How Buying A Sticker Book Made Me want to Burn My Bra

                  MUSINGS FROM THE MOLLUSK

           A Blog About Introversion, Child-Rearing, Education and Other Stuff

Let me explain something about myself: I LOVE visual embellishment; I've always doodled, color-penciled, and  curly-cued my writing, whether in my notebooks, or in letters---(back when I actually wrote them), and even on my students' papers!  Subscribing to the adage, 'a picture is worth a thousand words', my little smiley/snarky-characters would often supplant actual comments on the work of my students---and quite often that was more than enough for them.  My little pictures were all over my calendar book entries, and when a well-known graphic artist came up with her own 'Mom's Planner Calendar', complete with accompanying stickers, I was ALL over that!  I particularly loved the stickers.

Which is why, I happened to find myself in a well-frequented,  book store chain, hunting for stickers for which to embellish my recently purchased calendar book for 2015.  I came upon a sticker book----two, actually. Each of the sticker books promised a life-time supply of stickers within their pages, but one book was designed for boys, and the other one, girls.   Words used on the cover to describe the 'boys' stickers were words like, 'artsy', and 'interesting', while the adjectives used to describe the 'girls' stickers were words such as, 'cutesy' and 'doodly'.  So it had all come down to this.  Boys were, or could aspire to be 'artsy' and 'interesting', while expectations for their female counterparts encompassed

the very shallow depths of 'cutesy' and 'doodly'.  Forty-six years of the Women's Movement, equal pay, the metro-sexual male, househusbands, female CEO's, and here the hell is a sticker book in 2015 telling  girls that there's nothing more to being a girl than being 'cutesy'.

I stood there, looking at the two sticker books in disbelief.  The insidious pages themselves were festooned with the promised-copiousness of stickers.  The 'boys' stickers had the usual sports motifs, along with musical instruments, (guitars, drums, and saxophones, mostly), camping images, flags, pictures of families, balloons, dogs, cats, inner tubes, funny faces, astronauts, etc., all executed in various styles.

The 'girls' stickers were done in pinks, oranges, tropical blues, and other vivid pastels. The images ran the very wide gamut ( just feel the sarcasm oozing), of hearts, flowers, rainbows and ice cream cones. Yup.

Now mind you, I actually like hearts, flowers, rainbows and ice cream cones. And I loved the colors in which these images were shown.  But in a world where we have supposedly been telling our girl children and students that they can be and do anything, and where our girls have grown up with a Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg  on the Supreme Court, and women astronauts, politicians and clergy, and everything else-----THESE STICKER BOOKS JUST DID NOT MAKE SENSE! 

Perhaps I should have just walked away, and if I had been purchasing the sticker book for a child----I wouldn't have made the purchase, and would have walked---- but I didn't. I actually bought the 'boys' stickers. (They were really cool).  But I will be contacting that publisher----and sharing my views!

                                                         The Mollusk