Female Students, Rapunzel, and "Girl" Toys

So, I was thinking about all of this and how it applies to my students, or children I interact with regularly. I don’t always have the same students come back each month. That means that I have to completely re-evaluate my students every time.

I do a monthly art class on the third Saturday of the month where I show the kids a kind of art that I think they probably don’t get to do in school. I spent spring and summer doing printmaking, and late summer and fall showing them things like metal embossing, paper marbling and bookmaking, and working with polymer clay. It’s a lot of fun, and the kids like the fact that I’m not grading them and they’re free to experiment. There is no assignment, no rubric. They just come, learn a new kind of art, and create.

The split of boys and girls is usually pretty even. I have a core group of about four students who come back every time, two boys and two girls. The rest rotate in and out. Sometimes kids only come once, sometimes they come every other month, or just a few times. The classes are free, so they’re not losing anything by not coming.

Anyway, I got to thinking about how I teach and how I interact with students. There’s a really great article here about how to talk to little girls, and how emphasizing their appearance can lead to insecurities, eating disorders, and a life focused on appearances.

So, taking notes from that article, when I talk to female students, I try to get them to talk about less superficial things. This isn’t usually a problem with art students, because they enjoy talking about art and the creative process. So I try to engage them in that, what they think about art, how they like to work, what they do and don’t like about art at their school. Junior high is my favorite age group to teach, because they’re more articulate than elementary school kids, but they haven’t become jaded and bored like many high school kids I have encountered.

And junior high kids are very smart and perceptive. The girls I teach often find much more clever ways of doing their projects than the way I showed them. I love that. I love that they’re fearless. I wish there were some way I could reach out to other girls, girls who think art is dumb or boring, and show them that it’s amazing, and that they can have freedom to express themselves with it. That there’s more to life than the superficial.

I’ve noticed that with older girls, junior high and up, it isn’t too difficult to get them to open up and think about things other than appearances. But with the little ones, the five year olds, it’s much more difficult to steer the conversation in other directions.

A friend of mine’s daughter, for example, is five. She just loves Disney princesses, and right now her favorite is Rapunzel. Hey, cool, I love Rapunzel too. She’s smart, quirky, and loves to paint. What’s not to love about her?

Well… my friend’s daughter compares herself to Rapunzel a lot. She wishes that she had long gold hair like Rapunzel, instead of her short, mousy brown hair.

I tried getting her to talk about this one day. “But Rapunzel cuts her hair at the end,” I told her. “It looks a lot like yours at the end of the movie."

“Rapunzel doesn’t cut it!” She corrected me. “Eugene does.”

Well, this is true. The hero of the story cuts Rapunzel’s hair off in order to save her from the witch who has been masquerading as her mother for her whole life.

“Okay, but still, she has short brown hair at the end, ‘cause her hair changes color. It looks like her mom’s. Your hair looks like your mom’s too.”

She didn’t look very satisfied with my answer. “I guess,” she muttered.

This was distressing to me, because I love the Disney girls, and I feel that they’re much stronger heroines than most people give them credit for. The problem with the girls lies not in their original stories, but in the way they are marketed.

For example, Rapunzel. Really, she should have her short brown pixie cut hair in all the marketing, because that’s how she looks at the end of the movie. But all the dolls and toys and pictures still show her with long blonde hair. How confusing for little girls. And how disappointing, because Disney could have really changed the way people see princesses with Rapunzel.

It frustrates my friend, because her daughter, at the tender age of five, laments her lack of golden hair and already worries about being fat, much to her dismay. She home schools the kids, so her daughter is picking this up from being at friend’s houses. It’s very distressing, because her daughter is focusing on the superficial aspects of Rapunzel, and ignoring what an amazing girl she really is. She’s very smart—she knows how to chart stars, she knits, plays guitar, bakes, plays chess, dances, pretty much everything under the sun, because she lives alone in her tower and has lots of time. She paints murals on every bare inch of wall that depict herself smiling and free, looking like a firework streaking across her walls. She longs to leave her tower not because she meets the hero, Flynn/Eugene, but for herself. Flynn is merely the catalyst who finally gets her out. Rapunzel has longed to leave for nearly her entire life. The first time we see Rapunzel, she’s singing a song titled “When Will My Life Begin?”, lamenting the fact that while she has time to cultivate her talents, it’s not enough. She longs to leave and find out what the “floating lights” she sees every year are on her birthday are.

And all of those amazing characteristics are ignored because of her golden hair, which she loses in the end anyway. It’s very distressing, trying to get a five year old to understand that, because to the five year old, all she sees is her Rapunzel doll with long gold hair, the other toys and story books and pictures of Rapunzel with that hair.

Little girls, like around the ages of 5-6, grow up learning about how much we emphasize appearances. Toys for girls that age are all pink and sparkly, because heaven forbid little girls want to play with “boy” toys. Look at any toy ad, like say the ones from Toys R Us that are probably in your newspaper almost daily this time of year. The “girl” toys are printed on pages with pink borders, and all of the toys are “traditionally” girly. Whereas the boy toys are on blue pages. Why do we separate children at such an early age?

I feel so frustrated when I want to go get things for Toys For Tots, and all the “girl” toys look the same. What if a girl likes cars? Or superheroes? Based on the way these toys are packaged and separated within toy stores, she’s not allowed to. How awful that must be for girls who don’t fit into the mold that society has made for them.