Ladies of Generations X and Y, You Need to Grow Up

According to this blog post from writer Julie Klausner.

Truthfully, I agree with a lot of what she's saying (although I didn't really know this was a "thing" thanks to being a woefully out-of-the-loop person living in the middle of the country where trends tend to happen five years too late, if at all). Women playing down their accomplishments or intelligence, and adopting a childlike persona to appear non-threatening to men is surely problematic. Unfortunately, so is policing femininity.

While I understand Klausner's post was meant to be humorous, some of the things she listed as proof that we're all turning into little girls -- girl scout cookies, birds, crafting -- aren't necessarily childish, unless, I guess, your entire wardrobe (or more likely, facebook page) is festooned with them. I get the point she was making, I just wish it was made better and without demonizing things that are stereotypically feminine, nay, girlish.  (I say all this with the experience of someone who spent a good chunk of her twenties and early thirties trying her damnedest to be a "bro-dude" with great disdain for anything girly.) But the reactions to the original were, overwhelmingly, of the "Nuh-uh, I'm not!" variety, which invariably shuts down the kinds of discussions we should be having.

Another issue I have with this post is that these tropes aren't available to all women. Tami from What Tami Said wrote a great piece about how the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype (personified by Zoey Deshanel) has no WOC equivalent:

I also find it worth noting that the persona that Klausner writes about is bound by class and race. The cult of domesticity defined idealized womanhood centuries ago--and that definition included both perpetual childhood and whiteness. The wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film are not open to many women of color, particularly black women. We can be strong women, aggressive women, promiscuous women...we can do Bonet bohemian and Earth Mother (as Andrea pointed out), but never carefree and childish. Even black girls are too often viewed as worldly women and not innocents.

Of the negative reaction Klausner's post has been getting, she said this later in the comments:

What bugged me most about reaction to the Klausner post was that a whole lot of women seemed to be refusing to even entertain that the trend of the woman-child might mean something for feminism. The reality is that all of our choices—be we men or women—are influenced, in part, by societal values. Though a lot of folks on that thread saw acknowledging that as attacking.

Unfortunately, these points were overlooked by the feminist blogosphere at large in favor of a litany of "I like kitties and cupcakes, and I am a full-fledged grown-up. So there."

Maybe the point was made after all.