I have the week off. I get almost nothing done when I have time off. For the past hour, I've sat on the sofa staring at this lion that Chotto-ma drew a few days ago. It's such a beautiful lion, isn't it? It has kind eyes. A zebra might have another opinion, but it has kind eyes. It also has a bow on its head, if you peer in closely. What's a big beast of a lion without a little red bow in his mane, right?
We like breaking stereotypes in this house, and ste-reo-types is a word Chotto-ma learnt early. Because, by lord, we're surrounded by them outside, we drown in them when we walk out the door!
We went to the John Lewis store to buy pyjamas for Chotto-ma the other day. Chotto-ma loves dinosaurs, and she loves sharks and penguins and anything that moves on all fours or sixes. But no sir, John Lewis begs to differ. Every interesting pyjama with dinosaurs and sharks had a sewn-in tag saying
John Lewis For Boys. Wait. What's wrong with
John Lewis For Kids, if you must assume I'm size-blind? I'm sure people can decide if they'd like to buy it for a boy or girl
based on the child's personality and taste rather than sex? Yes, there was one lone dino-print pyjama in the girls' section, bless their generosity - but no points for guessing its colour. No, it wasn't pink. It was Very Pink.
And that brings me to the country's great, unspoken colour-code. Pink and Blue. When you have a baby, don't you dare confuse those two! Girls must gurgle in their prams in pink, boys in blue. Cover a little girl in a blue blanket only if you want to hear, "Aww, what a handsome little boy!"
And of course, there's the conversation I had at the hairdresser's some time ago. There was a lovely girl cutting my hair, and Chotto-ma trying to catch my chopped, wet strands before they fell to the floor. The hairdresser and I were chatting about this and that, as we usually do. She was talking about her job at the salon, so I asked her how she'd gotten into hairdressing. And she said: "You know, I was never much into school, so I did what girls do. I got into beauty."
And then there's the fact that Chotto-ma went to a birthday party where all the girls got little purple coin-purses in their party-bags and all the boys got large bugs preserved in glass cubes. And she came home a little sad. She'd really wanted the bug with its black hairy legs and cool shiny green body, but she was a girl, so a purple purse it was.
And there's the fact that at Chotto-ma's after-school club, when she and a friend were once playing with a box of Lego from the Star Wars series, an older boy came up to them, took the box away, and reminded them they they had the 'girl Lego' to play with, and that these were for the boys.
And there's the fact that you might know a little boy who loves playing with kitchen sets but you also know that you can never gift him a kitchen set for his birthday, without incurring the shock of his parents. He must be gifted a car, poor child. Or a football at the very least.
And the fact that a local children's magazine I was leafing through had an article called "Party Ideas for Boys and Girls", where the page was split in two - Boys / Girls, and the boys' section had science experiments, pirates, football and space. While the girls' section had a tutu party, flowers and fairies, cupcake baking, princesses and mermaids. Chotto-ma is obsessed with space and planets and all its galaxies, just as I was when I was young. She loves science experiments, which we often do at home with kitchen ingredients. But never mind all that - let's just put all the girls in sparkly mermaid costumes, shall we?
It's hard for children to find their own voice when the world seems to be so organised in their stereotypes. When they're seen as Boy or Girl, instead of People. Girls, especially, are constantly given subliminal hints about their
'role' in life. When you gift a girl a Barbie (I could write an entire
post on everything that's wrong with that doll), and you buy a book
called 'Facts on Fossils' for a boy, you are sending her a strong
message, which will have far deeper repercussions than one might think. [Link to an interesting article on that below]
We do what we can to balance Chotto-ma's world at home, even if it means breaking the smallest stereotypes. I have a blue toothbrush and D has a pink one. We went out and bought them after telling her how people couldn't be coded by colour, how no one had to follow any set notion of 'Obvious'. And when we came back home from the hairdresser's that day, I showed her a photograph of the scientists who built
Mangalyaan, the Mars orbiter. The photo showed a group of Indian scientists, all women, in beautiful silk sarees and flowers in their hair, punching the air as they made history in space technology. They'd probably also packed their child's lunch before coming in to work to build that rocket.
Chotto-ma sees D cooking as many meals as I do; because dinner is cooked by whoever has the time to cook it that day. And the house is cleaned, and clothes folded, by whoever has the time to clean the house and fold the clothes that day. There's nothing more to it - apart from the fact that you'll probably eat a little better if
I cook the dinner. And you'll probably also get a slice of lovely cake after.
Are there stereotypes that bother you? Moments when you have found them frustrating as a parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt? Stereotypes that annoyed you when you were a child? I'd love to hear your stories, for surely I'm not the only one who has them? My stories come from being the parent of a girl, but which ones do you face as the parent of a boy? I'd love to know, and it'd be good to have this discussed - please share the blog link on Facebook and elsewhere if you like.
And in the meantime, I'll give you a recipe for a mean orange-almond cake, which goes well with good old talk about things that matter. I've baked it thrice in three weeks. Well, Chotto-ma and I baked it together, even as we talked about planets, bugs, prehistoric creatures and other so-called 'boy things'. Because, there might be a set recipe for a cake, but there ain't no set recipe for a girl. Or a boy.
Added on March 10, 2015: A kind lady emailed me an article yesterday after
reading the post. This article is from a
US perspective, while mine is from the UK, but they say the same thing.
It shows why seemingly small, market-created stereotypes can do deeper
damage to our social structure, and handicap girls and women. Here's an excerpt from the article
"...contributing
factors, according to academic experts I interviewed, include a culture
that encourages young women to play with dolls rather than robots and
pursue traditionally female careers, as well as the self-perpetuating
stereotype that a programmer is a white male. Sometimes women can feel
like they don’t belong in a technical world dominated by men.
Those
stereotypes are based on reality, according to data released by some of
the largest tech companies. Among the top employers in Silicon Valley,
including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple, 70% of the workforce is
male. In technical roles, the disparity is even greater. At Twitter, for
instance, only 10% of the technical workforce is female."
You can read the complete article here.
Orange and Almond Cake
Ingredients
1 cup plain flour
1 cup ground almond
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice, pulp in
2 tsp zest of an orange
2 heaped tbsp of butter
2 heaped tbsp yogurt
1/4 cup oil (vegetable or sunflower)
Preheat oven to 160 degrees C (320 degrees F).
Grease cake tin with butter, keep aside. (I like my 6-inch, and deep, cake tin for this)
Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl - flour, ground almond, baking powder, sugar, orange zest.
Make a well in the middle. Crack in the eggs. Add the vanilla essence, the butter, oil and yogurt.
Start mixing it in a circular motion. Pour the orange juice a bit at a time as you mix. Till it's a nice smooth batter, easy to stir.
Pour batter into cake tin. Bake for about 50 minutes, then slide a knife in to check if done. If it's still a little soft, switch off the oven, and pop the cake back in. Leave it there for 15 more minutes.
This cake has a beautiful crunchy crust when it's just out of the oven, so you must have a slice warm. But once it's cooled, wrap the rest in clingfilm and leave it on the table overnight. It's even better a day later, when the ground almond has released all its lovely natural oil.
You'll love it!
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