It’s Pi Day, the day that math geeks everywhere celebrate the ability to measure properties of a circle. Hooray for Pi Day! I don’t mean to boast, but I am awesome at math. Oh sure, I would be a little rusty these days, but back in the day I rocked the calculus world. I remember taking my very first calculus class and knowing at the onset that I loved it and knew what I wanted to do with my life – which at the time had nothing to do with the housewife lifestyle that I now live – and after that, I concentrated on math and economics and statistics. I worked in a male-dominated field in a male-dominated company; I was the sole woman in my work group, and in the larger group, I had few female colleagues. I mention this because stereotypically, women tend not to pursue careers in the fields of math and science, although this is changing, slowly.
I’ve been thinking a lot about gender roles and stereotypes lately. It’s been the buzz all over the internet, ever since Lego came out with their Friends line. As an aside, had the Friends line been available when I was a child, I would have been all over it. Which brings me to my next point: although I am a math geek and although I spent my career creating models and running mathematical simulations and loving every minute of it, I am also very feminine. I wear makeup, scented lotion, and jewelry every day. I spend a lot of time thinking about clothes and my hair. When I was a child, my clothes were not all pink – because back then, you wore what your mother said you were going to wear, and there were much fewer choices in the clothing department – but I wished they were. My room was painted pink, my bedspread was pink, and my favourite toy was a dollhouse. So. Does my being a girly-girl preclude my being a math geek? Of course not.
My boys’ toy preferences and interests were apparent from a very young age. I was distraught that my nine month old son would fuss in his stroller when I wanted to take him for long walks, until I realized that he would be happy in his stroller when I walked alongside busy streets. Watching the buses, cars, and trucks was enough to make him happy. At age two, he could name all the major car manufacturers; when we walked past a vehicle he could identify the make and model. A friend suggested the “Mighty Machines” videos, and my two sons would watch them over and over again.
My youngest son’s favourite “Mighty Machine” video was one about a demolition site. His favourite game was re-enacting a demolition site, and his chubby, angelic-looking toddler self would build up piles of blocks and toys merely to knock it all down. When he and his brother were 2 and 3, they would play dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were not friends. They killed each other. They fought each other. They would unite against the bad dinosaurs and there would be much carnage. And later, I would see the two boys snuggled together on the couch, my younger son’s head resting on my older son’s shoulder, and they would ask to watch “Mighty Machines”.
The boys are now six and a half and almost eight. The games they play almost always involve a battle of some kind, something blowing up, death, and destruction. In discussing boys and their games, my friend Beck articulated something that I had been struggling to put into words; she said that a lot of traditional male play has to do with safely channeling male aggression, and that it also has to do with little boys grappling with the ideas of justice and helping the innocent. This struck exactly the right note with me. I once was having a friendly discussion with another mom, and when I joked about my children and their fascination with blowing things up, she told me to watch out, lest I have a “Columbine situation” on my hands. You can imagine how that made me feel.
I recently read an article in which the author complained about her daughter and her love for pink clothing and princess accessories. She had encouraged her sons to wear pink and play with dolls, but she disliked her daughter taking part in the same type of play. She was, she said, more comfortable when her children challenged gender norms than when they conformed to them. This upset me in a way I could not articulate, and I still can’t, really. I cannot imagine how I would have felt, as a child, if the only play available to me was of a “male” variety, or even of a gender neutral one.
My children play games that would seem to be violent. They don’t have dolls and they don’t wear pink. They have friends who are girls. After school, in the playground, they play games where they spy on the bad guys and then shoot them. They love stuffed animals. The bad guys get body parts chopped off in their games. They turn off the TV when a sad story comes on the news. This morning they saw an itinerant bottle-picker digging through the recycling in our alley, and when I explained what he was doing, Mark teared up and Jake looked worried, at the thought of someone with no job and no home going through other people’s trash for money.
My boys are compassionate, empathetic, and kind AND they are attracted to violent games and toys. This does not make them violent. They know the difference between a game and real life. When we attempt to force children into a particular role, when we insist that boys have dolls and girls have trucks, we do them a disservice. The world has room for everyone: tomboy girls and boys who play Barbies, as well as girly-girls and boys who stab each other with pretend light sabres, and everything in between. Children are not what they play with or wear, just as my penchant for pretty things does not take away from my ability to solve an equation.
