OmegaMom

I see brown skin looking at me.

Sigh.

The dotter is firmly convinced that Twiggy is beautiful. “But I’m not,” she tells me earnestly.

Another day, she tells me, “Girls with brown skin can’t get married.”

She tells me she’s a “boy-girl”; I correct her with “tomboy”, and she happily agrees. This one doesn’t bother me at all (though I’m not sure she’s really a tomboy, more like a pseudo-tomboy or a tomboy-wannabe).

Twiggy, in certain manifestations, would bother me for other reasons. I still remember the waif-like look she flaunted during the 60s. But the Twiggy the dotter is referring to is an older, more fleshed-out Twiggy, guest-starring in one of the first-season episodes of the Muppets (we have the entire collection on DVD). The “beauty” is that she has long, curly blond hair, that she looks like Barbie.

Mulan and Jasmine just don’t cut it. Oh, they’re great fun to watch, and it’s fun to pretend that you’re Mulan training in swordwork, but…well, heroines like them are few and far between.

I ran this by OmegaDad this evening, and he immediately went out to the dotter and began a sweet but excruciatingly awkward conversation with the dotter while she was watching Muppets dance around with Twiggy. The end result: the dotter got quite upset at his insistence that she was more beautiful to him than Twiggy. Didn’t work. He obviously doesn’t know what beautiful is. How stupid can he be? was the impression I got from the overheard conversation.

Her favorite friends are all blond moppets with curly hair.

Her long-time beau, C., is a tall blond lout-in-the-making. (Well, he’s actually a very sweet boy who worships the ground she walks on, but he’s several inches taller than she is and very very blond.)

The “I’m not beautiful” and “brown skin is bad” is starting so very very early. I mistakenly thought we had a few more years before this started.