Lipstick on a Pig

Sydney came home one day with a picture of a dinosaur she had drawn during one of her outings—the library or preschool, I don’t remember which. It was a girl dinosaur, she informed me, because it was wearing lipstick.

Uh oh. Gender minefield, my brain said.

See… I don’t wear lipstick. Or eyeshadow. Or blush, or nail polish, or any of the other body painting items that I presume 90% of my fellow women use. I don’t even own these items, nor have I ever understood how or why I would use them. Furthermore, most of my stockings get used for practical things like sucking up unwanted ladybugs in the vaccum in the winter or shoring up tomato-laden plants in the summer. I own a few dresses but rarely wear them, all of my shoes are comfortable and usually scuffed up, my regular jewelry consists of one plain gold wedding ring, and basically I’m lucky if I manage to put all of my clothes on right side in and get to work without spilling something on them in the morning. In short, I don’t get the whole feminine body image thing. I don’t even think about it.

Add to that the inherent stereotypes created by a society which assumes that “lipstick is for girls, trucks are for boys” and my need to create for my daughters a caring and open childhood free of added burdens simply because of their physical sex while at the time time not dooming them to freakdom and ridicule by their less open minded peers and parents, not to mention trying to explain (for example) the symbols on the bathroom door for practical purposes such as not going into the wrong toilet by mistake, and what exactly do I say? Clearly, an older person or a peer informed Sydney about the lipstick=girls connection. And since Sydney’s mother doesn’t have or wear lipstick, that part probably had to be explained too. And now here I come along, bent on undoing Sydney’s developing understanding of why her dinosaur is a girl.

But on the other hand… what if she wants to be the icon of feminity when she gets older? Who am I to impose my own views of gender on her? I certainly don’t want to limit her possibilities just because I happen to be an unrepentant thirty-something tomboy with a penchant for motorcycles and excavators and no fashion sense at all. What if she’s destined to design the next Ralph Laurenesque line?

And what will happen when she does start toeing the line in the makeup department? How will she interpret her mother’s complete lack of competence in this arena? Where will she learn to wear lipstick and eyeshadow and what purse to carry in the fall if not from me?

All this was going through my head as I finally said, carefully: “Boys can wear lipstick too, you know. And I don’t wear lipstick, and I’m a girl.”

To which she replied: “But mommy… you do wear lipstick! You put it on whenever your lips get dry!” Proving that even though she is out in the world she still sees the world largely through the actions of her own parents. I do indeed wear Chapstick, mostly in the winter, and so does Daddy, so we decided it was still a girl dinosaur but her lips were dry which was why she was wearing chapstick/lipstick.

With that settled, Sydney rattled the picture in my face. “ROAR!!!” she said.

Phew. Dodged a bullet. May she think Chapstick and Lipstick are the same thing for many years to come.