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So I spent a night babysitting and generally hanging out with Loving Child (you might recall she is the one who was very concerned with my skinned knee).  I don’t like to sit in front of the TV all night, so I try to find art projects for us to do in between reading books and being the two coolest chicks on the planet.

She wanted to draw a picture of us, which I agreed to because it’s actually a really good opportunity to help them start filling in the blanks in their world and helping them solve problems on their own (That’s a tree!  Hmm, it’s a really good tree but it’s missing something.  Oooh, leaves.  You are so clever, you figured that out on your own).  She also wanted to draw a picture of her and Mommy.

Anyway, LC sits down and draws us together.  Head, hair, eyes, nose, mouth…awesome for a four year old to recognize all those parts.  A triangle for a dress, standard.  Lines for legs and…at the feet, triangles with no bottom.

I asked her to tell me about the feet and she looked at me like I was so thick–it was really endearing.

“*Sigh*  Miss Jolie, those are high heels.”

She has never seen me in a pair of heels.  Heels are not what you wear to kindergarten.  Heels are not what you wear to babysitting a child whose greatest joy in life is climbing to the top of the refrigerator.  She has seen me in flat Mary Janes, fuzzy Muppet looking boots, and converse (she loves the converse).

She drew her and mommy and again, high heels.  I have seen Mommy in a pair of heeled boots exactly once and she almost fell down the steps and laughed at me that she never wears these ridiculous things and can’t walk right.  While I admit I don’t spend the weekend with my telescope trained on their house, I did see Mommy twice a day every day for nine months and no heels.

Then she drew a pair of high heels on herself.  I know this child has never worn a pair of heels, not even for dress up.

I was thinking this could be a problem solving experiment, so I pointed to my feet and said “But, LC, I’m not wearing high heels…” and then I pointed her feet out to her.

“*Sigh* Ladies wear high heels.”

I mean, she said this like I knew nothing about the universe.  Those of you who have children or work in education or have ever been around children know that tone of voice.  It’s the tone of voice used to signal the default of the universe.  People have skin.  Duh.  Your hair is red, Miss Jolie, what the fuck is wrong with you?  This Just Is.

I feel the need to mention that this is a pretty feminist household.  I don’t quite know that mom burns her bra, but she kept her last name, loves LC’s strong will and encourages LC to master her environment in a way that’s really common only for boys*.  Mommy is actually really chill and I happen to like her a lot.  I don’t know Daddy very well, but he’s always polite and he seems like a very sweet guy. This is a child who has turned to me and, out of the clear blue, said, “If someone’s not nice to me, I’m not marrying him.”  This is not a household where I’d expect a lot of gendering to happen, because it’s just plain old not how these people roll.

It’s certainly not coming from me, either.

She’s a little young to be flipping through the pages of Vogue.  She hates the Disney Princesses except for Alice, who stands flat on the ground.  I was almost tearing my hair out trying to figure out where we got the idea that not only do adult ladies wear high heels, so do four-year-olds.

If it’s not coming from the house and it’s not coming from the teachers and it’s not coming from Standard Four-Year-Old Media…is it a societal default?  Are we so inundated with pictures of women wearing stiletto heels (it’s also fair to note that all three of us were wearing lipstick, which is something else I can attest that we never do) that FOUR-YEAR-OLDS have picked that up as the feminine default.  It’s so insidious, too, because I know most of my girls with children have sat down and had the conversation that girls can do anything boys can do and they can wear pants and be doctors and you don’t have to do anything you don’t ever want to do to make someone love you.  Now we have to sit them down and explain to them that we also don’t have to wear shoes that pinch?  Somehow this is being presented enough and in enough media that a child could get their hands on that we actually have to discuss footwear now.

Ladies wear high heels, duh.

Is there a single thing we don’t have to straighten out?  Is there any default notion that children have of the world that, as feminists, we don’t have to address and correct?

*Mommy has also taught LC all of the proper names for the parts of her body and there is no bodily shame going on, either.  There is no Down There/Private Place going on.  In fact, at one point during the last school year, LC had either a UTI or a yeast infection and told me she can’t learn her letters today because her vagina hurts.  That’s a fine excuse not to do something in my book.