THANKYOU.
My response which was intended to convey this same message would have been vitriolic and meandering.
My friend gets pissed when his daughter wants princess stuff. He’d literally buy any other item in the store for her if she wanted, but she still wants the princess stuff. The real question is which comes first: the chicken or the egg.
I’m sorry, I’ll let myself out.
Eggs come from girl-chickens…not sure I want to eat whatever they get from boy-chickens.
I think they missed a trick: Dinosaur Eggs! How cool would that be? Appeals to children regardless of gender roles, and it’s technically true. Fuck, I’d buy them, I’m such a big kid.
My wife teaches a children´s musical group. All the children who go there come from gender-neutral, empowering, maker-type, feminist, organic, liberal families. It´s the kind of area we live in. At their last end of the year performance there were five princesses on stage. The script called for only one, but there was no chance in hell any of the girls wanted to play any other part than a princess. My wife and another teacher had to fill in for some of the other parts as there are only two boys in the group. Gender-swapping any parts was explicitly given as an option to the children by the way, so the girls could have been knights, sorceresses or giants if the chose to. They were certainly encouraged to. Just a little story, make of it what you will.
Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers.
When she was little, my daughter would have definitely preferred the pirate egg carton. She only got into the pink-princess thing when she changed daycare centers and the thought-leader among the girls convinced her that girls had to love pink and princesses.
Of course, she didn’t need any encouragement to eat eggs, either. She would have happily eaten them at every meal regardless of what kind of box they came in.
There stood a child, alone before the neatly stacked boxes of eggs, seemingly frozen in time, unable to choose.
‘Should I take the pirate eggs or the princess eggs? My parents have raised me gender-free, keeping my hair kind of short, allowing me to decide whether to wear pink or blue, skirts or lumberjack shirts (like my hero Jill). I’m afraid, though, to be in public, making what is obviously a gender choice. What will they think of me, if I pick the pirate eggs? I really like them, but the princess eggs, well, they feel like what I’m supposed to pick. I identify more closely with one parent than the other, and this might reinforce that closeness, causing some hurt to the other?’
A parent walks over, suddenly, grabbing a plain, white box of eggs with one hand, and the shoulder of the child with the other.
‘Let’s go, Terry! It doesn’t matter, they’re just eggs!’
The child stumbles along in the grip of authority, confused, angry.
‘If it doesn’t matter so much, then why did you reach past the black boxes for a white one?’
It could have been worse. At the Rocket Fizz in my town they sell rattlesnake eggs at the register.
It’s princesses that are the problem. They have the best job: look pretty, boss people around, marry princes, give birth to heirs, speak out for your pet causes, go to parties. I’m kinda sad I can’t be a princess.
The only way to make it fair for the other jobs is to make it near impossible to be a princess in real life. It should only be for the female children of royalty, and those lucky enough to marry a prince. That way it would be so impossible girls wouldn’t dare to dream it, right? Oh, I guess not.
so many rules to being a liberal!
“In my day…”
“Fuck you, grandma!”
Fortunately, that stage does get grown out of pretty quickly, especially when the family does not force it on the child.
The subtle underlying sexism baked into our culture, unfortunately, does not fade away so readily.
I dont know what is going on in Norway, but I have no problems getting my 2 year old daughter to eat eggs - it’s one of her favorite foods! We cook eggs every morning.
Maybe they just need to put some cheese or hollandaise sauce on those eggs. If the kid wont eat that they aren’t worthy. Throw them away and make some new ones.
As a child I remember wanting to be a princess, but being frustrated that princesses don’t really seem to have any power or DO anything.
So I settled for identifying with the evil queens.
I think the better question is why princess=woman=weak not the chicken/vs/egg gambit over whether little girls should ever like pink.
We’re still talking about the eggs, right?
I forgot to add environmentally conscious.
They’re only pirate eggs if they’re exact copies of previously copyrighted chickens.
These, I believe, are more accurately mash-up eggs. Especially if you drop the carton a few times on the way home.
are pirated eggs pre-cracked? or do you need to download that on the edge of a frying pan?
