In Defense of the Pink Princesses

"A DOZEN," my friend ranted to me in a phone conversation in 2011, "There were literally 12 girls at this meeting and every one of them was completely swathed in pink from head to toe!". My friend had attended a La Leche League meeting with her nursing toddler son and was unable to fathom why every woman at the meeting had insisted on dressing her daughter in hues of pepto bismol. My own daughter frequently wore pink, but she had plenty of other colors as well, and I didn't have any particular vendetta against pink, so I had a hard time commiserating with my friend in her irritation. That was my first encounter with the princess opposition as a parent, but it wouldn't be my last.

Unless you've been hiding in a cave somewhere with cotton balls jammed in your ear singing "Row Row Row Your Boat", you'll know that our society is experiencing something of a surge in the gender equality movement. The pay gap is in the papers, there are (currently) three women on the Supreme Court, and it's just basically a really good time to be a woman, compared to other points in history. And that's great! As a woman, raising two future women, I am very happy about this.

Here's the problem though. In all the advocating we did to make sure that everyone is treated equally, we've begun to scorn things that are traditionally female. I bought Bella a book for Christmas without reading it first, called "Olivia and the Fairy Princesses" thinking "My daughter loves fairy princesses, she will love this book!" But it turns out that, in the book, the main character, Olivia, is complaining to her parents about how everyone wants to be a fairy princess, and how annoying that is to her. Olivia marches to the beat of her own drum, and that's awesome, and I do believe it's important to teach children that it's okay to like different things than what the crowds like. But I also think it's important to let kids know that they should be themselves even if what they enjoy is mainstream or traditional. If we are teaching our children to be genuinely themselves, then those things are okay too.

Olivia is not the one who upset me though, she's just a mirror of what society is echoing these days. I think we (historically) spent so long in the "different is bad" phase that we have done a complete 180 and have asserted that not only is different good, but conformity is bad. This is a false dichotomy. The unique and the mainstream can both be good. Just because one thing is good, does not mean its counterpart is necessarily bad.

Around Christmas time this year I posted a picture of my daughters in their room. We had purchased them their own artificial christmas tree (that they picked out). It was pink. Inside their room (which is painted pink), it practically glowed in an admittedly eye-straining way. Rather than commenting on the girls' obvious delight, or even criticizing me for the overindulgence of buying them their own Christmas tree, I was taken aback by all the snarky comments from friends and family, which essentially amounted to disapproval over the vast quantities of pink in their room. I bristled at this because the point of the post wasn't to ask my Facebook friends what they thought of my daughters' room decor, it was to show off how happy they were with their very own Christmas tree. Yes, it was pink. Yes, the decorations were silver disco balls. Yes, it looked like overkill in that pink room. BUT, The girls picked these out themselves. In fact, I had to curb their shopping impulses because they wanted to buy pretty much everything in the store that was either pink, white or silver.

Today I encountered an NPR book review on my Facebook newsfeed touting the comic, "I Hate Fairyland". It sounds funny, really. But it's hard to laugh when the comments are echoing the same sentiment I hear on my newsfeed almost daily, filled with disdain for the traditionally feminine.

On one hand, it's true that traditional feminine rolls in our society tend to subjugate women and relegate them to the kitchen or the bedroom where they're not allowed to have opinions for fear of being called a bitch, and they're not allowed to have jobs outside the home for fear of being called an unfit mother. These are real struggles that women face, even now. And those complaints are legitimate. It's hard to maintain a family and a job as a woman. Your motives are constantly questioned, you're put under a microscope and interrogated about how you plan to balance your work and your family, yet men are so rarely asked the same questions.

At the same time though, I have heard women complain that they feel like they're being looked down upon because they choose to stay home with their children. They are told, by other women no less, that the women's liberation movement fought for their right to work and dammit they should be working to set an example of a strong woman for their children. But, isn't the point of Feminism to give women a choice about what they want to do? If we're forcing women to work via societal shaming, isn't that just as bad as forcing women to stay home? Either way, a choice is taken from the woman and put to society.

There is also the quandary that, in asserting that women are just as good as men, while simultaneously eschewing anything traditionally feminine in favor of the traditionally masculine, are we not stating with our actions that men and masculinity are superior? Why are we wearing pants suits instead of encouraging men to wear skirts? Could it be because we also associate femininity with weakness? If so, doesn't that make us just as misogynistic? True feminism should celebrate femininity as its own strength, not ridicule it as something lesser.

I was born in 1983, and I recall, growing up, feeling pressured to be "unique". I came to believe that if I liked pink, like all the other little girls did, then that meant that I wasn't special. This isn't something my parents forced on me, it was a message I heard loud and clear from teachers, television shows and peers. I'm willing to admit that part of this was the influence of society, and the other part was my own stubborn refusal to be a stereotype. There were "boy" things that I liked without anyone shaming me into it, of course. I liked Thomas the Train when I was very little, and later on I got really into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Heroes in a half-shell! Turtle power!) and I loved legos before they were pink. However, I also pretended to enjoy things I really didn't like, and to not enjoy things I really did, because I felt that I shouldn't act too girly.

