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December 13, 2005
Class Struggle: Grade School Edition
In Sweden, at least in our local grade school, the same group of kids stay together from the age of six to eleven. Woeful is the lot of any late arrivals who have to fit it several years after the class dynamics have been established. The kids are ten this year and the queen bee of the class was absent from school when it started this fall after being accepted into some kind of art or music school. Her absence has created a vaccum in the coolest-girl department and has sparked a power struggle that, months later, is still being played out.
The former queen's power was undeniable: she was tallest, thinnest and had modeled clothes in a catalog for a department store. Virtually all of the girls in this class are attractive and many, including my child, are beautiful. But none have the departed queen's credentials, as it were, and another girl's attempts to claim the throne--which, as far as I can tell mostly consists of demanding the right to boss the other girls around--are being rebuffed. One day at dinner my kid announced that a friend I'll call A had defected from a recess club my daughter had started to the wannabe queen's group. "They wear makeup," she said scornfully. "Why would A want to be with them?"
My kid responded to this perceived betrayal by asking another girl, B, to join her club. B accepted, my kid told me, so now A couldn't be in the club even if she changed her mind and wanted by in. Why not, I wondered. "Because there are only three members," my kid said, and ticked off herself, another good friend, and B now that A was gone. Why only three, I asked. "Because," she said, and started laughing. "Just because." Whenever the wannabe queen tries to boss her around, my kid said, she just tells her to shut up. "She doesn't like it very much."
I know my daughter is torn. Although she says she doesn't want to be one of the popular girls--it's not her style, she claims--she says this as though it were a prison sentence or a birth defect. She has dubbed me, rightfully, a dork, and wonders why I can't wear makeup or shave my legs more often or at least get trendier clothes. She asks me if I was ever popular. When I tell her I was the head of the drama club in high school and had plenty of friends in college, she's disappointed. That isn't the kind of popularity she means. She means the kind of popularity enjoyed by the former queen bee in her class. And the kind of popularity portrayed in movies like Mean Girls and Bring It On, in which the most popular girls are enshrined as Bitch Goddesses who can do anything and say anything and basically get away with it because they're Popular.
I never got the girlie look down, despite experiments in eighth grade with frosted blue eye shadow and mini skirts. It's not my style and it's not a problem. Not anymore. It used to matter. It used to matter a lot. Now I watch my daughter gaze at the scantily clad women on billboards and see music videos and ask, out loud, why women are always taking off their clothes in these things and men aren't. She parrots our discussions about sexism like the good little student she is. But I don't think sexism troubles her in the slightest, I don't think it really registers as anything but the world she's in, like water to a fish.
So she's torn because some of her classmates are wearing make up and crop tops and trying their hardest to look like sixteen-year-olds at ten as part of the popularity sweepstakes. Her dad and I don't let her do that. That limitation is partly a relief and partly infuriating. Given a choice, my daughter would choose the MTV-inspired sexy femme style over mom's dorky style any day of the week. (She doesn't understand yet that there's a choice between the two.) At the same time, she doesn't really want to grow up. Not yet. Not in the way those clothes imply.
I hate the way commercial culture has embedded itself in my daughter's consciousness, that she views herself though its distorted lens and finds her wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful, creative self lacking and lacking greatly.
Today Swedes celebrate Lucia. There's no better time for a festival of lights. The sun set more than an hour ago, at 2:47 pm.
That breaks my heart.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at December 13, 2005 04:11 PM
Comments
"She doesn't understand yet that there's a choice between the two." This line made me LOL. As if the Madison Avenue robot look (or its local equivalent) were worthy of anything but open scorn. Of course, the problem with worrying about this is that you can't help but raise a smart kid who'll clue in eventually.
My girlfriend has similar dilemmas. Her tyke of roughly the same age is girly in the sense that she cares too much about clothes but already gets that fashion should be subverted if not banished with self-expression and style. I'll send her -- the mom, I mean -- a link to this entry.
Posted by: Pete at December 14, 2005 09:09 PM