For those who are going to weigh in about how my daughter will rebel and that girls just like pink or that just wait, she’ll want it when she dresses herself… a) hmmm, funny, I never did and b) I’m not banning the colour from the house, just refusing this bizarre world in which pink is the only colour girls can wear. A few months ago, my little girl had grown into some clothing we’d been given and I reluctantly dressed her in it. Her first pink stuff. Stripey hot pink and orange pants (they look better than that sounds) and a hot pink jacket from someone else. Surprisingly, it looked good. And then I took her out into a world where every other little girl was wearing pink and remembered why I have a problem with it. Have you been into a mainstream clothing shop for babies recently?

It’s about limiting her options. Already. It’s about telling her she can’t have the rainbow. I want to raise a girl who believes she can do and be anything, just like the posters said on the trains when I was growing up. I fear that I’m living in a strange retro world where feminism didn’t happen, despite the fact that I’m working and my partner is not the only man at playgroup, so clearly it did. However, as the slogan goes, I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy and we ain’t there yet.

I’m not quite as intense as the Swedish couple who are concealing their child’s gender from anyone who isn’t changing the nappies. I do however understand where they’re coming from. I gave my child a gender-neutral name, partly because I had heard about a study where people were less likely to hire a person based solely on whether their name sounded male or female. I wanted my first interaction with my baby to be non-gendered (it didn’t turn out that way because of an anaesthetist who spilled the beans, but the intention was there!). If this sounds like overkill, then you might be someone who has never been uncomfortable with your gender.

I remember reading in Sandy Stone‘s book about her gender transition that some psychiatrist insisted she wasn’t serious about transitioning when she turned up to a session wearing pants. She had to point out the window at the vast majority of cisgendered women out there dressed exactly as she was. And yet today, we have exactly the same double standards about what “femininity” is. When Caster Semenya won a race by too great a margin for a “woman”, she was subjected to a raft of sex tests (and let’s not get confused: it was her sex and not her gender that was in question; her gender identity was clearly female or she wouldn’t have been entering a women’s race). That’s all odd and challenging but when it got offensive was when YOU magazine gave her a makeover: apparently, you’re “really” a woman when you wear make-up and a dress.

Some will say that the Semenya case demonstrates clearly that there are differences between “men” and “women”, that even the small amount of extra testosterone from internal testes gave Semenya an advantage. Well, sure. No one is denying that certain biological characteristics lead to certain practical outcomes on average but these tiny differences, in relative strength, speed, stamina, what-have-you are blown out of proportion through a lifetime of socialisation.

Recent studies have shown that when parents thought they were dealing with girls, they were more likely to describe the child as happy and socially engaged and more likely to underestimate the child’s physical abilities — even when the child was actually a boy they’d been told was a girl. As Sharon Begley explains, in her review of Lise Eliot’s book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, “Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens.”

I can only imagine that such perceptions lead to a long-term distortion of minor differences, as girls are interacted with as if they are more social, thus becoming more social, and as their physical activity is limited for fear they will hurt themselves and they slowly internalise the message that they are not as competent. When we measure “innate” sex differences in adults, it is the result of this long-term conditioning we are measuring. Begley again: “How we perceive children — sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains.” (It’s worth reading the whole article; Begley succinctly summarises Eliot’s findings. There’s also an interview over at Salon with Eliot which isn’t as good as it could have been.)

The other book doing the rounds at the moment is Nurtureshock by sociologists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. I’ll leave the bulk of my thoughts on this book for another post but one interesting idea from it relates to how we over-reward our children for underachievement and how that actually undermines self-esteem. I question the phrases we use: how often in a day do you say “good girl” or “good boy” when what you really mean is “brave girl” or “clever boy”? And how often are we, through this, disguising the different things we praise boys and girls for? One alternative approach is Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Another book I haven’t actually had time to read, I understand the concept to be that you eschew all criticism and praise and instead just reflect back to the child what they did: “hey, you rolled over by yourself — now you can reach your toy. Hey, you knocked over the milk — now, we’ll have to clean it up.”

