What playgrounds are girls in need of?

By Karin

First I start out with one of my favourite quotations:

"Boys can use games to escape into a fantasy world which allows them to prepare themselves for the requirements of adult masculinity, they can gird their digital loins with magical potencies and vanquish enemies with their limitless strength. They can also get killed, over and over again, along the way, until they have achieved the degree of mastery that makes them champions. Then they can reach in to the full storehouse of boy games and accept another challenge. […]
The cultural prescriptions for femininity are equally stringent - and they are also internally contradictory. Girls are expected to be both frail and enduring, helpless and competent, fun loving and sensitive, emotional and available, needy and nurturing, vain and moral. Girl needs games in which they can rehearse and express the ambiguities and contradictions of femininity. Navigating the shoals of femininity are the stuff girls think about.”

(Brunner, Bennet & Honey, 1997, s. 86-87)

This is something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time; why girls’ relationships to games seem so complex. Not only does this concern whether or girls like games or not, and if so which games they like, but it inevitably comes down to the phenomenon of play. Play is an important part of a child’s development. Through play the child manages the transition between the inner world of the psyche and the outer reality (Winnicott). Play thus becomes a very important tool for young boys and girls to use in order to deal with the expectation that are held on their future identity. It becomes even more so if you consider the theories of Judith Butler. She states that gender is something that is performed through an individual’s actions. So to become the “right” gender (and this is of course expected to go along with the body you are happen to be born with) you have to learn how to perform the “right” actions.

Skill comes with practise. If being a girl means I need skills in certain areas different from what I would need if I were a boy (seen from the society’s point of view), than the things (actions) I will have to practise will be different too. As said in the quotation femininity is a very ambiguous and contradictory thing. There are some safe grounds that all girls know about (for example dress in pink and you’ll be fine!) but there are a number of areas that are like minefields. It’s okay to do them but not too much or with too much enthusiasm. Take sports for an example. It is certainly considered good to be sporty as a girl (you shouldn’t be fat and lazy!), but if you would happen to get too muscular then it can be a problem. Whether or not these norms are something that we as grown ups agree upon or not doesn’t matter, it will for sure be something young girls are very concerned about. We can only hope to influence these girls into becoming free women who can put the rigidity of these norms behind them.

So how can we make empowering playgrounds for these girls entangled in the complexities of femininity? Are there places where they can explore their identity freely without feeling highjack by the society?

The first step is to make it possible for girls to play at all. Here is a blog entry from an angry mum who curses the way the fashion of girly clothes makes it impossible for her young daughter to play freely. There are so many things that are going on during those vulnerable years of childhood and adolescence, many small strings that all together weave a net of passivity laid upon women. It makes me furious to think about it… But I believe there are ways to sneak past these mechanisms of oppression.

There is more to play than first meets the eye. The transformative potential in play is sometimes underestimated. In play everything can be put up side down. The imagination is free to run wild and new discoveries can be made and explored. The sphere for personal actions expands (like a bubble you blow with your chewing gum!).

I recently read a study on what German girls like and dislike in videogames. It came down to three things; they disliked violence and over sexualized portrayals of women, and they liked a richness of social interaction in games. This is certainly nothing new or surprising. There are many pink games that exclude violence, have cute little characters and are all about relationships. Still it all seems so superficial to me. We need to dig deeper than that. Be more unexpected.