THIRD SUGGESTION

Teach her that the idea of “gender roles” is
absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that
she should or should not do something because
she is a girl.

“Because you are a girl” is never a reason for
anything. Ever.

I remember being told as a child to “bend
down properly while sweeping, like a girl.”
Which meant that sweeping was about being
female. I wish I had been told simply “bend
down and sweep properly because you’ll dean
the floor better.” And I wish my brothers had
been told the same thing.

There have been recent Nigerian social
media debates about women and cooking,
about how wives have to cook for husbands. It
is funny, in the way that sad things are funny,

that we are still talking about cooking as some
kind of marriageability test for women.

The knowledge of cooking does not come

pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned.
Cooking-domestic work in general-is a life
skill that both men and women should ideally
have. It is also a skill that can elude both men
and women.

We also need to question the idea of mar-
riage as a prize to women, because that is the
basis of these absurd debates. If we stopped
conditioning women to see marriage as a prize,
then we would have fewer debates about a wife
needing to cook in order to earn that prize.

It is interesting to me how early the world
starts to invent gender roles. Yesterday I went
to a children’s shop to buy Chizalum an out-
fit. In the girls’ section were pale creations in
washed-out shades of pink. I disliked them.

. 1 ad outfits in vibrant shades ‘rhe boys’ section 1

I 5

of blue. Because I thought blue would be ador-
able against her brown skin-and photograph
better-I bought one. At the checkout counter,
the cashier said mine was the perfect present
for the new boy. I said it was for a baby girl. She

looked horrified. “Blue for a girl?”
I cannot help but wonder about the clever

marketing person who invented this pink-blue
binary. There was also a “gender-neutral” sec-
tion, with its array of bloodless grays. “Gender-

neutral” is silly because it is premised on the
idea of male being blue and female being pink
and “gender-neutral” being its own category.
Why not just have baby clothes organized by

age and displayed in all colors? The bodies of

male and female infants are similar, after all.
I looked at the toy section, which was also

arranged by gender. Toys for boys are mostly
active, and involve some sort of doing-t rains,
cars-and toys for girls are mostly passive and
are overwhelmingly doll s. I was struck by this .

r6

1 had not quite realized how early society starts

to invent ideas of what a boy should be and what
a girl should be.

I wished the toys had been arranged by type,
rather than by gender.

Did I ever tell you about going to a U.S. mall
with a seven-year-old Nigerian girl and her

mother? She saw a toy helicopter, one of those
things that fly by wireless remote control, and
she was fascinated and asked for one. “No,” her
mother said. “You have your dolls.” And she re-
sponded, “Mummy, is it only dolls I will play
with?”

I have never for gotten that. Her mother
meant well, obviously. She was well versed in
the ideas of gender roles-that girls play with
dolls and boys with helicopters. I wonder now,
wistfully, if the little girl would have turned out
to be a revolutionary engineer, had she been
given a chance to explore that helicopter.

If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender

17

roles on young children, we give them space
to reach their full potential. Please see Chiza-
lum as an individual. Not as a girl who should
be a certain way. See her weaknesses and her

strengths in an individual way. Do not measure
her on a scale of what a girl should be. Mea-
sure her on a scale of being the best version of
hersel£

A young Nigerian woman once told me that
she had for years behaved “like a boy”-she
liked football and was bored by dresses-until
her mother forced her to stop her “boyish” in-
terests. Now she is grateful to her mother for
helping her start behaving like a girl. The story
made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself
she had needed to silence and stifle, and I won-
dered about what her spirit had lost, because
what she called “behaving like a boy” was sim-
ply behaving like herself.

Another acqu ·
a1ntance, an Amer.ican living

18

. tl,e Pacific Northwest, once told me that 1 n ·
when she took her one-year-old son to a baby

play group, where babies had been brought by
their mothers, she noticed that the mothers

of baby girls were very restraining, constantly
telling the girls “don’t touch” or “stop and be

nice,” and she noticed that the baby boys were
encouraged to explore more and were not re-
strained as much and were almost never told to
“b . “H h h e nice. er t eory wast at parents uncon-
sciously start very early to teach girls how to
be, that baby girls are given less room and more
rules and baby boys more room and fewer rules.

Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us
that we will often follow them even when they
chafe against our true desires, our needs, our
happiness. They are very difficult to unlearn,

. . . t to make sure that and so 1t 1s important to ry
Chizalum reJ· ects them from the beginning.

· h ‘d f
I d f letting her internalize t e t ea o nstea o ·

gender roles, teach her self-reliance. Tell her
that it is important to be able to do for her-
self and fend for herself Teach her to try to fix
physical things when they break. We are quick
to assume girls can’t do many things. Let her
try. She might not fully succeed, but let her try.
Buy her toys like blocks and trains-and dolls,
too, if you want to.

FOURTH SUGGESTION

Beware the danger of what I call Feminism

Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equal-
ity. Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, ap-
peasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is
like being pregnant. You either are or you are
not. You either believe in the full

1
. f

equa 1ty o
men and women or you do not.

Feminism Lite uses analog,.ies 1 ·k··” “h .
, 1 e e 1s the

head and you are the neck” 0 “} . . . _ · . r 1e 1s Jn v,ng