Well, Duh!

Plunking your kid in front of the TV won’t make her a genius.

File this under I can’t believe this is news but an article published on Yahoo Shine today claims that the revelation that the Baby Einstein videos are nothing more than, “a mind numbing way to occupy infants”, is apparently, “rocking the parent world.”

All I can say is…really? The idea that TV isn’t good for kids under two is “rocking” the parenting world?

I don’t have children of my own which in some necks of the woods qualifies me for nothing but withering looks when I issue an opinion on child rearing, but I do have multiple degrees in education and once upon a time I used to work for the largest toy retailer in the city of Boston. The Baby Einstein videos were on a constant loop on a small beat up TV in the infant’s department. Being within ten feet of them while I scraped gum off the floor, scooped candy into tiny cellophane bags or gift wrapped a $300 mohair teddy bear as a present for a toddler who would undoubtably gnaw the ear off of it was enough to give me, a grown woman, a migraine. People, have you ever seen these videos? They’re like bad acid flashbacks. Seriously, my mind hasn’t been bent so severely since the light show at that Phish concert I got dragged to back in college. Baby Einstein videos aren’t educational, in fact I’d argue that they have more potential to damage a kid’s attention span than make them smarter. They’re the equivalent of video catnip. In short, they are a shitty, stupid and ridiculous product that just happens to have a marketing scheme that plays into the vanity, insecurity and laziness of modern parents. My kid can have a head start over all the other kids and all I have to do is plop him in front of these videos!

As a sales associate I would constantly try to steer potential gift givers away from the Baby Einstein videos,”How about a monogrammed baby blanket? A set of handmade wooden blocks? A hardcover heirloom-quality edition of Make Way for Ducklings?”

Like an evil parent from a Roald Dahl novel the parent would reply,”Oh he already has enough books, let’s get him some videos.” Enough books? I grew up in a family where one could never have enough books. The idea that a parent would choose a video that was obviously garbage over a book was mind-boggling to me. Who are you? The Wormwoods?

“A child can’t have too many books!” I’d opine cheerfully. The Beacon Hill mom would dismiss me with a wave of a perfectly manicured hand decked with a diamond that was probably worth more than the house I grew up in and say in a tone that barely masked her contempt that a complete philistine who wore a name-tag and a polo shirt to work would dare to give her parenting advice, “The Baby Einstein videos were designed to be educational. It’s brain science. I’ll take two.”

Time and again people would ask me my opinion on the Baby Einstein videos and I’d tell them I didn’t think they were developmentally sound. Time and again people would tell me I was wrong, just because the packaging and the advertising told them it would make their kid smarter. Never mind that anybody with two eyes can look at the videos and see they are junk. Never mind that the parental wisdom that children under two shouldn’t be watching TV has been around forever. Why are we so quick to trust what advertising and packaging tell us are true instead of our own guts? Are we that insecure with our own judgement? Are parents that lazy?

I’m laughing to myself today thinking about all those condescending bitches who used to send their drivers around to the store to fill the family Cadillac Escalade with birthday gifts for their toddlers (I saw a lot of that, it was downtown Boston before the stock market crash) instructing their maids to purge all the Baby Einstein merch from the nursery. “Get that garbage out of here, I read on the internet that it isn’t educational! Now Blake  Jr. will never get into Harvard! “

Ha fucking ha, bitch.

It warrants a mention that parents have been looking for a way to occupy small children since the beginning of time. And no, women in the work force or feminism is not to blame for this particular form (or I’d argue, any form) of crap parenting. Yes, parents of both genders are busier than ever so an excuse to plop your kids in front of the TV while you fix dinner is more seductive as it ever has been. But let’s be straight here people, my grandmother and her  mother and just about every other mother who went before them were stay at home moms. Did they spend their days playing mentally stimulating, developmentally appropriate educational games with their kids? Hell no, they smoked, played bridge and got their hair done while the kids ran around and played outside. And out of those generations of children, plenty of them still were top in their class, got into ivy league schools and landed good jobs, no cracked out kiddie videos required.

Know what is developmentally appropriate? Building a fort with the couch cushions, coloring with those big fat crayons and playing in the sandbox. In fact, I’d argue that almost anything is more appropriate for toddlers than watching Baby Einstein videos. But how would I know? I’m not a parent, I’m just a person with common sense.

Sometimes I’m not so sure I want to have children, but articles like this make me want to breed just to make sure that another generation of children will grow up knowing what it is like to play in the mud, put on their own puppet shows and live with a life that’s not over-scheduled and inundated with pre-packaged crap before they’re even old enough to tie their own shoes.

 

 

 

I Have Boobs, Deal With It.

Sing it, Meghan McCain!

