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It's okay, mom - I'm talking about female dogs. Specifically, I'm talking about the lack of female dogs on Nick Jr.'s show "Paw Patrol." Let me just jump out of the gate and say that I will not be starting any petitions over this. There are a lot of things to get all hot under the collar over, and this is not one of them.
I'm just disappointed in you, Nick Jr.
The boys discovered Paw Patrol shortly before I did, so it was already too late to guide them elsewhere. There are certainly more annoying kids' shows out there (don't get me started on Bubble Guppies) but what bothers me most about this one is that its sin is sooooooooo ooold:
Gender bias. Aren't we done with this?
So the set up is that there are about half a dozen rescue dogs that make up the Paw Patrol team, and one 10 year-old boy who trains them and co-ordinates the rescue operations. The pups have specialty backpack type things with gadgets and special vehicles they ride around on (pretty obviously designed for the toy store shelves). There's a police pup, firefighter pup, recycling truck pup... and some others (I haven't made a meticulous study of the half-year old show)... and then there's a helicopter pilot pup. And that last pup is the only female on the team.
And she's all in pink.
The rest of the town seems fairly diverse, at a glance, with a dark-skinned female mayor, for instance. But the jobs of the lead characters still fall into their stereotypically male-dominated paws. And the tiny token female is pink. Why is it always fucking pink!
I've been trying for years to make my peace with pink. There are certain (natural) shades I can deal with, but I object so strongly to the branding of femininity as a color, that even the most benign occurrences of this color - little pink roses, pretty sunsets - make my stomach clench, oh, just a little bit. It's not (always) the shades that offend, it's what they are meant to represent: delicacy, fragility, immaturity... Even the "sassy" shades of shocking pink, still demand self-expression within the given hues of cultural obedience.
Yes, I know, it's just a kids' show. But so is Dora the Explorer, and Dora kicks ass. Pink stuff with Dora doesn't bother me as much because it's more incidental, not a uniform. She is the lead character of the show and she is smart and resourceful (and woefully unsupervised in some shockingly dangerous territory), and she gets to run around in orange and red t-shirt and shorts. Yes, she wears pink dresses sometimes, but she also wears other colors and other outfits. She has been the knight to the rescue, and she didn't have to wear pink armor to do it. In other words, she is a well-rounded, developed character... as far as cartoon characters go.
Dora has been around for years, too. She is basically the face of Nick Jr. And she is not the only good female role-model out there. Most of the time, we see great examples on that network, on the shows and in the in-between spots, of gender equality and good all-around life lessons. So how, with all that self-awareness about treating people the same, despite any differences in gender or culture or ability, does that forward thinking network develop a new show (just this last summer 2013) with the same gender throw-back thinking? Why do people have such a hard time creating normal, neutral female characters?
Could it be that media keeps rehashing the same anti-feminist themes?
Even strong shows like Yo Gabba Gabba (which we all love), still offer the same female archetypes to choose from: girly Foofa or Tomboy Toodee *coughdykecough*. What archetypes do Muno, Brobee, and Plex represent? Can't pinpoint them, hunh? (And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go to YouTube and look up the awesomeness that it YGG... I'll wait...).
My suggestion to writers, producers, and storytellers everywhere who seem to struggle with this idea of girls being and doing whatever the hell they feel like being and doing, is to assign the gender last. Write out the attributes of the character - their interests, abilities, challenges, physicalities - and then flip a coin to pick whether that person - or anthropomorphic personification, thereof - is a boy or a girl. Heck, borrow a D20 from your D&D pals and assign more complex combinations: 1-pretty girl, 2-pretty boy, 3-average girl... 14-average boy with a slight limp... You get the idea.
When I was younger and struggling to settle on a career path, my gender never entered my decision making process. I ultimately decided on becoming a math/physics major, but I ended up in a women's history class one semester. I was shocked by the number of women in my class who were surprised by my major. They had always been told that girls couldn't do math. This stunned me. I had somehow never gotten that messaging. And, perhaps more importantly, I had been raised by a single-father who valued logic and learning, and who never refused to answer any of my questions because I "wasn't old enough to understand" or because I was the girl and wouldn't I rather run along and play with some dolls...
Well, unless my brothers were going to let me play G.I. Joes with them... but after dad explained what I wanted to know about the structure of the Universe...
What if we just treated everyone like that? Like the only thing that mattered really was on the inside. There might still be gender disparities in some fields, but they would be the naturally arising disparities and would not carry the stigma that "cross-over" professionals (male nurses, female firefighters, etc.) still have to deal with today.
C'mon, Nick Jr... You're so close. You could be a full part of the solution.
Just mind the bitches.
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