Last week, the Huffington Post published a piece by Lisa Bloom: How to Talk to Little Girls. The article went viral, getting thousands of likes on Facebook and getting reposted, well, everywhere. In her op-ed, Bloom talks about the importance of not complimenting little girls on their looks, and instead engaging them in discussion about books, about ideas, about current events – anything other than beauty or fashion.
There was a lot to like about her piece, but something she wrote gave me pause. Recalling her conversation with a little girl named Maya, Bloom writes:
Not once did we discuss clothes or hair or bodies or who was pretty. It’s surprising how hard it is to stay away from those topics with little girls, but I’m stubborn.
Obviously, this was one conversation. But I’m troubled by Bloom’s suggestion that when talking to young girls, adults should stay away completely from the topics of clothes, hair, and prettiness. That’s both unrealistic and unhelpful.
Yes, we place much too much emphasis on young women’s appearance. That focus starts heartbreakingly early; many of you may have seen this story about the 6 year-old who thinks she’s fat. It’s an infuriating realization that many girls that age (and even younger) worry about their bodies. So it makes excellent sense to engage our little sisters in conversation about topics that have nothing to do with appearance.
But we also need to remember that fashion isn’t the enemy. Cruel and narrow standards and impossible ideals are. Ignoring subjects like clothes and hair does nothing to equip our daughters and little sisters (and, let’s face it, ourselves) to deal with the pressure to look good. All it does is leave many girls feeling shallow for still caring about beauty.
It’s not evidence of superficiality to take an interest in clothes or shoes or make-up. Girls can care about fashion while also caring about books, about sports, about nature, about making a difference in the world. We need to get past the myth that an interest in beauty makes you vain and frivolous. Girls need to be reassured that it’s okay to care about clothes and hair, but they also need reminders that they are valued for so much more than their looks. Let’s lose the false choice that says we either validate little girls for their brains or for their beauty. We need to be fearless about praising both.
This is personal to me. I’m not just a college professor and a writer. I’m also a father to a little girl. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t tell her how beautiful she is. But I also praise her for the other things she does, and as she grows more vocal, I engage her in conversation in a host of other topics. I read to my daughter every night – and I help her pick out her outfit for the following day. My little girl loves clothes as well as books. And I want to encourage her in both passions.
My daughter — and the many other amazing young women I’m privileged to work with – are some of the reasons why I’m involved with Healthy is the New Skinny and the Perfectly Unperfected Project. These twin initiatives are designed to remind us that beauty happens on a spectrum – and that happiness and fulfillment and the right to be respected aren’t just for the slender and the seemingly flawless. Our models (who are also role models) aren’t ashamed to care about clothes and accessories and looking good. But they also know that as much joy and fun as there can be in fashion, there’s a lot more to life as well. And they’re committed to embracing all of it.
Like Lisa Bloom, I’m stubborn. So when it comes to clothes and hair and prettiness, I’m stubborn enough to believe that we should talk to our daughters about those things too.
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[...] Thursday column is up at Healthy is the New Skinny this morning. Let’s Talk to Girls about Beauty, Too was written as a response to this generally excellent Lisa Bloom essay at the Huffington Post. An [...]
I agree with the reasoning here but not with part of the outcome. Were most messages aimed at girls about anything OTHER than prettiness and femininity, I’d see far less wrong with a constant flow of reinforcement of how pretty a little girl is. But girls are already hypersaturated with this material; if adults in her life are conscious of this, swinging the pendulum a little far in the other direction is going to help the ultimate cause, not hurt it.
When I’m with girls (I’m not a parent myself) I don’t encourage beauty talk, but if they bring it up I listen and ask questions. They don’t need ANYTHING more than that from me. They don’t need me telling them they’re pretty; they don’t need my compliments; they don’t need my reinforcement of what they see every damn day. They need me not shaming them for their interests, of course, so I don’t. (And it should be noted that I write a blog about cultural messages surrounding beauty, so I think interest in beauty is far from frivolous.) Perhaps if it were my daughter I’d feel differently. I just feel like for the girls in my life, if I can offer them a safe haven from feeling like they’re being examined–even positively! which most little girls are!–then it’s my responsibility to offer them that space, early on. If they want to talk about wearing makeup and whatnot there are ways to talk about that without just going back to “you’re so pretty,” but THEY must be the ones to lead that conversation. Not me, the adult.
Autumn, I hear you. But at the same time, the only way we deconstruct the toxic messages about beauty is if we engage with them. Waiting until the kid brings them up strikes me as ignoring the proverbial elephant in the living room; I think we do well to engage on all fronts. The message has to be that girls are valued for so much more than their looks, we agree on that. But NOT talking about fashion or clothes conveys the unmistakable message that we see those as somehow less important.
Let me be clear that in my work as a teacher, a mentor, and an adviser to the Healthy is the New Skinny initiative I don’t go around telling young women how pretty they are. That would be inappropriate. But we can engage questions of fashion and aesthetics as interesting and worthwhile subjects in their own right even without offering body-based compliments.
