outside the (toy) box

I recently read a funny post by subarctic mama about her husband convincing her daughter to get regular (unlicensed) sneakers instead of Cinderella sneakers and I had to laugh!  I fear my own inability to manage such a situation so much that I have gone to rather great lengths to avoid it. 

As I mentioned before, I avoid taking Thing 1 shopping to keep her sheltered somewhat from consumer culture and to circumvent what they aptly call in the business, “the nag factor,”  but shoe shopping is obviously a time where having the child around is fairly important.  Do I opt to bend the rules in the service of her happy feet?  Nah.  Instead I act like a giant weirdo — carrying around a piece of corrugated cardboard with dd’s foot traced on it - sliding it in and out of shoes, holding it up to the sole, etc.  Does this work? Not as well as I’d like, but it does work.  Last time I checked, feet were still 3-D, so the cardboard approximation is a little lame, and it never tells me when the shoes feel too tight.  So, I do fail often, but less often in the summertime since sandals are forgiving. On the other hand, dd always says she loves the shoes, so maybe it is working. Thing 1 is happy, Mom is happy.  The extra effort (I have to return the shoes about 30% of the time) and slightly bizarre behavior (”Hi, yes, my piece of cardboard would like to try these in a size 9 — thanks.”) seems worth it.

It isn’t that I couldn’t tell Thing 1 “no” if she asked for Bratz tennies, it’s that I love not having conflict over this nonsense.  I don’t want her feeling deprived or disappointed in her sneakers, but I also don’t want her to have these things.  Why?  Well, a very solid 60% of the answer is that I just don’t want to support the damn empire (see my last post), and 20% is that I don’t want to help circulate these narrow, bizarre standards of beauty, but there is also another 20% to the answer that I’m quite ashamed of… I also don’t want to buy them because (wait for it) I think they’re tacky. I mean, man, is there anything cheesier than light up little mermaid sneakers? 

I know I shouldn’t care — concern with appearance is one of the lynch pins of the wretched gender knot –I should let her be free, express herself, and wear whatever pleases her (a la Montessori), but I reeeaaalllly don’t want to (Did I just say that out loud?). My husband can and does. He’ll go out with her having done her own hair in her signature style — a couple of seriously lopsided, scraggly pony tails (really scraggly) with mismatched garish ponytail holders (usually one felt flower and one watermelon) and a plaid headband across the forehead (do you remember Bjorn Borg?)  Anyway, it makes me feel badly about myself that I could be so shallow, but I care that she look presentable, and those gnarly sneakers etc. seem just impossibly gauche (to me).

There. I said it. I hate licensed characters mostly (really, 80% of the yuck is intellectual and valid — only 20% is shallow and condescending) for the right reasons, but I also refrain from purchasing for some of the wrong reasons too. 

Admitting this to myself made me wonder about the social class dimensions of the licensed character divide.  I mean, you can get Bratz backpacks and Spiderman jammies by the bushel at KMart, Kohl’s, Sears, Target, etc. but you don’t see hide nor hair of the stuff at boutique clothing stores, or even at the mall chains — gap, gymboree, talbots kids etc.  Why is this?  Is there an upper class/upper middle class distaste for these characters or is there some particular working/lower middle class affinity for promotional merchandise?  Maybe those with more cultural capital dislike them because they are overtly linked to (middlebrow/lowbrow) popular culture.  Rejecting Cinderella shoes = distance from those who make such consumption choices.  Or, perhaps it’s less insidious - perhaps taste is simply )and more innocently) patterned along class lines, a la Pierre Bourdieu.  This has been shown to be true in some other areas of cultural consumption.  Or maybe the class divide has to do with gender ideology — we know that people from working class backgrounds are more tightly wedded to traditional gender roles than those from other social classes, and the characters (superheroes and princesses) certainly celebrate (reify?) such roles.  But, on the other hand, to play the devil’s advocate, to the extent that social class does play a role, trends typically process in more of an emulation fashion, with the lower classes aspiring to be more like the upper classes, and adopting their consumption patterns, in which case, you would expect the lower classes to avoid the merchandise if the upper classes do…. perhaps none of this holds for kids… hmmm. Interesting. I don’t know. 

So, I should go - my day of shopping with my cardboard cutout feet wore me out, and I feel lousy for admitting (to myself) that part of my aversion is taste based. The high horse is so much nicer than the low ground.