I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Mavis is starting to come into culture. I mean, of course, we are always in culture, but lately I really notice that Mavis is accessing ideas and stories that are bigger than what I can regulate. It’s mostly little stuff: her learning the term “Native American” at school and then asking me, “What do Native Americans do?”–as a teacher of culture studies, this question was way too dense for me to unpack! But other things, too. Her increasing awareness that there are “girl” and “boy” things to do. Her recent (and, I’m proud to say, late) coming into knowledge of princesses. My recognition that to allow her to watch the movie Shrek, which she saw on a shelf in the video store and wanted to see, meant that I would have to explain a whole slew of cultural references she didn’t understand. Her love of The Backyardigans, which actually draws on all kinds of cultural myths and narratives (cowboys, clowns, samurai, professors in the jungle, the Orient Express, pirates, Tarzan, etc.).
At the same time, I have been talking a lot with one of my students, a young woman, who is convinced that she is unattractive and ugly and will never attract a decent boyfriend. She is a smart, funny, and attractive. This attitude is out of character for her. Yet fresh off her latest rejection by a boy looking for more of a bimbo, she is upset, and I just feel angry for her. What in our culture gave his rejection the power to make her feel so disqualified from love? Almost all women, I think, have some part of themselves they find hard to love. How did that happen?
Lately Mavis has fallen in love with a series of books that I also loved as a child. It’s not particularly high quality literature, but she loves the characters and the stories. I loved them too, so its pleasurable for me to share them with her. Yet as I read them this time, I recognize the way the gender roles are quite stereotypical. I also think about how the Backyardigans are such a mega-brand–not quite as pervasive as Dora, but getting there. I have never wanted Mavis to become a dupe of marketing. Yet it’s fun seeing her enjoy these characters and their imaginative adventures (I like the fact that the show has no pretense to being “educational,” which is a big twitch of mine). And I like showing her those old books. I also tend to think of most parental cultural micromanagement as parenting that a) shows silly over-obsessiveness and b) reflects a desire to promote an aesthetic that signals a certain class-based notion of taste. In short, I think it’s mostly about allaying parental fears and/or cultivating a parental image that, usually, is just materialism of a different stripe. Parenting by art direction, I once heard it called.
And how much do my books or the Backyardigans really ruin Mavis? I read Babar the elephant, say, when I was a kid, and I don’t think I’ve become an imperialist. Despite my reading these gender-stereotypical books when I was a kid, I have a very egalitarian marriage and before I met Jasper never did have a romantic relationship where I felt any kind of negative gender expectations. I already have with Mavis those kinds of conversations about media sources where we critique whether it’s real or really like that or whether it should be like that. Maybe she’s better off learning this kind of stuff–princesses, etc.–with my voice gentley questioning it along the way than learning it later when it seems new and exciting.
But I don’t know. Despite being raised by a feminist, despite never having been told, ever, that I was less than for having been born a girl, despite having had wonderful teachers and always having had women role models, I had some of those hang-ups that my student has. I cringe at myself in the mirror. I remember thinking, in fourth grade, that math was for boys (no one ever told me that, ever). In college, even though I was often one of the smartest in the room, I never spoke in class. Something had to have taught me this. My hunch is that the culture taught me this–where? I don’t know, really. But there was a cumulative effect. One way or the other, I learned these things–along other things like prejudices, no doubt–from the culture all around me. I was thinking about this as I viewed, last week, a museum exhibit of popular culture images of racism, sexism, and other -isms. The exhibit made me realize how casually these ideologies get inserted into the culture. Sometimes I wonder if I should be more judicious in what I let Mavis see. Then again, it’s pretty much inevitable that she’s going to learn these stories that are our cultural heritage one way or the other, as she grows. Shrek is so interesting because it’s a positive message, but it totally relies on its viewers’ familiarity with the conventions of fairy tales, that you have an established sense of beauty that, well, pretty much sucks.
So, I don’t know. I’ve typed a lot to say not very much here, except, I guess, that sometimes it’s interesting to talk to my students and cast their issues onto my parenting choices. I’m pretty sure the middle course is the best way to go here, of course. But it’s crazy how much I feel like I’m always juggling when I just read a simple story or turn on the TV. I wonder so much what she’s really hearing.
