Lauca really couldn’t give a fuck. She likes pretty dresses, she likes new clothes, but that’s about it. She doesn’t care how she looks, she doesn’t care if her clothes don’t fit, her skirt is falling apart, and her hair is unbrushed and full of food. She’s not yet seven years old so I shouldn’t care either, but I do. Because I am not like her, I give plenty of fucks when we’re out in public.
Even if I can put my own issues aside I seem to be worrying about Lauca’s social life. Lauca’s best friend has developed a precocious interest in ‘teenage girl culture’. Her friendship with this best friend is increasingly under strain. The best friend has the neatest hair in the world. This friendship of theirs, which has been for almost half their life might not be forever and that’s ok, but I wonder if it is a vision into my daughter’s near future. I am torn between celebrating Lauca’s innocence and apparent immunity to the more suffocating features of ‘girl culture’, and worrying about her being rejected soon by school friends for not being sufficiently aware of ‘girl culture’. Mostly I’m all up in the celebration stuff but I won’t lie, there is a bit of me disturbed by all that ‘couldn’t give a fuck-ness’, too.
So, you can file all of this under Not Terribly Brave Or Feminist Parenting.
Aaaanyway, the excerpt below is from an excellent piece about ‘girl culture’ and the incredible emphasis on appearance that we teach girls, from here in the Huffington Post:
By interacting in these ways, girls are being nice to one another. They’re complimenting each other. They are telling each other something important about the world and their place in it. By the time girls are on Facebook they’d have to be living in the outer reaches of upper Mongolia not to know how important it is to be beautiful in our culture. They want their friends to be happy and succeed in that endeavor. What are the roots of self esteem in this equation? Primarily the way they look. And that’s because it’s what our culture tells them…
.. Early adolescence is particularly stressful on adolescent girls’ friendships and peer relations, and often means a marked increase in indirect relational aggression. (Mean girls… ) Relational aggression is both more common in girls and more distressful to them. It includes behaviors such as spreading rumors or threatening withdrawal of friendship. It starts happening as girls negotiate power relations and, this is really important, affirm or resist conventional constructions of femininity. That when photographs and their comments come in to play and have more weight than might otherwise be ascribed to them. The photos and comments have power to define girls. Even girls who do not fit the mold of “traditionally” popular, beautiful and thin girl, if they are well-liked, are supported in this way – through compliments that focus almost entirely on looks, with smatterings of “You’re so sweet!” and “You’re so nice!” The opposite is also true. That’s why cyberbullying can so quickly escalate to cause real harm.
And then there’s this one, too, on the horror of seeing body image issues emerge in your young daughter, from here on Rachel Simmons.
The sun has set and we’re putting another day to rest. In the confusion of this typical weeknight, I glance up from the floor at my seven year old daughter, standing on the step stool, completely undressed, brushing her teeth. I don’t like the way she is looking at herself in the mirror. I don’t like the way she pokes at her belly and frowns at her profile. I watch her for another minute and step in.
“What’s up, girl?” I ask. “I’m fat.” she responds without hesitation. I’m instantly weak. She continues, “My stomach jiggles when I run. I want to be skinny. I want my stomach to go flat down.” I am silent. I have read the books, the blogs, the research. I have aced gender studies, mass media, society and culture courses in college. I have given advice to other mothers. I run workshops and programming for middle school girls. I have traveled across the world to empower women and children in poverty. I am over qualified to handle this comment. But in reality, my heart just breaks instead. I am mush. Not my girl.
As a former girl whose main criteria for clothing was physical comfort and mobility (though I did enjoy playing dress-up in my babysitters’ prom dresses, etc.), I just wanted to say that at age thirty I’m not a whole lot worse for the social wear. I did get some harassment from peers (including my little sister, ironically enough) for not caring “enough” about my appearance. And it sucked. And I went through some borderline disordered eating spells. I won’t gloss over that. But I found my way to a personal style that balances “feminine” and “masculine” clothes. I’ve never physically enjoyed the sensation of make-up so don’t wear it, but enjoy a bit of jewelry. Shower daily, but shave rarely. Wear a bit of perfume ’cause my girlfriend enjoys the scents and has sold me on the pleasure of them.
It helps, I know, that my family home-educated so I didn’t have peer culture in school to deal with. And now I move in a lot of queer circles where gender and appearance isn’t policed on such a personal level as I gather it can be among straight women. But I do think there are pockets of resistance out there, and having a childhood relatively free of gender/appearance policing really helped me build immunity toward the culture at large and its poisonous messages.
