“I don’t want her to wear her good nature like a gemstone, her body like an ornament”

At the New York Times Motherlode blog, Catherine Newman’s written a piece called “I Do Not Want My Daughter to be ‘Nice’”:

Birdy is polite in a “Can you please help me find my rain boots?” and “Thank you, I’d love another deviled egg” kind of way. But when strangers talk to her, she is like, “Whatever.” She looks away, scowling. She does not smile or encourage.

I bite my tongue so that I won’t hiss at her to be nice. I tell you this confessionally. Because do I think it is a good idea for girls to engage with zealously leering men, like the creepy guy in the hardware store who is telling her how pretty she is? I do not. “Say thank you to the nice man who wolf-whistled!” “Smile at the frat boy who’s date-raping you!” I want my daughter to be tough, to say no, to waste exactly zero of her God-given energy on the sexual, emotional and psychological demands of lame men — of lame anybodies. I don’t want her to accommodate and please. I don’t want her to wear her good nature like a gemstone, her body like an ornament.

And, currently, she is not in danger. She is decisive and no-nonsense, preferring short hair and soft pants with elastic waistbands. Dresses get in her way, and don’t even get her started on jeans, the snugly revealing allure of which completely mystifies her. She’s the kind of person who donates money to the Animal Welfare Institute and attends assiduously to all the materials they send her, including their dully depressing annual reports, which she keeps in a special folder. Gender stereotypes, among other injustices, infuriate her. “This is so stupid!” she sighs at Target, about the pink rows of dolls and the blue rows of Lego. “Why don’t they just put a penis or a vagina on every toy so you can be completely sure you’re getting the right one?”

Negative reactions to this piece have been along expected lines — “I can’t accept that my millionth-wave feminism depends on scowling,” “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Catherine and her daughter do not live in the South” — illuminating the fact that it’s somehow still radical for a female person to live without the primary goal of being pleasing. People are bothered far less by a boy who refuses to accommodate, and Birdy, who is just 10 years old, has plenty of time to evolve and adjust in the way she negotiates society’s desire for gendered sweetness, or just to keep doing what she’s doing, which sounds pretty solid to me.