DD is pink and princessy and cares about hair etc and is only 5

[NormaStanleyFletcher]

So not like me.

I was brought up by progressive parents in the 70s, and got nothing but electronics kits for my birthdays - there was a cartoon I saw once with a little girl opening a chemistry kit and thinking "I would kill for a barbie" - that was me.

So I have not tried to sway in any particular direction. I am going to have to come up with a reasonable answer to "how do I become a princess?" "Mummy when are you going to be a princess?" Erm, never is the answer to both so far...

I'm now looking for dd, I'm even thinking of getting her a BMX as it has black tyres. Completely right about the bikes, AGAIN, it's all about pretty where as boys are 'mean' and 'fast'.

FFS. I'm going to get her a pink one, but it has to just be pink, not sparkly, pretty, glittery shite.

'Why oh why have girls bikes got WHITE tyres?'

Because white tyres are the height of cool. They are distinctive and stand out from the crowd. That's why all the luxury cars of the past had white tyres

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewall_tire

mathanxiety said that her DDs loved their pink bikes and thought they were great, far better than the dull bikes of the boys. I bet if they had white tyres, they would have loved them even more.

Elvis had a pink cadillac with white wheels. Pink doesn't stink, pink rocks. It is the height of cool.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis'_Pink_Cadillac

The rock'n'roll greats used to sing songs of praise about their pink cadillacs.

What about the symbol on the doors of female toilets all over the world.......a lady wearing a skirt. So we are defined by what we wear in this most powerful and ubiquitous symbol.

I have three daughters all very different. Youngest one is super pretty, green eyes and blond ringlets. People always remark how pretty she is to me and directly to her. Fine and dandy, but I worry that this will be all that she is. She got her first certificate at school for having a lovely smile and great attitude to learning! I thought WTF! No other child's appearance was mentioned.

My other two daughters are freckly redheads. No one has ever stopped me or commented on their prettiness. I wonder how they are affected by hearing the adulations heaped on their little sister.

'Single sex schools are not about creating a 'girl-culture' though, it is about education and growing up away from the male gaze.'

Single sex schools are about making 'girl culture' all about education. (Not sure about the 'male gaze' bit because that is there as soon as you walk out the school gates.) 'Girl culture' when it means a pov where girls are limited as to aspiration and participation is what girls' schools were set up to counteract back in the Victorian era. 'Girl culture' does not necessarily mean second class citizen culture. The assumption that girl culture is automatically going to mean something fluffy and insubstantial is sad to see.

I went to an all girls primary and mixed secondary myself. My oldest DCs went to a large American high school and DD1 will graduate from a large American university next year and go to work in a male dominated and maths oriented field. The culture of the wider society and of the family itself has an impact far greater than the colour of bike you ride when it comes to forming your opinion of yourself and setting your course through life imo. If you have chosen the bike yourself, paid for part of the cost from your own earnings, and used the bike to get to school at 5.30 am for swimming practice before school all through three winters then you are probably going to do well no matter what colour the bike is.

I don't know if I would go so far as to claim my DDs thought their bikes were better than the boys' bikes because it seemed to me during their childhoods that they existed in a world where competition was either amongst boys or amongst girls. They certainly thought their bikes were really nice, and expressed that in terms of being nicer than or as nice as the bikes of other girls. DS liked his first bike very much as it was like the bikes of the boys he was friends with (as opposed to the bike exH wanted to get for him. DS wanted a bmx and exH was inclined to get him a racer style). He hated the second bike because the handlebars were wonky and loved the third one, which he bought himself.

It was my observation of my DCs that they didn't compare themselves with children of the other sex. The DDs compared themselves to girls and DS to boys. Looking back, this was how I saw things in my own childhood too. It would have seemed like comparing apples and oranges to compare myself or my stuff to a boy or his.

Raven, men have a bathroom symbol too, a figure who is either stark naked or wearing pants, however you wish to interpret it. Not all the men of the world go around in trousers. Not all the men and women of the world could have the words for Men's or Women's Bathroom printed on the door in their own language. Bathroom door symbols are a convenient shorthand for a situation where a convenient shorthand is necessary. You could have a red door and a green door but then there would be the colour blind to consider. And there would be people saying that the use of one colour to mark out one sex made that sex 'other' and inferior, which seems to be what is happening here.

Coming late to the thread.
I think it's really important to acknowledge that patriarchies depend on the subordinate "caste" (horrible term, but quite correct) being easily identifiable. Studies have shown that when people don't know the sex of a child, they literally do not know how to interact with that child. This is why patriarchies require females to carry the stamp of their class around with them. Pink is for females what the Nazi "Yellow Stars" were for Jews. Same goes for long hair, high heels, make-up, the lot. Femalestheir fashion, their gait, their hair must be constructed differently, by society, in order for the two tier power system to continue.
Male to female transsexuals who "pass" after having facial feminization surgery (don'T ask!) and taking hormones for a while say they never realised what misogyny meant before, until they saw the hatred in a man's eyes when he thought the trans woman in question really was a woman. So that particular transexual had to learn behaviour modification, just like all females do, in order to mitigate the misogyny of men in his daily interactions. Women do this all the time without even realizing it. Female-to-males, on the other hand, feel like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders, and they're amazed to find a burden lifted that they never even realised they were carrying!

