"Not a snowman, a snowgirl," she corrected me. "It's a girl."
For as long as she has been able to speak, Crabkid has displayed feminist tendencies, reminding me that we still live in a man's world and that even I have grown complacent within it. Take that snowgirl. Why not? Why should a sexless hump of snow with a scarf and buttons be masculine? After all the carrot's on the top tier of the snowballs, not sticking out between or below.
Having never gone so far as to call history "herstory" or ripping the "e" out of "women" to replace it with a "y," I still used my macho father's money well in college by writing some decent patriarchy-dissing critiques of classic lit. And while I've always taken care to use gender-inclusive pronouns, I apparently still think man-first thoughts: "What a cute scarecrow!" I said to Crabkid, on seeing a cute fall creature propped up on a haystack outside Whole Foods this fall. "Isn't he cute?"
"She," Crabkid corrected me. "It's a girl." Again, why not? So the scarecrow is wearing pants! Big deal? The crotch is flat, the straw hair is long (not that this should mean anything in today's shaggy-boy times). Indeed, in this androgynous era, my kid reminds me that I'm not as "with it" and gender-neutral as I think.
The feminist inclination in Crabkid extends to everything and everyone in her range. Like many little girls of four, she prefers girls. From princesses to playmates, she favors girl-oriented things and people. In fact she's less impressed with Santa than she is with Mrs. Claus. "I think Mrs. Claus delivers the presents," she told me last night. "Maybe Santa just wraps them."
Related: The girliest obsession of all: the color pink.)
As much as possible Crabkid uses the word "she"—even when, occasionally, she's just plum wrong: "What a sweet boy," I crooned to the pet rabbit—Benji—my mother got for Crabkid when we visited her in Africa last year. Again I was corrected and told "Benji is a girl!" This time I corrected back, because Benji really was a boy and I don't want Crabkid to be sexist and not like boys at all! But at the thought of Benji being a boy, Crabkid's eyes just glazed over with boredom. She lost interest, wandered off to play with her dolls. "Maybe she is a girl," I relented, eager to have Crabkid appreciate this wild bunny, which my mother went to such lengths to procure and which was destroying her house, tunneling under the pool and dropping rabbit pellets beneath the beds. Such a wonderful little girl, that Benji!
The "she" pronoun follows our family everywhere now and extends to encompass a range of sexless things too. I no longer bat an eyelash in describing trees, books, and basically anything fantastic as feminine. Even our manly-looking car is a girl. Her name is Rose.
But Crabkid couldn't quite get her head around the fact that a male nurse checked her up at the ER recently, when we overreacted to a croupy cough at the crack of dawn. "He's a nurse?" she asked me after the fellow had left the room. "That's weird," she said. And then she asked for her blanket, whose name is Green Girl. "Green Girl, isn't it funny that nurse is a boy?"
Anyone else have a feminist about the house? Or is it a boys' club at yours?
Related:
Why do women prefer to have girls? One mom recounts her tale of
gender disappointment.
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