence and that’s the reason they put them in. Well, I hate to break it to you…but there are plenty of other ways for girls to gain confidence and NOT be paraded around like pieces of meat from the time they're infants.[1]

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[1] Pictures from Google Images, running a search for Toddlers & Tiaras.

Your Name, My Name, Baby Name, What Name?

03.30.2010

I was watching yet another A Baby Story on TLC (I really don’t watch it that often, I swear) and the couple was arguing about whether or not to include the wife’s maiden name on the baby’s birth certificate. The mother wanted it and her husband did not. He was bitter that she didn’t change her last name to his and wanted the baby to only have his last name. His wife was saying that since she’s the one who went through pregnancy and a painful delivery that it’s only fair her maiden name get included on the birth certificate. Though I didn’t agree with the way the wife treated her husband overall, and her lawyer-by-trade attitude was a little off-putting, I had to agree with her. Her husband’s last name would be the one used for their child, it’s just the maiden name became a kind of middle name.

This situation made me think of how fairly early on in our relationship Rob and I talked about the idea of marriage and whether or not I would change my name. I told him that I would not and a big argument ensued. This is one of the touchiest subjects, I think, between couples. That is, of course, if the woman doesn’t want to change her last name.

When Rob and I had this conversation, I had several friends already married and they all changed their last names to their husbands, which I don’t have a problem with. I’m not one of those feminists who insists everyone convert to her beliefs. I think we all have a different attachment to our names and I’m certainly not going to judge. I think in my case, I come from a household of only women, my mom kept her maiden name and gave me hers instead of my deadbeat dad’s and if I had any brothers, maybe I wouldn’t mind changing my name because society expects a family’s name to travel down paternally, but my family name dies with me and my sister.

I’ve been reprimanded for separating myself this way from Rob and our (future) children. They will all have the same last name and I’ll have a different one and, somehow, I feel like this alludes to the fact that I will somehow not be seen as their mother. Well, if someone chooses to view the situation as such, that’s his/her prerogative. I give birth to a child, that child is mine regardless of what my name is.

If you were to ask any man if he’d be willing to change his last name to his wife’s, most men would answer “No way.” If you prod further and ask why, the reason would be something along the lines of “It’s my name. It’s who I am.” What completely perplexes me is how it’s so easy to dismiss that very same logic when a woman gives that same reason. Men have an innate feeling to “conquer” and when a woman changes her name, there’s a deep-rooted feeling of “I won. You are mine” that gets satisfied. This is understandable and it’s hard wired from probably caveman days. But we’re not cavemen and cavewomen anymore. If a woman should choose to keep her name, so be it. It’s not a matter of winning or losing. Those of us who choose to not change our names are attached to who we are as that person; the identity that we’ve associated with that name. Other than maybe giving up a sense of freedom, what exactly does a man give up physically when wed? A woman is expected to give up her name and assume her husband’s identity [in formal invitations only the man’s name is used (e.g., Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so)], and because of biology, a woman gives up her body while pregnant, her energy, her stamina, deals with pain for many hours during pregnancy and birth, faces the issues of staying-at-home or going back to work (depending on what the family unit can afford). I KNOW that men have their concerns and worries but why is it so difficult to accept that there’s a little something that belongs to just the woman that she might want to keep all for herself cause she does end up giving up so much more of herself than a man EVER will?

Society's Standards: Is There a Magic Number?

03.16.2010

I was on the phone today with a friend and after spending hours discussing our mid-term, we started to talk a little about the expectations that society has. She has a 4-year old little boy that she didn’t plan on having, but nonetheless, she is trying her best to do what she can to raise him properly (she and her boyfriend, that is). She was expressing to me how many people have a rough time accepting that she was fairly young having had her son and didn’t marry the boy’s father.

This got me thinking to my own life and how when Rob and I started dating, after about 2 years people started looking at us strangely because we weren’t taking any steps to getting married and starting a family. When I look back on my mid-20s when Rob and I met, I can’t fathom getting married a few years after we met and then starting a family. If that works for others, fine, but that was so not my life. I had difficulty accepting some of my friends’ weddings because I was on a different path and I found it hard to believe that, at 22, these women had something figured out that I didn't. (Arrogant, I know.) When you agree to marry someone, you’re (hopefully) only going to do this once and I was in absolutely no rush to jump into that. You have your 20s once; you have the rest of your life to live with just one other person and I had difficulty comprehending that someone, at 22, would want to give that up.

So why do we try to convince individuals to live their lives by the standards of “everyone else”? Our society tells us from an early age that we can do anything we want and, yet, somehow that magically seems to stop at about age 25 or 26. At that point, if you’re not married, you better be on the fast track, so that by the time you’re 30 you can have your first child. And somewhere in between meeting your partner and 30, you need to buy the “adult” car, with enough room for the little ones, and soon thereafter, buy your first house with the latest furnishings including a dog.

I don’t necessarily begrudge anyone for wanting these things and getting them, I just don’t understand why people look down on those like me who take a different path. Women used to get married at about age 13 and then would have kids right away. Any woman who wasn't married by the time she was 20, would be considered a spinster and often outcast. But the times, of course, have changed and a girl who has a child at 13 or 14 is considered to be too young. So what’s the "magic age"? It’s as if a woman has to be 25, married with the perfect husband (never mind if she’s gay), and with the perfect job that will suit her just fine until she has children, which she should start having about a year after marriage. Is this what our society strives for and should I have altered my fundamental beliefs to fit that mold because, at 35, I fit none of that (except for the perfect husband, maybe)? I feel like you get penalized if you don’t follow society’s path but then, if you do, you still get penalized because you may have wanted to do other things but didn't so as to meet these standards. (I'm, of course, talking about those people who felt like they had to follow the path of least resistance...I'm not talking about those who genuinely wanted to get married and have kids young.)