So by now most of us are already over the non-controversy regarding Meghan McCain and a certain chesty twit pic. However it is her response today in the Daily Beast that really intrigues me as it seems to encapsulate the struggles that all well-endowed women face. So McCain posted a picture of herself on twitter sporting vaguely porny looking cleavage. She claimed it was in preparation for her big night in that involved a good book and some takeout. Now I don’t know a 20 something female who would post and unflattering or dowdy picture of herself on the internet and as Broadsheet pointed out, “What do they think young Republican women wear to bed? Lanz of Salzburg?” OK, so posting a megaboobs shot of yourself online might be vaguely tacky (however again, I challenge you to find me a 20-something female who doesn’t have at least one vaguely saucy pic of herself on Facebook) but to be called a slut over it? What century are we in?

 McCain says she has, “struggled to accept the fact that the way I look in a tank top comes off more “sexual” than a flat-chested woman.”  I can totally relate here, there are some styles smaller chested women can wear without stares that I just can’t pass off without looking like Marilyn Monroe. Although it can be a nuisance at time, I’ve always ultimately thought of it as a nice problem to have. I do my best to dress appropriately for the situation I’m in, try to keep it all “tucked in” and not flash people in public, but in the end… I have boobs. They’re big, sometimes people are going to notice them. I’m not going to go around wearing turtlenecks every day or uncomfortable chest minimizing bras just because some people can’t handle the sight of a fully grown woman. 

What’s up with people behaving as if having large or noticeable breasts is a sign of promiscuity? Last time I checked, there was no correlation between cup size and number of sexual partners and if there is… boy did I miss out when I was single. It doesn’t work the opposite way, people don’t look at women with small breasts and think, “Oh, she must be such a prude.”  Why do we look at a woman who has larger breasts, breasts that are often more visible than the breasts of a smaller woman and automatically think that she’s a slut just because her body’s doing what it does naturally? 

Although breasts are highly fetishized in our culture, the fact is that they serve a very practical evolutionary purpose; feeding human babies. Unless you have a lactation fetish, that’s just about the least sexual thing I can think of. Having large breasts is not an invitation for people to stare, comment or think ill of my character any more than having a large nose or ears would be. Living with the body I was born with and feeling comfortable in it, comfortable enough to not want to hide behind boxy clothing doesn’t make me, or Meghan McCain a slut. And while we’re at it, I’m so done with slut shaming. What’s a slut? Anyone who’s had more sex than you have? I’m tired of the word slut. I’m a slut, you’re a slut, we’re all sluts. Why in this day and age do we really think it is our business to comment on who or how many people anybody else is sleeping with anyway? 

Meghan McCain says she’s proud  of her curves, but like so much of her other writing, I feel that she gets close to making a great point and then backs off it in the end. She says she’s not perfect and that she’s still “making mistakes” and that she says she’s, “learned a valuable lesson about the internet and boundaries” and hopes, “other girls can learn from this episode.” Learning to draw the line between the internet and real life is a valuable lesson for sure, but in the end is this a lesson about being who you are, critics be damned, or covering up and shutting up when a few assholes pull out the S word? After all, McCain did threaten to take down her twitter page after the whole incident, something she has never done when the media has repeatedly called her fat. Why is it that a tiny four lettered word like slut has the power to make a confident woman like McCain consider silencing herself? Why is it that we use the word slut so often to defame, discredit and shut down young women? 

It’s something to think about. In the mean time, don’t you even think about calling me and my C cups slutty. Unless, of course, you mean it in a good way.

Midday Barf O Rama

So in keeping with the topic of the Sluttoween,  here are some links you can check out if you really want to throw up in your mouth a little:

For some reading that will make you want to give up on society and move to a yurt in the middle of the wilderness, check out the blog Packaging Girlhood. They are hoping the stripper pole marketed as a children’s toy is a hoax. So am I.

And if you really want to break your brain, see Salon’s article on sexy Halloween costumes for your pets. Now just because she’s a dog doesn’t mean Fifi can’t sex it up once in a while. Seriously, being seen with a dowdy, unattractive pet on Halloween is like totally embarrassing! No more hot-dog or bumble-bee costumes for my Dachshund, this year Sparky is going as a naughty nurse!

People, Sluttoween has gone too far. I call bullshit on these stupid costumes (which aren’t even clever most of the time) and hereby announce a boycott against un-inspired slutty costumes for women of all ages. Forget sexy cop, sexy beer wench and sexy prostitute, this year I’m going as Botulism. Don’t think I won’t do it. Last year I appeared in a fat suit as Teddy Roosevelt. I’ve also donned a zombie Lavinia costume involving so much fake blood that it made other trick or treaters gag. One thing is for sure, for the sake of my sanity the Catholic School girl outfit is staying in the closet this year.

Oh I Don’t Know…

Call it out of character, but I’m having difficulty mustering feminist outrage against the supposedly “new” phenomenon of pre-teens buying into the “Slutoween” trend by donning tarty costumes made especially for them. 

