Where did we fail them? Where did we go wrong? Those seem to be the questions that hand-wringing parents are asking themselves on social media about the way their young daughters are developing. No, the girls are not asking to be treated like boys; young Michelle is not pleading with her parents to call her “Mike.”
Just the opposite. The amusing exchange on Twitter shows several loony liberal parents heaving deep sighs and commiserating over the fact that their little girls are growing up feminine — despite their best efforts to arrest the process.
The exchange was begun by Shannon Proudfoot, a writer for the magazine “Macleans’s ” who lamented that a dress-up toy for boys showed more adventurous roles (superhero, pirate) than the toy for girls, which just had several different princess outfits.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Please see: boys can be pirates, construction workers, firefighters. Girls can be: seven varieties of princess. pic.twitter.com/3OVT1v2wpj
— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) September 1, 2016
Proudfoot’s tweet caused some other users to come out of the woodwork, who joined Proudfoot in lamenting that, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t get their girls to dislike the color pink or to prefer boy toys.
@sproudfoot We’ve actively tried to be gender neutral toy wise with our kids (1 of each) and it’s such a losing battle. Sadness.
— Chris Keating (@Ceekay77) September 1, 2016
@Ceekay77 Yeah, I can already see my daughter preferring pink and I have no idea why because we’ve worked so hard to avoid that.
— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot) September 1, 2016
@sproudfoot @Ceekay77 pink & Disney princesses….we tried to discourage them, but our daughter has gravitated towards both.
— Joel Wood (@JoelWWood) September 1, 2016
The frustration of Proudfoot and the rest may be because they are feuding not just with human society, but also biology. Researchers have found that male and female monkeys have the same toy preferences as human boys and girls, indicating those preferences are biological and not merely social. Color preferences appear to be more socially constructed, though it’s unclear why Proudfoot and the rest consider a preference for the color pink such a devastating outcome in and of itself.
This report, by Blake Neff, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