Hugo, it sounds like we’re reaching similar conclusions with different action points? I don’t mean to question you telling your daughter she’s beautiful every day–certainly you know her needs more than I do. I just wonder how helpful it would have been for me as a girl to receive daily compliments on that elephant in the living room, especially when at some point it’ll be an elephant that most girls will question and challenge and wrestle with. (I should add here that in the interviews I do with women about beauty, unless one’s family had an extreme position on the matter nearly all of my interviewees reference the utter normalcy of their family’s take on appearance. I think this is one of those things that varies family by family, including feminist families. My parents literally never once told me I was pretty, and it’s difficult to say what impact that had on me, but in my mind that’s what’s “normal.” Certainly I’m not ashamed of engaging with beauty, given that it’s my primary topic!)
It will be rare the child who won’t bring up these issues at some point, right? I mean, that’s part of the point here: That girls who are bringing home a strong interest in beauty and its accoutrements shouldn’t be shamed for their interest. I just think that there are ways to have that engagement with girls besides compliments, even as those compliments are coupled with reinforcement of other values. “Pretty” can turn into a really loaded word, and I’d rather engage on her level of that word and concept than give her my own impressions, even if they’re entirely well-meaning.
Absolutely agreed. And if Bloom had limited herself to the advice to “take it easy on the compliments about the looks”, that would have been another thing altogether. But her op-ed went much further — she doesn’t think we should engage young girls about beauty and fashion at all. It’s one thing to go easy on the “you’re so pretty” remarks, and another altogether to refuse to talk about clothes or make-up or style. That was what struck me as the real bridge too far.
Hugo, thank you for this. My parents most definitely praised me growing up – for my brains, my talents and my humor. I am so thankful for that! However, I don’t recall either of them ever telling me I was pretty, at least until maybe my wedding day or since. I always wondered, is it because they don’t think I’m pretty, or is it because they don’t want me count beauty as being important? Being that my mom was in a beauty pageant at 17, it’s always seemed odd to me that it wouldn’t be more important for them to acknowledge their daughter’s looks. As a mom of a little girl, I have always tried to compliment her on both her brains and her beauty, also her humor, her kindness and her love of animals. There are definitely so many more things to focus on in life than outward beauty, but it is a part of self-esteem and is important as we grow.
On another note, Hugo, I applaud you for bringing to light so many different issues and knowing that with every post, you will have those who agree and those who disagree. It’s not always fun putting yourself out there and knowing that what you write isn’t necessarily what is “popular”, but it’s important and appreciated. Enjoy your holiday weekend!
Fashion is a lot like politics. One doesn’t have to abandon it just because your sentiments are going somewhere away from the way it’s been codified at the moment. There are paths of thought many of us only discover later in life, as they are quite intentionally not mentioned much in our schools. So it is with clothing as an art form. It is something which can be beautiful on any bodily canvas wide or narrow.
I must admit to being a little ambivalent about a title like “Healthy is the New Skinny”, being myself an advocate of such paradigms as Health At Every Size. “Perfectly Unperfect” I think gets at it better. To me the saddest thing is that a girl who thinks she’s fat automatically knows from outside propaganda to put a negative spin on that. What is so bad inherently about a living, breathing material that is essential to everyone’s body? Or a perfectly fine, perky, flirty three-letter word which has been dragged through the mud by those whose standing to dictate what it means has been sheepishly conceded for far too long? I just got wind of a web site which takes this in a decidedly refreshing direction. It’s called “F$%^ Yeah Chubby Girls”. If all the chubby girls I knew in my youth had that attitude, I know my life would have been much happier. May it be so for my young comrades going forward!
Autumn has a point. When i was a little girl, stranger would compliment my sister. And then see me. And add : “But you’re beautiful, too”
And it felt awfully wrong to me as ” But you’re no monster, dear”…
Lisa Bloom set the example of a stranger talking to a little girl. Her suggestion is too extreme if everyone was to follow it, but as very few people does, it’s a good point to have a balance.
I had a monthly reading magasine but i don’t recall having discuss it with someone outside my family as a child (and i loved them, but it was my little secret).
I frankly would have loved having talks like that with grown ups (even as a teenager)
Have a nice day,
Plop
On the one hand:
Not a day goes by when someone tells my two-year-old how pretty she is. When I catch the conversation, I always add “thanks, and she is smart too–and strong!” and then proceed to tell them how she is starting to read and loves to practice writing her letters and really understands quantities.
On the other hand:
Within the limits of the contents of her dresser, my daughter makes her own fashion (i.e. t-shirt) choices. She also recently went to the shoe store with me to pick out her first pair of own shoes. I plan to teach her, sometime down the road, how to pull an outfit together and make matching color choices, knowledge that I gained from my Grandmother and that has allowed me to dress well on a shoestring budget, but for now, I am perfectly ok with my little daughter wanting to wear her blue clogs with a pink-and-brown t-shirt and green pants.