While we had trouble doing this consistently, we have done our best to switch to describing our daughter’s actions and affects. It’s amazing how often I now think hard to work out why I think something is praiseworthy — was she adventurous? canny? strong? Would I think those things were praiseworthy in a boy or would I expect them?

I care about this because I want my daughter to grow up confident and capable. I want her to be free from the debilitating disease of self-doubt that seems to afflict almost every woman I know, no matter how competent or high-powered. I worry that she will be one of the few girls in her generation to have those attributes and once again, I worry that my efforts to help her be a strong individual will mark her out as different in a society that colour-codes every toy, every item of clothing and even the pages of the catalogs, just in case we were to mistake a practical toy that encouraged spatial play as suitable for our girl, when obviously, she should be playing with the pink cleaning cart clearly marked “girls only” on the packaging.

My mother tells a story that my Nan — my father’s mother — wouldn’t breastfeed him if they had guests, even in another room of the house, because everyone would know what she was doing. She was born in 1899 and had my father at 40, so she came from a very different era. I think about that — my father as an infant, screaming from hunger and being ignored because of social standards — and I feel so sad for him. I worry that this early experience set the scene for his ambivalent attitude to food (and now his diabetes because of that relationship). I worry that we are returning to that sort of society.

I think that some of the discomfort with public breastfeeding is this idea that breastfeeding is intensely sexual and our newly conservative society — ironic, given the amount of flesh shown on the beach or any television you care to flick on — sees sexuality as intrinsically dangerous. Oh wait — no, just female sexuality. Male sexuality is just fine: want to go longer? a bigger penis? would you like some barely-clad woman with your car/beer/burger?

I’m not about to claim that breastfeeding is never sexual. Recently, I came across an incredibly brave post about breastfeeding and this particular woman’s intense dislike of how it felt sexual to her. My nipples have never been particularly sensitive, and apart from the pain of abrasion early on and suffering through mastitis, feeding my daughter has never felt like anything much for me. That makes me a bit sad: I’d been led to believe oxytocin made it a wonderful, dreamy experience, but for me it ranges from a dull chore (early on, when feeding sessions seemed to go forever, I entertained myself by watching Six Feet Under from beginning to end, about an episode per feed) to a pleasant interlude. Either I don’t get the oxytocin or it’s too gentle a transition for me to notice anything is happening.

That’s a distraction from the real issue, though. Even the woman who says breastfeeding is sexual to her is not sitting there revelling in the sensations and wantonly exclaiming her pleasure. So the public discomfort is entirely projection: there’s a mouth on that nipple and that makes the viewer intensely uncomfortable because of their relationship to their body and their sexuality. That’s not entirely surprising in a society where we increasingly cater for fundamentalist fear of female sexuality — the only person who ever explicitly criticised me for breastfeeding in public admonished me that “Muslims live around here too, you know!”

So having wandered into this tangle of icky cultural mores, how do we get out? That is, how do I help my daughter understand that her body is beautiful and natural and that nudity is delightful, not something to be ashamed of? How do we, as a family, continue to have baths together without my partner being accused of indecency? (I say my partner, because we are in a heterosexist society that assumes women are not interested in each other, and to be honest, the statistics do indicate most perpetrators of sexual crime are male). We’re not nudists, in the sense that we don’t go out to summer camps and play tennis while naked, but we live in a warm climate and we certainly have had naked, non-sexual hot-tubs with close friends and we have a very casual attitude to nudity in the house.

