Liam has a doll!

Anyone remember that song from "Free to Be You and Me?" - Though two points to anyone who remembers the real name from the lyrics.

I dropped Liam at preschool today but rather than just a quick good-bye, which I usually have to do, I stayed around for about an hour. I've been feeling so disconnected to him the past 6 months and wanted to see if my hunches about how he was doing in school were right. It made me sad to see kids - and others - not really respond to him while he asked a question. And, in turn, him not responding to questions that were posed to him, especially one boy's query:

"Liam has a doll."

Liam ignores him while his doll is sitting next to the tinker toy crane he's building.

"Dolls are for girls. Why do you have a doll."

He doesn't reply.

Just like the ponytail incident, I feel a knife go through me and into Liam. I look at Sb for a reaction. We then discuss the gender issue - there's a lot of talk about how this is typical for 4 year olds trying to categorize everything. Well, they learned "dolls are for girls" somewhere that has nothing to do with development. So then I relate my Geena Davis story to her and then walk over to Ms and tell her as well.

This past week-end at the media reform conference in Memphis, I was annoyed that there were going to be so many celebrities speaking - Jane Fonda? Phil Donahue? Geena Davis? I somehow ended up sitting in the Saturday night large conference hall. Geen Davis was introduced and I was about to get up, but her opening words struck me. She talked about how she has always taken movie parts that have strong female characters - Thelma and Louise, A League of Her Own, that TV show where she plays the president. Hmmm....then she talked about her kids, who are the same age as mine - and how they do not have any strong female role models in the movies or tv geared toward kids - with a few exceptions, like Dora the Explorer. She helped start a foundation that funds research on this issue - the results were startling - virtually no positive girl role models in kids programing for kids 11 and under - and few girls to begin with - when they are present - they are stereotyped.

She also lobbies Hollywood to change this. She seems hopeful. I feel cynical, but I was still inspired by her speech more than any other - maybe because the other speakers talked about media critique that I already feel passionately about and didn't learn from. What stuck in my mind of all of the pictures she showed us was, in her retrospective about our generation, a picture of Miss Piggy - and her pig-skinned cleavage.

Having a girl and a boy, I worry about both my kids and the gender stereotyping and oppression - but now I understand that it isn't just the burden on girls to overcome - but also on boys to not be able to fully express the full range of themselves. Was something taken away from Liam today?