A friend posted a link on my Facebook news feed last night and rage spontaneously combusted inside me.
It was celebrating a blog by author Lisa Bloom, titled “How to talk to little girls”. Have you read it? It's all about giving girls a "life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments" rather than our looks.
It does the rounds on Facebook every few months and women everywhere "like" the living crap out of it and write soppy "share this with every mum you know" comments.
I, on the other hand, responded with the comment: "I HATE THAT POST."
And yes, I wrote it in capital letters.
I hate it for so many reasons. Oh, I know that in an ideal world it would be so very wonderful if women were valued solely for their brains, but that's NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Because we don't live in an ideal world.
So I lean far more on the side of Amanda King and her blog, "Why we SHOULD tell our daughters they are beautiful", who says: "If you spend your daughter's first years of life never telling her she is beautiful, never making a big deal out of her physicality, because you rightfully recognise that it falls absolutely dead last on the list of things that is important about her... what will happen when she gets out into the world without you, and absolutely everybody and everything thing around her, every piece of sensory and social input she receives will be telling her, "You are nothing if you're not beautiful?"
"I believe that helping to shape her ideas of beauty, by exposing her to all kinds of beautiful things, including the beauty in our own varied shapes, in our own bodies as mothers, as the biggest role model our girls will ever have, is a better idea than not talking about beauty at all."
Bloom's article, on the other hand, bemoans the fact that 25 percent of young American women would prefer to win America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize.
Try as I might to muster moral outrage about this statistic, it just annoys me. It presumes everyone should aspire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, despite few women (or men) being capable of it and 25 per cent of the young respondents probably being unsure what the Nobel Peace Prize was exactly when Bloom asked them.
So I’m not surprised they chose winning a modelling competition.
To illustrate her point, Bloom uses the example of meeting a little girl and not discussing her appearance, but having an intelligent conversation with her about books and “deeper issues” – this is a five-year-old we’re talking about – like peer pressure instead. The little girl was surprised and thrilled by Bloom’s line of questioning, as she happened to be an early and prolific reader.
“Will my few minutes with Maya change our multibillion dollar beauty industry, reality shows that demean women, our celebrity-manic culture?” asks Bloom. “No. But I did change Maya’s perspective for at least that evening.”
I wonder how Maya’s parents feel about that. I’d be a little insulted if I were them, because it presumes Maya has never been asked such things before. That she’s only praised for her cuteness.