On the third hand:
I often pull her aside to look in the mirror, right before bathtime. We look at her face and body and talk about all the things we love about them, such as her dimples, her nose, her soft skin, her strong legs and arms, all that. I hope to build in her that way an appreciation for her own body and what it can do before she runs into commercials that tell her she has to be one or the other way.
On the fourth hand:
When we go shopping, she gets to walk through both, the boys’ and the girls’, sections of the store. When she was a baby, we didn’t do much pink, but rather exposed her to all possible colors, so that now, she doesn’t feel compelled to pick pink things only because she’s a girl. In fact, to limit the number of pink things in the house, I pronounced a ban on the color to our relatives, and voila, while some “girlie girl” clothes and toys still came our way, folks also knew to pick alternatives if there were any available. Surprisingly, I’ve gotten a LOT of support for that, even from my super conservative inlaws. And when my little girl, whose hair has yet to grow long, is out on the playground scaling the frighteningly tall climbing structures in her jeans dungarees and her blue or green t-shirt, we both have a lot of fun when people and other kids tell her she’s wearing “boy colors” or she looks like a boy. Whatever. The next minute, we’ll be dancing around our house in purple fairy wings and a ladybug skirt.
I’ve just stumbled on an article from the Denver University’s student paper from about five years ago, entitled “Feminism and Sexism: A Reconciliation” by Jordan Cass. It can’t be found online, so this is a partial manual transcription:
(after he sees his mother break down crying over forgetting her makeup on the way to a family dinner)
“As I began to mull over the event in my head, I was confronted with two starkly different contrasting trains of thought. One, that an emphasis on beauty is an absurd expectation placed on women; and that makeup, styled hair, flattering clothes and the like should not be necessary elements of a woman’s life.
At the same time, I came to realize something else: I wasn’t capable of living by my own ideals. What I mean to say is I could meet the nicest, funniest, most intellectually stimulating girl on the planet; but if she were overweight, wore no makeup, and never shaved, I could not find myself attracted to her. I say these words with no sense of pride whatsoever, only frankness. …I only have my gut reactions to go by, and my gut reactions are those of a sexist pig.
” … I consider myself to be a decidedly non-superficial person who despises and overemphasis on image. But how can I look down upon women who are preoccupied with their appearance when my own actions to nothing to dispel the idea that they should do otherwise?
“The worst part about all this is that I know I am far from alone. I have heard men speak about women in far less flattering terms than I am using here, and it is hardly necessary to say that most men enjoy thin, attractive women.
I do not know what the solution is. It seems to me that there exists no possibility of peace between the sexes. If men get what they want, women will continue to be objectified and live a life in which unrealistic expectations are heaped upon them. If the feminists get what they want, true “equality” is achieved, and beauty standards are thrown out the window, then men will live a silent life of longing for the superficiality they all secretly desire.”
Now, Cass is coming from the position you believe is wrong Hugo– his idea that caring about beauty is superficial, when you make the case that it’s not. In fact, your point of view is one way out of Cass’ dilemma.
But it does make me think: why do our very gut instincts seem to demand we act sexist, racist, and in all other discriminatory ways? Why do our very hearts and feelings seem to demand we act like the worst of ourselves? Even to the point of using reason and intellect as a primal weapon of dominance and control to win, as a New York Times article said not too long ago?
And unfortunately, the solution does not seem to be to ignore or eliminate instinct– it seems to be, tragically, necessary for us to maintain social interactions.
And THAT, I believe, is the biggest obstacle for us to overcome. Creating an egalitarian, fairer, ultimately happier society is in large part about overcoming our instincts. But at the same time, following those instincts improves our relationships, gets us a reputation of being better socially than those who don’t live by instincts, and just plain makes us happier.
The incentive to stay in our instincts is powerful indeed. For when push comes to shove, we will make the decision to keep our relationships intact, and keep our loved ones loving us. And if that means abandoning our ideals, if that means putting up with unequal and hurtful power and family dynamics, if that means NOT fighting for the underprivileged, we will do it. And keep on doing it.
@Hugo and Autumn
I think that the difference here is that Bloom is talking about how she interacted with a friend’s child. I think that Hugo’s right that parents/caretakers can engage with all children (not just girls) around personal appearance and help them explore it. And I think that the world would be a different place if “you’re so pretty” wasn’t the default behavior from strangers who meet girls. Or for that matter, for men who want to meet women.
Again, Charlie, I’m all for not going to aesthetic compliments as the default for talking to little girls.
But that wasn’t Bloom’s primary point. She threw the baby out with the bathwater, by not only refusing to compliment little Maya (fine) but not engaging her on “clothes or hair” at all. In a single conversation, that’s one thing. But I came away from her piece with the unmistakable impression that adults should avoid discussion fashion and beauty and clothes with their daughters altogether, as if they were somehow less significant than other concerns. That was and is my primary objection to her stance.
This reminds me of reading in Po Bronson’s new book about how kids pick up racism from white parents who don’t consider themselves racist, but just don’t talk about race in an effort to NOT be racist…the kids pick up that it’s something we don’t talk about, and therefore it’s bad.
Avoiding a subject is not going to make it better. Talking about all sides of it is.
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