My 8 year-old daughter Alice is really into comics these days, often hiding our home phone under her pillow to keep reading when she’s supposed to be asleep. To my chagrin, she couldn’t care less if the female characters have huge eyes though, and/or no noses. But yesterday, I noticed the above while she was watching the opening to the anime adaptation of Hidamari Sketch. It was a great opportunity to start teaching her about female characters’ typical poses too.
Cue 20 minutes of giggling at the bottoms in the Escher Girls blog, which ultimately had the whole family trying—and failing—to imitate some of the pictures (although I was pretty good myself actually). Naturally, we quickly skipped past some of the more inappropriate ones, and Alice still has no idea why female characters are so often drawn in a “boobs and butt” style. But at least she’s aware of the phenomenon now, and, with gentle prodding from me, will hopefully think more about it herself as she gets older.
For now though, she’s still very much a 8 year-old girl, and I can hardly fault her for that. Much of those 20 minutes were also spent by her and her 6 year-old sister Elizabeth saying “와! 예쁘다…” (Wow! They’re so pretty…), and today this post took a long time to write because she kept on stopping me to tell me all about the characters in Hidamari Sketch. Including Yoshinoya above, who’s supposedly a high school teacher (sigh)…
The Grand Narrative 
I love your clever introduction of these issues with your daughters at such a young age…with the amount of crap they’ll be forced to contend with in the media it’s so important to get them thinking early. This is the downside to raising girls and something that worries me so I’m reading your blog with even more interest now we have one of our own!
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Thanks very much. Honestly though, I’d have no idea if I hadn’t read The Lolita Effect and Cinderella Ate my Daughter first. I highly recommend both, and talked a lot about the former here, but I probably took away more practical ideas and advice from the latter (although it’s not an advice or parenting book per se). For instance, it’s directly because of that book that now I’m wearing a lot of pink clothes and buying pink phone covers, headphones, and so on ;) And hell, now that I think about it, I probably owe what happened in this post to it too.
But man, it’s exhausting. Seriously, just ten minutes ago, the three of us danced to Girls Just Want to Have Fun five times. I’m very happy they just danced off to their rooms singing it to themselves, hopefully sparking an interest when they’re older in learning why it was so revolutionary for its times, but I pity my poor wife who has to put them to sleep now…
p.s. All of the above influenced some of my recent clothing choices too!
p.p.s. Where in NZ are you from BTW? I’m not exactly an Aucklander myself, but I did live 10 years there, and went to Auckland Uni.
p.p.p.s You’ve probably seen it before, but just in case not, I noticed that by coincidence JeongMee Yoon’s Pink and Blue photo series was featured in the NYT as I typed this.
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I will definitely hunt those books out and have a read and go back and re-read your thoughts also. I love that you hyped your daughters up and then let your wife put them to bed, haha, thought I’m sure there’s an argument somewhere there too about the perceived roles of parents, regardless of what you were listening to :P LOL.
I (H-J) am from Dunedin originally and Dan is from Wellington, though when we’re in NZ we’re both now based in Wellington. 10 years in Auckland almost makes you a Kiwi! Almost…:)
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