It was very funny to see how much our own family trope of “some people think…” (which was usually followed up with, “but we think…” on a whole host of issues of personal style and gender identification and other cultural stuff was internalized by our youngest, who came home from first grade with “Some people think the earth revolves around the sun!”

Er, yes, sweetheart, and those people would be the ones who are correct!

So I think you are saying that gender identificatiion is inculcated in the child by the following formula: x parts parental instruction + y parts peer pressure + z parts genetic endowment.

Makes sense to me. And I think that x is less than y is less than z.

And I think that political identification works the same way.

Makes sense to me, and I think that: x

There’s an ambiguity about the condition you express there. Do you mean a disavowal of the pleasure that, after the critical examination of it, nonetheless remains, or do you mean a disavowal of the pleasure that has in the process of its critical examination has evaporated? The first version seems to make sense, but the second doesn’t, since it would be quite destructive of the point of critical reflection – to not disavow a pleasure which had evaporated under the light of reason (or whatever) would make the use of reason (or whatever) pointless; it’d be to privilege, for no obvious reason, your initial reaction over your considered one. I even think the first version needs to be expressed pretty carefully, since the condition of the initial question remaining interesting is that we don’t disavow the results of the processes of examination either; the tension can only exist if we really take both the pleasure and the reflection seriously. And I think that’s to the good in a way; the kind of idea of sin-in-culture that that can sustain can be enjoyably transgressive.

How will the face painters know that more children are ready to accept more gender-neutral designs unless parents go up to them and say “Hey, why don’t you have more gender-neutral designs”? That’s a kind of feedback that *is* useful.

That said, of course I know parents who “command their children in these terms” (though as an aside I don’t think all the people who prohibit the tv necessarily do it because of gender or “political correctness” reasons). I just think those parents are a significant minority, and it’s unfair and dismissive to label all those who advocate a certain cultural politics of minimizing gender differences in consumer goods as parenting in this way. That’s just not accurate.

But I’d extend it outward: I think we command each other in these terms under the banner of “political correctness”, and that’s equally bad for most of the same reasons. We say: don’t watch *that* film, it has a bad representation in it. Don’t do that activity: it has bad representational politics. Maybe we command ourselves. Are your interests “native” to you, or the ones you feel you ought to have? Do you ever have to talk yourself into liking something, or disliking something?

Commanding the people selling culture is a different matter, but there are problems there too. Put yourself in the role of the manager of a facepainting operation at a large corporate amusement park. What are you actually prepared to ask that person to do that wouldn’t represent economic suicide? I’m prepared to say that they don’t actually have to label various designs “girl” and “boy”. I’m prepared to suggest–for their own sake, because I think it wouldn’t hurt their sales–that they have the models a bit more mixed up (e.g., a few boys with butterflies, etc. and a few girls with monsters). But, for example, am I prepared to say that they should have a wider range of designs? Not really because they’ve got to train young summer workers in face painting and pay them an appropriate wage: you can’t ask for unique, boutique or countercultural designs that might be difficult to execute and might not be asked for more than three or four times in a summer. I’m not prepared to ask them to challenge the entire semiotics of children’s culture. It would be cool if they did do some funky stuff, sure, but it isn’t reasonable to demand or command that they do so. Am I prepared to make a big deal out of any of my modestly critical observations about what they do offer? No, because it’s also important to be proportionate about this kind of criticism.

If the facepainters come back and say, “Look, this is what these kids want”, they’re not really wrong. If I gathered together a panel of my daughter’s friends and said, “What kinds of pictures would you like to paint on your face?” or “What kind of costume would you like to wear at Halloween”, a lot of the answers would look like the catalog of available choices. A smaller plurality might be more individual choices that are badly represented in the available commercial systems, sure. My daughter’s Halloween ideas are usually NOT easily satisfied by what you can get in the costume stores. (The current plan for this fall is that she goes as one of her favorite Pokemon, not Pikachu, and my wife and I go as Team Rocket. I’d have to shave my mustache to be James, though, and I don’t exactly have the right figure. I could be Professor Oak or Professor Rowan but they’re kind of generic figures.) But the facepainters wouldn’t be wrong to say, “Princesses, monsters, fairies, cats both sell AND they’re relatively easy to turn into iconic face designs that most of our workers can execute well enough to satisfy the kids”.