Why? Well first of all, I have trouble with the idea that pre-teen girls trying to dress older than their years is anything new, or even necessarily something that adults should be overly alarmed about. Adolescent girls have always pilfered mom’s lipstick and changed in the bathroom at the school dance into that shorter skirt the ‘rents wouldn’t let them leave the house in. Yeah, part of that is pressure from society, but part of it is also natural curiosity. Trying to figure out what the hell to do with one’s newly morphed pubescent body is a big undertaking and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of experimentation (and plenty of fashion train-wrecks) to figure out your relationship with your budding body. Dressing older (and by association, sexier) is as much about independence to most teen girls as it is about fitting in and being pretty. Instead of trusting our girls to navigate the muddy waters of adolescence and make good choices why do we behave as if it only takes one pair of sparkley fishnets to turn a 13-year-old into a baby prostitute?

Case in point, when I was in seventh grade I saw the movie Clue and decided I wanted to be a French maid for Halloween. My mother tried to talk me out of it. She even tried appealing to my emergent feminism by explaining that French maids are sort of a degrading male fantasy. This tidbit was pretty much lost on me. At that point my budding sexuality did not include any awareness of dominance, submission or other kinks. All I knew was that French maids got to wear frilly costumes, carry feather dusters and speak in smarmy French accents. Who wouldn’t want to be a French maid for Halloween? All mom’s suggestions for other, more appropriate costumes for a thirteen year old (“What about being a bag of grapes!? We can blow up some purple balloons and stick them to a sweat suit!”) fell on deaf ears. I was dug in. I was being a French maid for Halloween. 

Instead of locking me up and throwing away the key, my mother reluctantly took me on a field trip to the local costume shop to pick out the most conservative French maid outfit we could find. She also insisted that I wear a turtleneck under it and drape a shawl over my shoulders, “Because it will be cold out.” I went out trick or treating in the outfit, practiced my smarmy French accent, accosted several people with my feather duster, collected a butt load of candy and came home… without herpes. I did not magically become popular with all the boys. I didn’t even end up dating for another three years. I didn’t ditch my well worn wardrobe of peasant skirts and wool clogs for leather pants and bustiers. The next Halloween I went as Red Death from Phantom of the Opera in pants, a tuxedo shirt, a floor length cape and a mask that covered most of my face. In short, I remained unharmed by my brush with the Slutoween phenomenon. 

Was I just lucky that I didn’t become a statistic? I think not. First of all, I had good parents who wanted to have constructive conversations with me about my choices instead of just slut-shaming me. Because she actually listened to me my mother learned that my interest in being a French maid had more to do with playing a kooky character than pandering to the male sex. In fact, pandering to the male sex wasn’t even on my radar at that age. Even if it had been, I’m sure mom and I would have had a conversation about that too.

Unlike the author of the Daily Mail Article, I don’t believe that, “Parents who allow their offspring to wear this junk should consider putting them up for adoption.” I am so glad that my parents valued me as a person who could make her own decisions instead of thinking of me as a Pretty Pretty Princess that they had to keep pure as long as possible no matter what the cost.

Pre-teens of both genders are thinking about sex all the time and it’s totally natural. What else are you going to do when your brain is totally bathed in hormones? We’d be foolish to think that denying them every pair of tacky earrings or pot of lip gloss is going to stop them from growing up too fast. Guarding your daughters from the trappings of adulthood is a false sense of security. Instead of trying to take away the makeup and the high heels, why aren’t we trying to teach young women that these things don’t have to define them? Because that would mean that parents would actually have to talk openly and honestly about growing up with their kids… and that’s just awkward. Better to call them  whores and ground them until they are 30! 

As a kid I was encouraged to think for myself and stand up for what I believed in and be my awkward, imperfect self in any way that I wanted to be. This didn’t win me many friends in Junior High but in the end I think it made me less susceptible to the junk culture that tells girls their only value is being attractive. I understand that parents have a very real responsibility to protect their kids form predators. I also understand just how damaging it is to sexualize children from a young age. I just don’t think that the solution to the problem is to shelter our children more. I think the solution is to help our children learn to make good choices on their own.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my mom had refused to let me wear that French maid outfit on Halloween. I certainly would have had less fun dressed as a bag of grapes. Would I have merely snuck out in the slutty outfit anyway? Would fishnets and heels become even more attractive and glamorous once I knew that my mother hated them? Of course! Perhaps the fact that I had permission to experiment with the sexy outfit in the first place also empowered me to reject it in the end. Bottom line… kids are vulnerable, precious and impressionable but they are also a lot smarter than we think they are. Raise your kid well and a little eyeliner (or a slutty Halloween costume) isn’t going to change who they are.