Ok, I was watch­ing The Daily Show with Hubby & one of the seg­ments showed a ABC seg­ment on Baby High Heels from last year.  I hadn’t seen these before. I’m still not sure what out­fit a baby would need heels for.  They are made by Hee­lar­i­ous.  And I do get it’s sup­posed to be tongue in cheek & cute.

But…

You knew there was going to be a but didn’t you?

When I saw these a lot of con­flict­ing emo­tions were brought to the sur­face for me. Kristen Schaal, she appears occas­sion­ally on The Daily Show, was doing a piece on France’s push to ban burqas.  Her point even in our free soci­ety there are still these social expec­ta­tions that exist for women to live up to.  Even our babies get caught in the net.

I’ve always been a lit­tle uncom­fort­able with the whole dress­ing up girls thing.  I’m talk­ing toddlers/preschoolers in heels & fancy dresses, the whole pretty princess look.  I see how excited Mamacita gets putting these dress-up clothes on & while I love see­ing her enjoy her­self there is a part of me cringes at it.

I feel torn between my rad­i­cal side that wants to reject any­thing that main­stream soci­ety says is fem­i­nine, carve out my own ver­sion of fem­i­nine that embraces innate beauty,  kicks down doors & pushes aside the images of women as objects in need of some fairy tale res­cue.  And the other side of me that wears heels, puts on a princess tiara with Mamacita (and likes it), & wants to embrace the fun of play­ing with imagery of the fem­i­nine that already exists in soci­ety with­out the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion that is pop­u­lar­ized in media.

However, it’s really pow­er­ful stuff as Mamacita gets older that she’s going to face in a dif­fer­ent way.  I know the data & the research.  I have rearched & writ­ten on it myself.   I’m all too aware that media & fash­ion do play some part in how women define themselves.

There is a cer­tain type of beauty & fem­i­nin­ity that exists out there in our cul­ture & it’s got a big foot­print.  I worry about her feel­ing pres­sure to con­form to this fem­i­nine ideal.  An ideal is never attain­able, it’s always out of reach.  If it weren’t then it wouldn’t be an ideal.  Instead it would be real­is­tic & real­ism isn’t ide­al­ism.  Ide­al­ism doesn’t make room for imperfections.

I want my daugh­ter to know that what she looks like doesn’t have to be some pre-packaged ver­sion of per­fect.  I worry about her devel­op­ing a sense of who she is.  I worry about her being sad­dled with the same hang-ups I or other women I see around me car­ry­ing around about how they look ver­sus who they are.

I know peo­ple are read­ing this & think­ing I’m the one read­ing a lot into baby heels.  How­ever, it’s not the heels so much as what they remind me of.  They remind me that as woman I’m con­stantly com­ing up against images of what being “pretty” is & that I can­not attain them no mat­ter how hard I try.  They also remind me that I want my Mamacita to know, not just feel but know, that her worth is more than heels & a pretty out­fit.  I am fur­ther reminded that I don’t want my boys think­ing that women are only worth­while if they look a cer­tain way.

I didn’t expect some­thing like a pair of baby high heels to invoke any response in me.  Cer­tainly not one that would cause me to think about how my daugh­ter will grow up in the world.  Mak­ing me won­der how she’ll define her­self as a woman in years to come.    But they did.

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