no time for that Tuesday

Okay: I agree that it is time to toilet train my son. I remain unconvinced that his entry into the world of pooping in toilets requires gendered programming to facilitate it:

Left: gender-neutral products for the incontinent; Right: fledging continence, with an inexplicable side of Being a Boy

The picture above doesn't entirely capture the particulars of this transition from androgynous diaper-shitter to Big BOY or GIRL! Choose now! However, blocking the aisle at Family Dollar last night, after a pretty intense conversation with Mac's day care teacher about the toileting norms of his new Toddler Class, I had a mini-crisis about this new stage in my parenting journey when I innocently mistook the pink (GIRL) pull ups for red (CHILD) pull ups, only to realize that I no longer simply have a child; I now have a Little Boy.

If Mac were a girl, this particular dilemma would be easy: turn over the girl packet and you will see that these pink diapers have asinine pink flowers and other bullshit on them, while the boy pull ups have a much less irritating color and design scheme (Which I no longer remember -- turtles? shooting stars? The point is, they don't piss me off.) Were I raising a girl McCartney, we'd just buy the boy diapers and be done with it. Because their function is to contain my child's private regions and the products thereof, they lack the standard penis slit that really justifies gender specific adult undergarments.

Because Mac is a boy, though, I feel like buying him the better pull-ups, which are also the boy pull-ups, is reinforcing a system of norms that leaves little girls stuck with stupid, lame things.

And it only starts with training pants! They asked us the same question at McDonalds earlier this month, where Mac, engorged with chicken nuggets, "sip soda"'s, and the blindness of male privilege, left behind both his awesome Adventure Time toy and his effing LEGO cup. (His worthless mother was neurotically dissecting a snack wrap in an effort to avoid its shards of cheese-plastic, and noticed neither the receiving of said bounty nor its assimilation into the similarly plastic-looking, technicolor remains of our family lunch.)

Meanwhile, somewhere, a little girl is confronting her second-class status by way of this bullshit:

Okay, my two year old and I may see eye to eye only rarely, and our respective areas of expertise may  exist as a kind of Venn diagram that does not intersect, but both he and I can tell you without hesitation that that is not what a toy is. That, my friends, is jewelry. And jewelry is like clothes that you are not required to wear to stay warm and avoid arrest -- which is to say, useless and stupid.

I don't know what the incentive is, giving girls stupid shitty non-toys and dumb-looking pink pull-ups while boys get Lego cups and undies I'd be proud to run around in my damn self, but seriously, everyone, WT to the F with this. I've got no time for it.