Go Luaca!
In my experience, the social cost of not conforming to girl culture as a kid is outweighed by the benefits. The girls at my middle school were particularly nasty, and the school so small that there was only one clique, and even the least popular girls were busy trying to be accepted by the most popular girls. Except for me. The popular girls were mean; whey would I want to be their friends?
Sometimes I had a friend or two in the grade above or below me. Sometimes I spent recess in the library studying or reading a book. I did have one consistent friend throughout, a best friend, and a boy at that. That helped, but he was also playing the popularity game and wouldn’t speak to me when we were at school.
I was not motivated to be girly. I never got into make up. I never shaved my legs. I wasn’t obsessed with my figure or my clothes. When I got to high school, it was a much bigger school, and I fell in with the click that considered themselves non-conformist, not interested in the mainstream high school culture. In this group I felt at home, and free to be as girly or not girly as I wanted.
I’ve never had an eating disorder. I’ve never hated my body. Of course I had moments of ‘I wish my body was a little more this or that’ as a teenager, but I got over it; it was not a big deal. I have about as healthy a relationship with food and my body as one can reasonably expect in our culture.
I know it’s not the only reason I turned out this way. My parents were awesome and feminist and more than a little non-conformist themselves. I just mean to say that yes, the social costs of not buying into ‘girl culture’ in those difficult middle school years were well worth it in the long run.
My experience is a lot like Heather’s. I really didn’t enjoy the “girly” stuff, nor did I want to worry about makeup at 9 years old, so I drifted away from some friends in primary school and found new ones.
At high school, my group were, yes, the nerds or outcasts. But there were about 10 -15 of us so we weren’t that bullied that much & at least we had interesting conversations at lunch time, not just about boys/makeup/diets. I think the support of my feminist Mum was important in the later years of high school, as was knowing my best friend’s Mum was a feminist too.
As an adult, I pick when/why I want to dress up all feminine – and I often don’t.
I think let Lauca decide whether the friendship is important enough to her to want to conform, or whether she’s ready to find new friends. In my experience, there’s usually at least a few other girls who can’t give a fuck, and they’re often fun to talk to /play with.
Hmm, (sorry I can’t edit) but the difference between my experience & Heather’s was that I went to a high school with lots & lots of kids, drawn from all other the place geographically. The sheer numbers meant I could find my people more easily. I did use the library quite a bit in my (smaller, local) primary school ‘tho.
I was Lauca, oh, I was SO Lauca. Still am a lot like that, if I’m honest. I tend to keep my hair short these days, because the bird’s nest look does attract some odd looks and isn’t really that comfortable. I like buying new clothes and I like getting dressed up occasionally, but I seem devoid of any “female” gene which makes me care about my appearance on a day to day level.
I did find this isolating later on at school, but I think that it was not just my complete lack of ability to work out the fashion thing (doing my hair in a mirror still mystifies me, I have no idea how people get it to go where they want it to), it was also the fact that we had no money. There was no way we could afford the brand names or often, even anything new rather than second hand and I got a lot of flack for this. So you may find that as she gets older and it becomes more of a “requirement”, that she makes a token effort to appease the gatekeepers of the friendship groups, and then later on finds her own style.
A weird side effect of not caring about my own appearance much meant that I ended up with more male friends, because they seemed to find me less threatening. Funny how this changes as we get older, and the women who don’t conform seem to become the threatening ones in the minds of certain men!
Relax, mama. It is not our job as parents to question the choices that our children make. It is merely our job to help them cope with the effects of those choices.
(Oh and, if you do the “If you refuse to brush your hair, you must have it cut short” thing, don’t feel too bad about the resultant distressed screaming. I resisted for YEARS because everyone always commented on my “lovely” long hair and when I did finally agree to have it cut I adored it and wished I’d done it about 7 years sooner. It seems stereotypes get to those of us who skim over the top of them, too.)
I was not much of a girly girl really by today’s standards, I refused to wear pink between ages 10 and 16 (only relented and took on hot pink again because a friend who was much better at caring about clothes told me I would look good in hot pink). I liked anything that was guy’s stuff, I wore boys’ trousers and shirts from op shops because I liked the cut on my very skinny teenage body.
Oh and I also had the lots of guy friends between age 15 and 22… is THAT why I don’t have any guy friends anymore, lol. Scary opinion having woman. I hate thinking that!
I admit to tearing up when reading the second quotation. It’s that feeling of seeing years of negative self-image stretching ahead from this moment in front of the mirror.
