I am sorry if I offend, but among the current fads I don’t love is the collection of vinyl stick figure decals representing one’s brood on the backside of the family tank. To me this advertising of your family census is just icky. But I dislike it mostly because I discovered last week to my dismay that Only Boys Can Be Weight-Lifters and Only Girls Can Cook.
The stick figures representing males all have legs sticking out which end in some sort of masculine footwear. The younger males wear shorts, the older trousers. The females all have little triangular skirts, to be sure we can see their gender immediately. No mistaking Ryan for Ashley, nor Shopping Mom for Barbecue Dad.
I wanted to buy a stick figure decal for one of my grown kids as a joke. He makes a mean Hollandaise Sauce. But the only decal available on the I Can Cook peg was wearing a skirt. Nearby was the I Can Lift Weights decal – perfect for my Russian-squatting daughter who is working on bench-pressing her body weight. Too bad that decal was a flat-chested male with no curves–or skirt–in sight. But there was Grocery Mom, Golf Dad, Singing Girl, and Baseball Boy, all properly attired like something out of the auf Wiedersehen scene in the Sound of Music.
(Just an aside, I had to wear a skirt to school until I was in the 7th grade, so I’m a little twitchy on this subject. We were allowed to wear pants only when the New England winters gave us sub-zero temperatures, and even then it was preferred that we still wear skirts with tights and knee socks. I also had to wear a gym uniform twice a week which consisted of a hideous royal blue dress with MATCHING BLOOMERS! Yes, BLOOMERS! And this was in the late 1960s in Boston, not in 1948 Kansas.)
How is it that despite Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that many women continue to be thwarted by glass-ceilings, and despite that fact that these families are supported as often by Mom’s generous paycheck as CEO, CFO, or MD as Dad’s, they are buying pictures of boys in shorts and girls in skirts? Insistently?
Someone might have fun skewering this trend with some realistic alternatives. Two (different-looking) Daddies. Or Mommies. A Transgendered Uncle. The Cougar Mom and the Boy-Toy. The 3-Legged Cat. The Cross-Dressing Grandpa. The Pyromaniac Cousin.
But that would just be another waste of vinyl. Instead, let’s politely suggest that they scrape it off the car and find something better to do with their time, and their kids. Like telling their daughters they Can Lift Weights, and their sons they Can Cook.