Mom, Disney is a sexist company, isn’t it.
Out of the mouths of babes, and 9 year olds, come important truths. But I like to wait it out, rather than presume, so I reply with:
Why do you say that, honey?
On Pixie Hollow I want to buy pants for my fairies. I have the credits, but Pixie Hollow won’t let fairies wear pants.
But they have pants for sale?
Only to the Sparrow Men. You can buy pants for your boy fairies but not for your fairies. Even if you have the money.
Can the boys buy skirts?
No. So it’s even more sexist, isn’t it!
Momentarily, I congratulate my self that my own 4th grader is developing a discrimination detector.
Then, I come over to the computer to make sure she hasn’t missed something in the game. Maybe she’s just doing something wrong in the game that is preventing her from buying pants for her fairy.
Together, we go through the process — my daughter earned the game points, she went to the game store, and she can’t buy pants for her pixies.
Thanks for the friendly “reminder” of what girls can’t do, Pixie Hollow.
As designed, the game only lets players dress their fairies in dresses wings, shoes, and bows, while the Sparrow Men can have only pants, shirts, and wings.
(The name ‘Sparrow Men” comes from the book Peter Pan. Why they are not sparrowboys, or simply fairoes instead of fairies, I don’t know.)
This is what we parents call a “learning opportunity”.
Is Pixie Hollow’s “No Pants for Girls” Rule intentional sexism?
Pixie Hollow’s dress code may well be “benevolent sexism” or “enlightened sexism”. It may even be unintentional sexism, if the whole constraint is a technological oversight. Maybe the Sparrow Men module was developed as an add-on and they didn’t think to integrate all the pieces?
The cause of the pants prohibition for fairies may be rather benign. It’s not like we’re imagining some malevolent, Taliban-inspired product manager decreeing that girls fairies may not wear pants because it isn’t “appropriate” in Pixie Hollow. Maybe it never occurred to them that fairies might want to wear pants.
However, it doesn’t matter whether someone was overtly, consciously sexist or not. The game is sexist. It imposes its own gendered norms for what is kind of pixie appearance is appropriate. For no reason at all.
As Joe Gerstandt explains, it’s the outcome that counts. If an outcome creates a sexist or racist experience, even if not consciously intended by the creators, it is still sexist, and still needs to be changed.
My daughter and I have talked about the Fairy Dress Code issue at length now. She’s done a little research, and determined that there’s just no reason why girl fairies can’t wear pants. Although most of the books about fairies depict the fairies (mostly all female) in dresses, skirts, or flower petals (which are themselves skirt-like), there is no fairy queen or kind who has decreed that girl fairies can’t wear pants.
So there’s something wrong in the real world.
Do Pixie Dress Codes really matter?
You may think it’s silly to be concerned that in an online game, the girl fictional creatures are unable to do something so simple as wear pants, while the boy fictional creatures can. But it’s not that silly.
First, in the ‘up close an personal’ perspective, my kid has earned the points, they are her fairies, why can’t she dress them as she pleases?
Second, I don’t want my kid to have to confront sexism in her toys. Her dad and I have gone to a lot of trouble to raise her to understand that her sex, her gender performance, her race, and her other ‘categorizes’ should never be barriers to what she wants to do or who she wants to be.
Sexist Dress Codes: Real manifestations of real obstacles
Girls especially, but sometimes boys too, begin to notice that girls and boys are treated differently. They know this in their hearts, and they feel it in their experience, but they often don’t “see” gendering or discrimination in material and concrete ways that they can easily grok.
My daughters still find it hard to believe that there was no girls’ soccer team when I was in high school, that it was only in 1973 that women were ‘allowed’ to keep their names when they got married, and that I keep getting mail addressed to Mr. & Mrs. DearHusband, rather than Dr. Harquail and Mr. DearHusband. And those are only the visible, superficial manifestations… don’t even get me started on the number of girls in my 6th grader’s accelerated math class.
