“Girls Night Out” is not for me
Here’s my letter to ODA about today’s event Girls Night Out
I am bummed that ODA is promoting an event that reinforces traditional gender roles and stereotypes. While it is true that some women love to shop and wear pink, it is also true that women were once confined to this identity in our not-so-distant past and not all of us are nostalgic for that time.
I was troubled to see that Wind Up Here, a participating business, was encouraged by the event to create a window display of uber-feminized “girly” pink toys marketed to young girls. I was fortunate to grow up in the 70’s in a family that encouraged me to play with “boy” toys as well as “girly” toys. As a result, I became an aggressive rock-n-roll drummer rather than a back-up singer or a groupie. And I didn’t need a “cute” pink drum set made especially for little girls in order to learn how to play drums. Similarly girls don’t need pink calculators to do math, nor do they need pink ladders or hard hats in order to do construction work or pink stethoscopes in order to become doctors or pink typewriters in order to become journalists. The color pink is not the issue . The history of women as second class citizens whose options were limited by traditional gender roles is what I’m getting at here. Do we really want to go back to a time when girls wore pink and boys wore blue and anyone who violated these norms was just plain “weird”? Is that what we want to teach our kids? To me, Girls Night Out is a step in the wrong direction.
I think it’s cool to have a downtown event that is focused on women and don’t have a problem with women raising money for a good cause. But making Olympia “safe” and “clean” is not that good of a cause. As Sarah Utter pointed out in her pensive and articulate letter, downtown Olympia is full of artists who love graffiti, stickers and posters. To us that is not stuff that needs to get cleaned up. It is street art, information sharing, aesthetic work—-this is the essence of our creative community. Why does it need to be painted over and taken down? What about that will make downtown Olympia “safe”? Whose safety is ODA concerned with?
If you do decide to continue this event, I suggest that you do it in a more inclusive manner and choose a charity that truly benefits and values women, such as Safeplace
Tobi Vail
Olympia, WA
