Wednesday, June 8, 2011

"Girls Can Be Pirates Too."

Image credit: mikebaird on Flickr


Beanie will be four at the end of the month. As birthday planning commenced (a whole six months before her birthday) Beanie decided that she wanted to have a pirate birthday party. Cool, I thought. It's a nice change from the princess party, a character party, or etc. We play pirates quite a bit; she sets up chairs to make a pirate ship, she has a telescope, and we go digging from treasure around the house. A pirate birthday is perfect for my little girl.

I can't tell you how many times I've been asked if we're doing "girly pirates,"  as if girl pirates need to have heart-shaped eye-patches and pink clothing. I overheard my father-in-law telling her about piratesses (???) and later she told me that grandpa said she could be a pirate queen or princess. The pirate stuff was in the boy's section at one of the party stores we checked out.

Glenn and I told her that if people started telling her what kind of pirate she "had" to be, that she could just reply, "Girls can be pirates too!"

Because they can.

And they can be any kind of pirate they want to be.

7 comments:

  1. Good for you in supporting her. I have all boys & we had 2 pirate parties last year. We got lots of comments that my boys had picked out quite a lot of the pink floral & heart pirate decorations. It bothered me so much that my boys heard the adults making those judgmental, I mean harmless, comments. My boys decided they didn't like those decorations afterward because they were just for girls :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yay! I was a pirate last Halloween and had to handmake my costume because they didn't have any girl's stuff without pink! Hello, pirates didn't wear pink!

    ReplyDelete
  3. ARRR!! Sounds like it will be a fun time!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wish "people" didn't have to make a big deal about girls needs to play with girls stuff and boys need to play with boys stuff. Irks me all the time. My son like pink. WHAT is wrong with that?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I will ditto El. A has a blender that is pink & purple and he plays with it a lot. He has overheard people say that about his pink blender. It confuses little kids and starts drawing boundaries where boundaries really don't need to exist

    ReplyDelete
  6. Amen to this! I get a little irked by and "boyish" theme having to be recreated in pink...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Pink. (Or Blue) It's just a color.

    That's my new slogan.

    I really hate how people try to gender-ize EVERYTHING. It's a pirate. Or a blender. Or a whatever.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to comment! I love to hear from you.