Buying for babies

My wife and I have found out that we’re having a girl.  (Three weeks till the due date, by the way.)  This is important to know so that we can buy the right stuff.  Even in this androgynist-feminist age, the baby industry is quite up front about its gender-specific products.  Do you want a boy crib set or a girl crib set?  The Wal Mart web page will let you search them separately.  There are boy and girl car seats and boy and girl baby clothes.  The pregnancy books list the advantages of determining the child’s sex before birth; the main one is that you can buy gender-appropriate baby stuff.  They don’t qualify it by saying “things our homophobic, patriarchal culture regards as gender-appropriate” or anything like that.  In the pregnancy world, there are boyish boys and girlie girls.

This is actually an area where I would have been willing to compromise with the feminists, because I doubt that having blue vs. pink crib sheets has much to do with inculcating appropriate gender roles.  Since we don’t have to, though, my wife and I are getting pink things to prepare for the arrival of our little princess.

The most obvious lesson here is that the feminists are smart enough to defer to consumer sentimentality when challenging it wouldn’t be worth the cost.  Attacking the pink care bears on my daughter’s crib might provoke backlash, and it would do very little for their efforts to turn her into a lesbian later in life.

I think there is more going on here, though.  It is interesting that parents are most insistant about gender distinctions at this time in life when they really do matter least.  After all, without the cues from colored clothes, we would hardly be able to tell the difference between a baby girl and a baby boy.  And perhaps this is the issue.  For us, being manifestly gendered is a part of being human.  If what you’re carrying in your stomach or your arms isn’t a “he” or a “she”, it must be an “it”, a thing.  It was a real relief for my wife and I when the ultrasound technician told us we had a girl.  At last we knew what pronoun to use, and this allowed us to relate to our baby much more vividly.  We could only really think of her as a person when we knew her as not just a person, but as a girl.  All deep relationships are “gendered”.  Only in the impersonal workforce are people just “people”, rather than being the rich realities of men and women.

When we dress a baby girl in girlish clothes, or surround her with girlish toys, we are attempting to complete the manifestation of her humanity.  “This is not an ‘it'”, we say, “This is a ‘she'”.  As children mature, sex differences become more obvious, and there is less need for color cues.  The battle switches inward.  Then we must resist the capitalist-feminist complex that is ever-eager to reduce our “he”s and “she”s into “it”s.