I recall that in third grade, as a beginning of the year icebreaker, the teacher asked all the kids to state their name, birthday and what foreign place they wanted to visit. The boys had varying responses like Japan or Egypt, I think one boy even said Antarctica.

Every single girl answered "Paris".

As the teacher got to me I began to panic because, while I did want to go to Paris one day, I didn't want to give the same answer all the other girls gave. So I said Czechoslovakia. And that just about sums up my social skills. But I digress.

Even as a third grader I knew that these girls wanted to go to Paris because they found it to be romantic, and the idea that that's why I should want to go somewhere sort of disgusted me, even though I wanted to go there too. I was repressing those traditionally feminine urges myself. I was probably 26 years old and mother to a daughter before I finally began to embrace my traditionally feminine side. I allowed myself to admit I love pink, and to wear and buy things just because they were pink and just because I like pink, dammit. Not that I didn't wear and buy pink things before, it's just that I would have made excuses for it or said that it was because that's what's in style, and not because I actually like it.

Why do we repress these feelings? Of course it's great to let girls know that they don't have to like traditionally girly things, but why do we scorn those who do, and insist that these children have had gender norms thrust upon them by a misogynistic society or over restrictive parents? Is it impossible to believe that cis-gendered little girls are going to like traditionally feminine things? If we allow boys to like My Little Pony, why do we disdain girls who enjoy pink and want to dress up as princesses? Are both choices not valid?

My husband and I had very different ideas about how to decorate my oldest daughter's room when she was a baby. We literally had a fight in the middle of the paint aisle at Home Depot over what to paint the accent wall in Bella's room. We ended up choosing green, and bought pink and brown polka dots stickers to decorate it. My husband was totally against solid pink. He didn't want her to have pink bouncers or pink play gyms, so we bought the unisex jungle line from Fisher Price. He didn't want a pink diaper bag, so the first one was Winnie the Pooh, and when that one wore out, we replaced it with a brown and green Gerber bag.

Bella's original decor

When we decided to redecorate her room the first time, we took down the polka dots (because she had been peeling them off anyway) and I painted a tree on the green wall. We put a sun-shaped light in her room, put a river and forest rug on the floor, and turned an Ikea Kura bed into a cottage house bed with a working door that she could go inside and play. We did all this, initially, to encourage her to sleep in her bedroom. We kept her out of her room for a week, and revealed it to her as a surprise on her third birthday. She loved playing in there, but she never slept in there. She still slept on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom.

Bella's "House bed" as she called it.

Imagine if it had been a boy, and I had declared the color blue to be a taboo nursery color. If that seems ridiculous, but the idea of limiting the pink doesn't seem ridiculous, then you might be adhering to a double standard. I have read lots of articles about "princess syndrome" in girls, yet nary a one about "baseball syndrome" or "cowboy syndrome" for boys. Why is that, I wonder? (she wrote, sarcastically).

Bella had this set up until she was almost five. At that point I put my foot down and insisted to my husband that I should be allowed to decorate her room. I did this with his acquiescence but not his approval. I hosted a garage sale by myself and raised the money to purchase new paint and furnishings for her room. I painted the walls pink with a glitter topcoat, I painted her furniture white and bought all new princess themed accents. Because we'd made the surprise mistake with her before, I made sure to ask if she wanted a pink princess room before embarking on this quest, she assured me she wanted nothing more. It was such a success that my husband purchased a chandelier for the room even though I had no money in my budget left for one. He conceded defeat when she began sleeping in there, and she has slept in there since then. (Until recently, that is. She started having nightmares after a classmate told her all about kissing bugs, and now she's back on the mattress in our bedroom. Thanks, random kid.)

Bella's princess room

The point is, my daughter loves pink. She loves glitter, she loves ruffles. She loves bows and  princesses and ball gowns and fairies and unicorns and mermaids. At my husband's insistence, we did our best not to oversaturate her with pink as an infant, and yet, she still loves it, gravitates toward it and prefers it both in decorating and fashion. I'm supposed to tell her this is wrong? I should stifle this? Why? Because it's mainstream? Because someone totally unrelated to her, who doesn't know her well doesn't approve? How exactly is a pink obsession going to oppress her later in life? It won't. She will learn that it's okay to be exactly the way she wants to be, even if she's not bucking the system. She will learn that she doesn't have to repress her traditionally female urges just because they're mainstream. She will learn to just be herself without shame. If she wasn't traditional, I would still love her just as much, and would still fill her bedroom with things she likes.