Yes, we know that Pixie Hollow is a completely sexist universe.
The entire Pixie Hollow game is sexist, as is the book it was based on and the Disney franchise that it extends. Just check out the list, here, of fun things you can do in Pixie Hollow.
[Note: I'm trying to balance out my kid's experience by having her play Call of Duty 2 with her dad. Just kidding. Actually, I take solace in the Star Wars fantasy play where they all fight over who gets the red light saber and thus gets to be the Jedi "Master".]
In the grand scheme of sexism, the issue of pants being forbidden for fairies is a really small one. But on Pixie Hollow, it’s a big deal. An important element of the game revolves around “adorning” your pixie avatar. So why are choices for that adornment limited along gender lines?
Today, of all days, this dress code at Pixie Hollow is annoying my daughter.
Today is Wear The Pants Day, sponsored by my daughter’s favorite magazine, New Moon Girls. 
New Moon Girls, the feisty and fun feminist magazine and online community made by and for girls, wants females to observe “Wear The Pants Day” this Friday (June 11th) because girls and women around the world are still forbidden or discouraged from wearing pants. Yes, it is 2010, and yet:
Girls and women are beaten, arrested and worse for wearing pants, even loose pants covered by skirts. Just last week, Indonesian women wearing jeans had their pants confiscated and were ordered to don long skirts. Schoolgirls in Sudan were flogged last fall for wearing pants, and while international outrage helped keep flogging at bay for Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, she must pay a fee for the crime of wearing pants. Last September, some 20 Ugandan women wearing pants were stripped and left to walk home in underwear.
Right here in the US, plenty of anti-pants expectations remain. Just two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on persistent bias against pants-wearing women in many white-collar professions such as law and finance, and polled readers about whether pants or skirts were more appropriate for women. Readers approved pants, but only by a narrow margin. Female college grads are still warned to stick to skirts to grease the skids to the top in many professions. And girls and women in conservative religious communities face formal and informal proscriptions against pants-wearing.
Just when you think that wearing pants or not is trivial, you remember it isn’t trivial.
Changing the Dress Code at Pixie Hollow
We are working on our letter to the folks at Pixie Hollow. We’ve heard that Sparrow Men were added to Pixie Hollow because some boys and girls wrote to Disney and asked that boys be explicitly included in Pixie Hollow. While the explicit inclusion of male characters fixed the previous workaround (where players created androgynous-looking avatars and gave them ambiguous names so that the characters could be boy fairies), we’d like Disney to take their inclusion/ exclusion efforts a little further.
While we work on changing Disney’s online world, my girl is making a statement in the real world. Today, on Wear the Pants day, she’s going to school in …. a skirt.
She’s been convinced, by Svea’s letter on the New Moon Girls site, that by wearing a skirt she can make a point and learn something new. As Svea writes:
I made the decision to wear a skirt on June 11.I am going to wear a skirt for two reasons. First, to celebrate my freedom of being able to wear skirts, and second to imagine what it would be like if I had to wear a skirt every single day. Also, I wear pants every single day, so for me, having a wear the pants day would have virtually no symbolic meaning. It would be like having brush your teeth day or eat dinner day.
Dear Disney,
We’d like to be able to dress our pixies however we chose, thank you very much. And, we’d like to be able to wear what we want, regardless of someone else’s expectations of what’s gender appropriate.
That freedom should exist for fairies and sparrowguys in Pixie Hollow, and girls and boys everywhere in the world.
We’re not going to be able to change all the sexism in the game, or all the sexism in the world, but we’ll do our best to make a difference where we can.
See also:
Joe Gerstandt, on Our Time To Act: Disentangling Intentions from Outcomes, and
This article, which takes the discussion of sexism on Pixie Hollow pretty far, but leaves about 10% of the work for you to continue on your own: Tinker … bill? Disney fairies get a sex change: At long last, boys come to Pixie Hollow — and that’s a win for kids of both genders, by Mary Elizabeth Williams, on Slate’s Broadsheet
