Death to the pink

Here's a little fact.

If I take May out and she's not wearing pink, everyone assumes she's a boy. "Oh, he's so cute," the butch lesbian will say. "Oh, look at the blue-eyed boy," says the Harvard professor of women's studies. I'm in Cambridge, the center of East Coast liberality for two hundred years.

The metaphor here is so obvious that it's painful. Girls can only be one thing (pink) and boys can be everything else in the world.

Sometimes, even if I've got her in pink, she gets mistaken for a boy. This afternoon at Costco, she was wearing a pair of faded denim capris with butterflies and flowers on them. (Aunt Nikki, who is far more stylish than I am, got them for her.) And a pink top. And yet a woman looked at her and said, "Oh, what a handsome boy!" When her daughter corrected her, she said, "It's so hard to tell when they wear jeans."

So now she not only has to wear pink, she has to wear a dress?

As the mother of a daughter, I feel like I'm waging a guerilla battle against the legions of Pink Princesses. Anything "for girls" is necessarily pink. Usually with the legend "Princess-in-training" emblazoned across it.

What up with that? Princesses don't need training. You get born a princess or you marry a guy and become a princess but it's a temporary state, a waiting state. Princesses are queens in training.

(Christopher feels the need to point out that in a principality, like Monaco, you remain a princess. But I smack him and we continue with my rant without paying any attention to that.)

What's more, the Princess Meme is so insidious that it's taking over a lot of the other "traditional" girl memes. Fairies are now always fairy princesses. Ballerinas are princess ballerinas. Ponies, ponies for the love of little green apples, are princess ponies!

That's all you can find in the girls' section. I spent twenty minutes this morning in Babies R Us looking for any top that was blue and (so as not to add to her impending gender identity) flowery. May has blue eyes and looks best in blue. I found, in the whole of that giant mega store, exactly one flowered blue top.

I blame Disney. Is there a female lead who isn't a princess to start or becomes one by the end of the movie? Yes. Three. Lilo, yes, from Lilo and Stitch. And Mulan from Mulan. Jane from Tarzan. Though Tarzan is the Lord of Greystoke and he's the king of the apes, so.... (We don't remember if the Beast is a prince or just a lord in Beauty and the Beast. But if he's a lord, as he is in the fairy tale, he's close enough to a prince that I don't count her.)

But when do you see Lilo or Mulan at Disney stores? Never.