How many times have you heard a parent say this: “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink.”
That’s what Jenna Lyons was quoted as saying in a recent J. Crew ad, which showed her painting her son Beckett’s toenails neon pink.
Obviously, the ad is nothing but a plug for Essie nail polish, and a pretty effective one at that — it’s been receiving a remarkable amount of hype since last week.
But the commentary has less to do with the brand of nail polish, and more to do with the boy wearing it.
The conservative Media Research Center called the ad “blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”
Ah, of course. Because all kids with an affinity for pink are transvestites, right?
In all seriousness, that statement issued by the MRC shows the intense rigidity to which some people adhere to gender stereotypes, and it’s kind of scary to see these rules applied to children.
“Put some money aside for some psychotherapy for the kid,” Kenneth Ablow, a psychologist and Fox News contributor, said to Lyons in a blog entry.
But Ablow has got it all wrong. It’s the strict rules of gender keeping psychotherapists in business — not deviations from those rules.
Our unrealistic expectations, like those urging boys to hate the color pink, box us in and screw us up. We’re reprimanded for liking the things we naturally like. The controversy surrounding this ad exposes society’s emphatic reliance on social norms.
According to Ablow, the ad is a “dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity.”
There’s one thing he got right: the word “trappings.”
Gender’s confines are trappings. So why are people like Lyons being shamed for abandoning them?
The traps of femininity come in the form of double standards, and we’re all familiar with them. Women can be either bitches or push-overs, sluts or teases.
But men, starting from boyhood, are confined in the same way. Men are encouraged to be autonomous and logical, giving the impression that they’ve got it better than women, who are conditioned to be dependent and overemotional.
Masculinity gives the illusion of freedom, but it’s still a trap. Just look at the uproar little Beckett caused when he wore pink nail polish.
Girls’ identities, on the other hand, come with a little more leeway. We can wear pink nail polish and play with trucks. We can be nurses and engineers. We can modify femininity and mold it to fit us. But the rules of masculinity can’t bend without breaking, which is apparent in Beckett’s J. Crew ad.
Seeing how much — or how little — people can get away with breaking the rules of gender says a lot about the value we place on these constructs. When girls are tomboys, they’re championed for emulating masculinity. But when boys embody a feminine trait, they face endless mockery and questions of sexuality. We’ve completely belittled all things feminine. Why is that?
That’s a loaded question, but one thing is clear in this conversation: gender roles are marketed just as heavily as products themselves. It’s exciting to see ads and products alike abandoning these constructs. Justin Bieber, for example, created his own OPI nail polish line last fall, and named the colors after some of his songs.
It’s another stroke of genius on the part of marketers, who know just how to appeal to the senses of teenage girls across the country. But, the message underneath Bieber’s project tells us that gender barriers are starting to erode. Honestly, when did we ever think a 17-year-old boy would have a nail polish line?
And the most important thing to remember is that no one is getting hurt in the process of this culture shift. A boy is wearing pink nail polish in a fashion ad, and all that has happened because of it is a couple of conservatives got mad. The world will continue to spin without the trappings of gender, and we’ll probably all need a little less psychotherapy, too.
We need to be weaned off our daily doses of gender roles. Even though ads have reinforced stereotypes for as long as they’ve existed, maybe they’ll start showing us more boys with pink nails and moms who celebrate them.
Opening our minds will take time, I’m sure, but all good things are worth the wait.