It’s complicated: obviously, she needs to know that some people are uncomfortable with nudity, so she doesn’t just get her kit off at random friend’s places. I was going to write that she needs to understand that being nude is something we do in front of really close friends, not strangers but since my whole argument rests on the idea that breastfeeding in public is okay, I don’t really believe that, do I? For me, if I’m honest, it comes down to a belief in topless equality (see TERA or Go Topless!). I have regularly swum topless, I’ve been topless at Burning Man, I’ve even stage-dived topless. I simply don’t see that women’s bodies should be as sexualised as they are, or that men’s should be seen as non-sexual.

My daughter needs a separate message about her bodily integrity, that her body is her own and no one gets to touch it without permission. I want my daughter to grow up proud of her body, comfortable saying an enthusiastic YES! to sex when she wants it and equally comfortable saying a firm NO when she doesn’t, a vibrant young woman who knows that feeding a baby when it is hungry is the most natural thing in the world. I have a feeling that my daughter is going to be a little unusual among her peers and that makes me pretty sad. Either that or she’ll be hyper-embarrassed about her parents, but gee, what’s new?

According to the fabulous video, The Story of Stuff, in the US, 99% of the stuff that is bought ends up discarded within six months. That’s just disgusting to me. Then there’s the issue of pollutants and pesticides in growing new cotton… it’s a fraught issue. My guidelines go something like this:

1. Avoid new if possible. Reuse.
2. If new is necessary, try hand-made, market-made, fair trade rather than corporate.
3. If these aren’t available, aim for commercial but organic & sweatshop-free.

Everything old is new again

One of my solutions is recycling, but even better is reusing. There’s a reason that the slogan is ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. It’s supposed to go in that order. Secondhand is good, fifth-hand is better. Once upon a time, everything was made to last, and then the capitalists realised that their markets were finite unless they did something about it. That something was inventing built-in obsolescence. So, fifth-hand is about as good as you’ll get these days.

With stuff for kids, there’s also a cost factor. Even if it’s second-hand, shelling out hard-earned cash for something you’ll use for maybe a year at most is disheartening.

The hand-me-down system is a gem here — our baby’s cot, cot sheets, high chair, the glider I feed her in, all came from diverse wonderful friends. They don’t always have what I’m looking for though. Freecycle (which almost certainly has a chapter in your area, so check it out) is one way I solve this: I got my baby’s change table for free from a Freecycler, and recently I’ve been grabbing bags of clothing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

There’s a problem here though. The clothing from Freecycle is frequently not what I would buy myself. For one thing, it’s almost all gender coded in ways that I find extremely challenging. (I’m sure there was a gender revolution when I was growing up. Second-wave feminism, wasn’t it? How on *earth* did we get back to every single girl baby wearing only pink?) For another thing, at least half of it is polyester or poly-cotton, which I avoid.

Ideally, we’ll make the clothes ourselves and swap with other people doing the same, on and round and down the chain. This is time-intensive, of course, and I don’t think one mama could possibly take care of her bub and knit/sew/make every stitch they wear. Not in this day and age. Unless you’re happy with baby owning only five items in any one size. And washing every single day.

What my little conspicuously consuming little heart really wants to do is go out to all those adorable clothing stores and buy pure organic cotton and bamboo items so that her darling skin never has to touch anything harmful. And I’ll feel good doing it, right?

Well, wait a minute. Organic is one thing, but who made the stuff? Was someone exploited in the process? So now, I have another criterion: fair-trade or Australian-made so I know there was no sweatshop labour involved. And ideally, that cotton was grown somewhere with abundant natural rain, because growing cotton is intensely water-intensive and Australia doesn’t have a lot of it (it’s an issue everywhere, to be honest). Complicated enough for you?

I thought I’d try to make it easy by keeping track of the local brands and what they claim, so I have a quick reference guide handy.

I’ll add to this as you help me find other brands.

These are the ones I know… I haven’t had time to research extensively. Got a favourite brand? I’ll add it to the table!

Oh, and of course, anything I buy new gets added back in to the hand-me-down/Freecycle system. I won’t throw it away unless it’s absolutely falling apart. It’s only fair.