I hope that if I am ever a parent I find time to show my children the huge diversity in people’s looks and their choices about how they look.
My mother was blatantly favoured over her sister because she was ‘prettier’ – with fairly significant consequences for both siblings. How she looked was her main value to her mother. She spent her life in fear of getting her dress dirty, or her hair messy because of the repercussions. As a result, when she had her own children, looks were the least valuable thing. We were all given bowl haircuts, were constantly mistaken for being boys, had most unattractive glasses and were generally unbelievably daggy. How well I remember realising in year 7 the social faux pas I had made by wearing ancient old flared jeans (it was the 80’s – flares were not in). Two of my sisters have reacted against our parenting – they feel scarred by being mistaken for boys and will never, ever have their hair short again, they resent never being allowed to look pretty or cute, and they dress their girls in pink, frilly dresses.
It’s the lot of the parent to worry, isn’t it? No doubt if Lauca was like her friend you’d be concerned that social acceptance was too high a price. Perhaps, like the other commenters here, she’ll make her own way and be the better for it. But if she does conform for a while, to gain social acceptance, all is not lost. She has you for a mother.
ps. I really can’t stand food in the hair. My second daughter couldn’t give a fuck either, but food in the hair is my bridge too far.
When I was sixish, I would sing a made-up ditty to myself in the mirror in the toilets while fixing my hair: “Be-cause I am a girl, I have to look pre-tty”. Hahaha. I only remember because an older girl walked in on me and I was incredibly embarrassed about having been caught singing this.
I have three girls aged 7, 10 & 11.
The oldest is a ballerina and recently has spent a lot of time trying new hairstyles. But she’s not a girly culture girl – she critiques girly culture, stands up against bullies, speaks out against gender discrimination (and a piece she wrote is being published in New Moon Girl). And her closest friends are very sensible girls. The middle one has long hair that was always messy until she started watching The Brady Bunch, and now she brushes it and keeps it neat. She’s a quirky kid who goes her own way. The youngest is a fashionista. Being pretty is important to her. But she also creates characters and dresses as them, so she’s creative. She has a good sense of style.
That’s just who they are.
I think Lauca will be fine. She and her friend will find a common ground (her friend might find the girly culture doesn’t hold much sway with Lauca), or Lauca will prefer to be with other friends. Either way, OK.
These are such thought-provoking responses – what a tangled area of the brain one’s relationship to one’s own body image and sexism is when you bring into it also one’s daughter – and hugely reassuring, thank you everyone.
There will always be friends for your daughter. There are many people, men and women who can’t or won’t follow the majority. I was a square wheel as a child and still am. But I’ve had friends, gone to uni, had good jobs, got married, had kids, been happy. I feel like I’ve done these things in my way, on my terms.
I see it like this. If you look or behave in an ‘unconventional’ way, people react to you. Their reactions quickly separate out genuine, friendly people from people who are *holes. Figuring this out early saves a lot time and friendship wasted on *holes. :-D.
Don’t know whether my daughters will agree when they are older. I think most people want to be popular. And it does hurt to get excluded. But getting excluded by people you can’t stand? Doesn’t hurt so much.
Thanks for this post! I feel like my 8 year old is one of the only messy girls out there. When we go to parties, she is the only one with icing on her face and knots in her hair. All of the other girls look more put together than I do. I just don’t get it! What really makes me happy, is her Saturday art class. All of the girls in this class are just like her. Quirky, messy and true to themselves. It reinforces to me to continue to support her and shut out the external pressures (as best as I can). Maybe the put together girls are true as well, but when I take my rose colored glasses off I see differently.
My 8 year old has virtually no close female friends because she thinks they are uptight and boring. I am totally cool with that, because the day she comes home and says “I’m fat” when she hasn’t even lost her baby fat yet, I’m gunna lose my mind.
I actually have experienced it the other way around. I was extremely (!) girly-girlish while my older sister was quite the tomboy, in the end we both got bullied out of completely different reasons but in contrary to my sister, who is now going strong on looking quite stereotypically female, I am actually pretty fine with myself and my own body-image today. So I guess there are no predictions to be made and bullying can have tons of different reasons. The most important thing for me was having a super suportive home and just finding real friends along the road. I think Lauca will probably be just fine, girly or not, as she has an extremely supportive home to fall back on.
