Return CV Dorothy Nixon

Shall We Dance?

Originally in the Montreal Gazette. All rights reserved by the author.

My son Mark once had a favorite picture book, Robert Munsch's "Violet, Green and Yellow." In the story, Bridget, a bored little girl, gets an uncontrollable urge to colour all over herself with indelible markers. She paints every inch of her body with a fantastic pattern of intermingled rainbows. When she looks in the mirror and realizes that she's done something socially unacceptable, she ingeniously covers the indelible rainbow pattern with an image of her ordinary self.

I, too, liked the book, which was a good thing because I had to read it to Mark over and over for about a month. As I recall, he was obsessed with the story. Exactly why, I wasn't quite sure at the time. But I knew why I found the picture book so cute and appealing. Even as a grown woman I could relate to Bridget's actions. I feel certain there's a wilder, more flamboyant me under my everyday middle-class, middle-aged exterior.

I, too, would love to cover my body with all manner of symbols meaningful to me -- but like Bridget, I'm also worried about what people would say. I would like to be more spontaneous and uninhibited. But as a consumer-age girl, I've been conditioned from an early age to repress such healthy human impulses, or hide them under a false exterior, like Bridget. Our culture, it seems, has an interest in making sure I keep my native urges in check.

Why, I wonder? Might these natural impulses connect me with the power I crave?

Advertisers certainly know what's up, at least on some level, because most pitches aimed at me -- for creams and lipstick and perfumes and hair-dyes and shampoo -- promise me all kinds of power through their ritual application.

As one newly-born redhead in an ad a while back related, "I feel more powerful... [now that I've dyed my hair]. Seems superficial, I know, but, it goes deeper than that."

Sure it does. I can't help but feel that the advertising wizards have twisted our instinctive need to connect with other women and nature through bodily adornment into a divisive, desperate attempt to attract male approval by looking "beautiful" and thereby attaining a precarious, secondhand form of security and power.

The ads tell us there is power in being passive. Look at all the fashion advertisements depicting women prostrate, on the ground, or backed up against a wall. What a dangerous lie this is!

There is no real power in submission. There is no real power in conformity. When I adorn myself in the permissible, safe way; when I follow the fashion, and not my unique creative impulses, I can never truly be powerful. I am just setting myself up to be compared, by men and by women, to other women and the flavour-of-the-month. As Gloria Steinem says, I become a"female impersonator," alienated from my nature and the power of my instincts.

Luckily with age I am gaining some perspective and wisdom about it all -- oh, but it is such a slow process! I am learning to accept who I am lately, I have even found myself reaching for that pack of rainbow-coloured markers on the stationery store shelf.

I know it's pretty tough right now for younger women -- and girls growing up. Studies reveal that young women in their teens are suffering from depression in ever-increasing numbers. On one hand young women are told, via a slew of alluring images, that they must be ultra-feminine, self-absorbed, even narcissistic to fit in. On the other hand, they are being told they must take charge too, at home, in the work-place, and even in the gym.

Sometimes I'm glad that I don't have to raise a girl in today's world. Yet, is my little boy really better off? He too suffers the tyranny of mixed messages. Today's man must be a sensitive, caring guy -- but macho too. And I can tell you from experience, boys absorb that message at any early age.

One morning a few years ago, my rugged little boy Mark draped himself in some of my cheap beads and declared, "I must dance." Seeing my dazzling array of dimestore jewelry, he felt compelled to adorn himself. Once bedecked, he naturally felt the primitive impulse to dance, to express himself to the universe spontaneously and unabashedly.

What a healthy impulse, I thought at the time.

Today Mark owns a plastic knife, a plastic sword, a Nerf Manta Ray missile launcher, and innumerable ominous-looking Super Soaker water pistols. Mark now expresses himself by darting behind a hockey puck or making perfect "swishes" at the basketball hoop. Nowadays, Mark adorns himself only with Batman or other Superhero duds -- and then only on Hallowe'en. Perhaps this behavior is genetically programmed, but I doubt that's the whole story. Somewhere along the line Mark has learned, via blatant messages from society and more subtle signals from me, that little boys don't wear Mommy's jewelry -- cheap or otherwise -- and that little boys don't dance. (Dennis Rodman seems to serve as a vivid example of the slippery slope a man faces when he gives into his artistic side.) My son has the body of an athlete and the soul of an artist. I fear -- no, I know -- that his artistic side is slowly being squashed and is likely to be repressed even more in the coming years. Surely, smothering creative urges can't be any better for him -- a male -- than it is for his mother or female peers.

What a wasteful world we live in where both sexes have to hide their true selves to conform to some standard of feminity or masculinity that serves only to maintain the status quo! Only artists are allowed the dignity -- and joy -- of true self-expression in our culture, and that often comes at a price.

No wonder my son Mark and I both could relate to the brilliant, bold Bridget in the Robert Munsch tale. She found a way around the dilemma.



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