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On Thursday, I again strived to be an enlightened parent and entrepreneur, much to the dismay of our daughter at home, Abby, who was sipping her morning coffee.
Okay, Abby, listen up,
I barked. This is Take
Our Daughters to Work Day, and I don't want you to lose
self-esteem. So you're going to stay home and work with
me.
She started to splutter a protest, but I knew my duty and didn't let her interrupt.
First we've got to get a column written for the Post.
Then there are about a dozen people to call for a magazine
article we're going to work on. There's about an hour of
tedious scutwork where you get to piece out the phone bill.
And the office needs cleaned -- you want to start
there?
Dad, that's sexist, making me clean while you do the
exciting stuff.
But you said writing is real boring work, and
cleaning my office can be quite interesting, especially if
you've been studying fungal growths in biology.
Abby offered her usual reply. Dad, it's 'Take your
daughter to work day,' not 'Put your daughter to work
day.'
But what are you supposed to do?
I asked. Just
sit there and look over my shoulder, I guess. I can't write
with somebody looking over my shoulder, and so I can't do
my usual work with you around, and that defeats the whole
purpose, doesn't it?
Abby agreed. School's a lot easier than work,
anyway.
She further observed that since she's the only
one in the household with an outside job, maybe she should
ask her employer about Bring your parents to work
day.
It might be good for you, dad,
she explained.
Nobody ever yells at you for being five minutes late, or
tells you how to dress for work, and you can swear and
smoke and belch all you want to while on the job -- you
ought to find out how the rest of the world works.
I told her I'd been there and done that, and I asked her
if there was any merit to the logic behind Bring Your
Daughters to Work Day.
The theory is that girls get
less attention in school, and they lose self-esteem in
adolescence, and if they get a special day in the
workplace, then they'll get mouthy in class, just like
boys, and do better in school and all that.
But girls already do better in school,
Abby
pointed out. We don't drop out as much as boys do, more
of us go to college, we get higher grades -- I don't know
how they can say that schools work against girls.
But what about math?
I asked. I was in an
accelerated math program in junior high and high school.
When we started with eighth-grade algebra, it was about
evenly mixed. But by my senior calculus class, it was all
boys. The girls who dropped out along the way were pretty
smart -- there's got to be a reason.
Abby noted that You were always worried about that,
so you threatened to chain me and Columbine in the cellar,
feeding us nothing but bread and water, if we didn't go all
the way through on math.
Well, as a parent, you do what you must. Abby did agree
that many girls lose self-esteem at the onset of
adolescence, but that's hardly our fault. Look at any
magazine for teenage girls.
So I did -- an old issue of Young & Modern.
Its scented and colorful pages teemed with articles like
How to attract an awesome hunk,
Getting an even
suntan so guys will flock to you
and Are you a good
kisser?
In short, the goal of a teen-aged girl is to attract a teen-aged boy, not to ace a calculus test.
Further, the magazine's theme is that the typical teenaged girl is ugly and repellent unless she invests in the proper perfume, cosmetics, nail polish, clothes, etc.
The whole idea is to get you to think you're
repulsive the way you are,
Abby said, but you'll be
cool and popular if you just buy all this stuff that most
girls can't afford. So of course we'll have self-esteem
problems. These magazines are in business to give us
self-esteem problems, which we can cure by spending a lot
of money on Cover Girl cosmetics, Jordache jeans, Calvin
Klein fragrances, Maybelline lipstick, Studio Line gels,
whatever.
There must be billions of dollars invested in
promoting poor self-esteem in teen-aged girls,
I said.
It's a huge industry. Make girls feel inadequate, and
ten sell them some temporary feelings of adequacy with the
right clothes or cosmetics.
The Ms. Foundation folks can take daughters to work
all they want to,
Abby said, but until they burn
every copy of those magazines, teen-aged girls will still
feel inadequate. All the forces of Madison Avenue and Wall
Street are organized to make us feel inadequate, and
nothing's about to change that.
She took off for school, and I told her to kick some
serious butt on her calculus test. But first I thanked her
for coming to work
with me to produce a column.
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