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[…] This is the trouble with feminist parenting. […]
I also feel like I have to respond because I was just like Lauca. And I did have one nearly friendless, miserable year of rejection when I was 12/13. Then when I was 13/14, the others who had been felled from popularity became my friends. But I was at a new school the next year and was pretty gun-shy about making friends, especially female friends. Once bitten and all. I kept myself busy and engaged with extra-curriculars and, I guess, happy enough that no one worried about me but I was lonely, though hopeful. I think my mother gave me a good model by allowing herself to enjoy playing with her appearance without letting it consume her (or at least that’s how it seemed to me.) Her female friends and my aunts were similar. So I had hope that the other girls were just going through a phase.
Anyway, it all worked out in the end and one of the best by-products was that I am really close to my brother, because I spent a lot of my free time with him and his friends.
Looking back I can see how patriarchy had done a number on all of us. I deprived myself of meaningful relationships with other young women until my 20s because I was suspicious and judgmental of other young women, who were just doing their best to navigate their own way through the pressure to perform.
I was the “un-girly” child, too. But I was popular – god only knows why, maybe because the town we moved to was so small that “new-kid” meant I was a-ma-zing instead of someone to be picked on. And I was skinny, let’s not kid. I vividly remember talking with some other 2nd grade girls and the flush coming over me at the realization that I was more than 80lbs. Nevermind that I was a good six inches taller than my friends, I knew, right then: less is better. Regardless of height.
I rejected femininity too ferociously – today I think Little Me might identify as asexual or transgender, though who knows, because I was adamant that I wasn’t a girl, girl = bad, but I didn’t feel especially boy-y either – I didn’t have many female friends. I was okay with that as a child because I thought girls were catty/useless/makeup-obsessed/boring and boys were cool, which, in hindsight, breaks my heart a little. I hated media-created girliness, not girls. But I didn’t know. The only way I (and my mother) knew how to defend me against Shitty Commercial Girl Stuff was for me to abandon all pretense of girlness, and with that, girls.
Striving to show that it’s okay to be different is a better way, I think, but, really, it sounds like Lauca is cool with difference. It’ll be the friend that must learn to love a girl that isn’t “girly”. It seems like this rejection is pretty common, but I do wonder, because I know the girls I knew only wanted me to be with them, and help/protect me, and I abandoned them utterly for something that wasn’t their fault, really. And I didn’t tell them “come on, let’s climb trees together!” I said “I climb trees because I am a tomboy, you don’t because you are a useless girly girl”.
I was also a lot like Lauca! And I’ll admit that school was rough, all the way up through college, and that I didn’t have a lot of confidence until my twenties. But I have a lot of friends now – and Lauca is fortunate enough to have a mom who will always have her back, which will help her become a lot more confident than I was. She’ll be fine. Keep being an awesome mom!
[…] This is the trouble with feminist parenting. […]
Anotherblue: Oh, wow, you sound like me. Although I didn’t climb trees- I was pretty spooked of heights.
I gave up on girls/girlhood at eight. Mainly because I’d been bullied like whoa from kindergarten through first grade, mostly by girls in first grade. I ended up thinking: girls don’t like books, girls are pretty and not fat; I like books and I’m not pretty, so I’m not a girl. I always liked pants better, and from 9 onward it was pants and t-shirt, unless it was Halloween or picture day. I always avoided girls who wore skirts and dresses on a daily basis.
I had one or two close friends in high school, and most of my social life was on the internet. (Though part of that was the lingering conviction that most of my female peers were too stupid to live, and there were names for girls who were ‘friends’ with boys.)
My parents were kind of hands-off in that department; Mom grew up with three brothers, so wasn’t terribly girly herself and was okay with having tomboyish daughters, Dad didn’t really care what we looked like or how we did gender. He thought teaching us stuff like cooking was more important. And of course there was the instructive example of his mother: Grandmother was raised as a boy until she was five, and is still not very fond of women, in general.
[…] surprising that I didn’t even think about deeper issues like gender / equality. Over at Blue Milk, there was a discussion about raising a daughter in a sexist culture. This is a big concern among […]
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[…] Late last year I had this big worry about you and how maybe you weren’t doing enough to take care of your personal appearance and how I wondered about how this looked, like people would think I didn’t care about you as a mother if you got about in the stained, torn, too-small-for-you clothes while your brother and I looked more or less presentable. I also worried about whether you were going to start getting teased or left out by other little girls you play with who I can see are just starting to really embrace girly culture. Then I decided that your lack of self-awareness was really a blessing and that I should just relax. And about the same time you decided to start letting me brush your hair and you even wiped food off your face before you went out for the day and you would sometimes spoil me by asking if a certain outfit went together before wearing it. Anyway, I worried a lot more than I needed to about all that. […]
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