June 20, 2010
To begin, I would like to wish a hearty Happy Father’s Day to my father (pictured right), my step-father, and all the other fathers out there reading this.
Father’s Day this year feels quite strange to me. Usually this day (and Mother’s Day) sneaks up on me. I seem to have developed a built in ad-blocker — years of wandering around in a world that is simply saturated in advertisements for anything and everything just has me blocking them out. And as one of the Hallmark Three holidays (Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day) that are designed and promoted as a purely capitalistic exercise, and without a standard day every year — the third Sunday in June is not quite the same as the 14th of February — it’s simply not easy to keep track of.
Not as bad as Mother’s Day is — that one is celebrated at different times in Canada and the UK. But I am digressing.
The point is that this year it has failed to sneak up on me. I have been very aware of its approach. The ads that I habitually ignore so thoroughly that my conscious brain is unaware of them are noted and absorbed.
The cause is simple enough: this is Father’s Day Zero. Karen and I are in full-on baby madness mode. We cannot go shopping without looking at baby clothes, or baby furniture, or something baby-related. We are reading baby-related books. Looking at baby-related websites. Downloading baby-themed apps. Because there is an app for that. No, seriously.
Which brings me to the theme of the first-ever Father’s Day article at the Big Bad Blog: fathering and shopping for little girls.
While my own daughter is still far away from such trips, I still tend to read articles such as this one in the Toronto Star, about fathers shopping with their daughters. Be prepared, and all that.
The article makes me cringe. While we all become things that we promised ourselves not to be, to some degree or other, as we grow up, I seriously hope that I do not come to view my daughter through the lens used by the father in the article.
Case in point #1: The shorts.
I look at the photo to the right, and think to myself: that looks like a six year old dressed for the summer.
The father in the article says: “The shorts in particular are a skimpy outrage that may be in breach of indecency laws.”
How ridiculous. This father is already sexualizing his six-year-old daughter to such a degree that her bare legs cause him to think of indecency laws? They certainly seem no shorter than the shorts that my sister and I wore in the late 70s and early 80s, when we were children and long baggy shorts seemed not to have been discovered yet.
Besides which, a six year old should be spending large amounts of her summer outside, running around. Are you going to make her wear long dresses and trousers? I would hope not.
More particularly, I hope that I do not come to view my daughter’s clothing choices in such a highly sexualized manner — even once she reaches an age where it might be a consideration for her. Sure, I might veto shoe choices if they come with clear heels — but shorts are shorts.
Particularly on girls for whom puberty is still six years off.
Case in point #2: Dad’s choices.
Some of these quotes are unbelievable:
“It’s the kind of dress that a female character in a Pixar movie would wear.” “It’s got a Laura Ingles, Little House on the Prairie adorability to it. It speaks purity, innocence and modesty”.
He does not stop to think that his daughter might not want to look like a character from a Pixar movie. Or that Little House on the Prairie was set in the 1870s, and his daughter wants to fit in with a group of harsh critics (known as the girls in her school) in 2010.
And that “purity, innocence and modesty” bullshit? Once again, this father is already down what seems like a frightening path — thinking of his six-year-old in sexual terms.
The bottom line
More than anything else, the article seems to be a case study in a father who is afraid of his little girl growing up. He sees the clothes she picks out and associates them with teenagers and Sophia Loren, rather than seeing his six-year-old girl simply trying to be herself.
His chooses to try to push her back into the box she was in before she started going to school and having daily exposures to older kids, with fashion ideas that (unsurprisingly) clash with his as a father. Rather than explore this, the article chooses to treat this as the norm, pretend it’s OK, and perpetuates the stereotypes inherent in these assumptions by failing to challenge other fathers who feel the same way.
I hope to never do this — never hold my daughter back. To let her grow up. It seems unhealthy (for both of us) to try to retard my daughter’s development as a coping mechanism.
I hope to treat her as a six-year-old when she’s six; a sixteen-year-old when she’s sixteen; and an adult when she’s an adult.
Perhaps that’s a tall order — I expect that what this father is doing is an urge for many parents. But to quote GI Joe: knowing is half the battle. If you can recognise your own behaviour, you can shape it.
And that’s the kind of thing I think about on Father’s Day.