Since feminism took off during the seventies male-led companies have been obsessed, literally obsessed, with creating and marketing gendered clothing to children, and unfortunately more recently, sexualized clothing for little girls. THis is called a backlash.

sakura - really interesting to think about transsexuals in this context.

I'm not sure if I'm right here, but would you say the situation with transsexuals is problematic, because they reinforce the idea that gender is a social construct, not a matter of biology? If a male-to-female transsexual feels they know what it is to be a woman, because society treats them as a woman ... but it's not society's treatment that makes people male or female. So, in the same way, if a little girl is not dressed in pink but in brown or green or blue, she'll gain some of the priviledges of boyness, and (as we've seen on this thread ) a little boy who wears pink will get negative reactions. But, we're not advocating transssexualism as a solution to misogyny, and it perpetuates the idea that femaleness is socially constructed ... so it is very difficult IMO to find a way to step outside the binary roles without acknowledging their importance.

(Help me work this one out?!)

The other thing is ... I should have put this better before, but it seems to me, shades of pink are pretty much the only (strongly) gendered colour. Sure, little boys may wear blue - but boys seem to be able to wear blue, green, brown, whatever - and these colours aren't so much gender neutral as Not Pink, and therefore Not For Girls. There's not really an equal split, such that there are boy colours and girl colours and all you have to do is dress a child in green for it to be unidenfitable ... increasingly, people will assume that child is the (default) male because it's in Not Pink. My SIL is really fed up about this with her baby DD. It ties in with what you say about the patriarchy needing girls to be readily identifiable, I think?

Mathanxiety, I was referring to girl culture in terms of marketing and consumerism. I think a single sex culture in schools, friendship groups, the Guides, some dance classes and so on can be a positive thing and break down limits rather than impose them. I have nothing against all female organisations; I was just talking about girl culture in terms of media and marketing of products to girls.

White tyres are not cool, their vile and seemingly are only attached to insipid girly bikes. Too cool for school BMX's have black tyres.

DD has her brother's old bike because it was really expensive (because we live at the top of a massive hill on a moor and the kids need bikes that are as functional as adult mountain bikes, not some £70 bike), so I am not paying out for another bike just to have it in pink.

But I really do think there is a major issue her with people not liking something simply because it is associated with girls. I think it is about taking back what we want women's culture to be, and not letting it be determined by big companies. I actually think it is too soon to work towards entirely an entirely gender neutral world; while there is sexism, women need to still have their own culture. We just need to make sure we determine that culture, not the people who want to sell us stuff.

My dd's older brother (3.5 yrs older) is on the same size bike!! She's quite tall, age 7/8 clothes and just starting reception!

Yeah, we're beginning to run into that problem. DD is getting taller faster than DS is, so handing things down is becoming more tricky.

Why is 'girly' 'insipid', Posie?

insipid, overtly pink, with tassels and Barbie all over them. I want to buy dd a bike not buy into Disney Princesses or Barbie.....a bike for riding, not for display. Same as if the boys bike had monsters or Ben10 all over it, but boys bikes aren't as "merchanised" because boys are supposed to like exercise.

If they made boys' bikes with white tyres, everybody would say that white tyres are cool. Custom cars use white wall tires. In Disney's 'Cars' movie, the car Luigi tells the car Lightning McQueen that white wall tyres are best

Lightning McQueen: All right, Luigi, give me the best set of black walls you've got.
Luigi: No, no, no! You don't know what you want! Luigi know what you want. Black-wall tires, they blend into the pavement, but these white-wall tires, they say look at me, here I am, love me.
Lightning McQueen: All right, you're the expert. Oh, and don't forget the spare.

Eventually they will sell boys' bikes with white tyres. It's all about marketing and creating a fashion.

Girls wear dresses and skirts. Should they wear trousers just because boys do?

I can't help thinking though, Claig, that pale white non harsh white is to go with the whole delicate pink prettification of girls. If it were on a boy's bike it would be just cool, not delicate wee flowers can't handle black.

Dittany, what cultural things to do with girls do you think we shouldn't reject?

I think it's mainly marketing to sell products. It is product differentiation by differentiating between girls and boys and as MillyR said, the colours change as girls get older and pink is no longer in fashion. There was a time at the beginning of the century when pink was considered a boys' colour because it was associated with red, which is the colour of Mars, the god of war.

Fashions change in order to sell new product ranges. Pink for boys will probably make a return in a few hundred years' time.

I am not sure if the differentiation between girls and boys via pink/blue etc. really has any effect on women when they reach adulthood.

I don't know Dittany.

I take your point that dominant groups like to mark out subordinates.

But it is also the case that subordinate groups create cultural identities that are different from that of the dominant group because they want a group identity. Every minority group has done this as part of fighting for their rights.

So while it would be a wonderful thing for their to be a gender neutral society, we haven't historically come from that position and we aren't in that position now. As such, I think it is important for females to have their own culture and for the world to become gender neutral, it is males who need to change.

Obviously where a cultural norm is harmful females should give it up. But there is nothing about pink that has an intrinsic harm, and I don't see that it is any more like a yellow star than it is like a rainbow flag.

I'm not sure there are too many women who are adults that were truly pinkified yet!! Unless you think of pink as the start of the objectification of girls, making them something nice to look at.....which, considering hooters, playboy and lap dancing venues exploding everywhere, may just have happened!!

There is a big difference, IMO, between rejecting something, resisting it, and acknowledging it but rejecting/resisting the symbolism behind it.