I can see both sides, but does it really matter?

I recently watched an episode of Dateline where the staff had set up a gender experiment in a local Halloween costume shop. Actors were hired to portray a mother/son duo and a mother/daughter one. In each scenario, the child was to choose a stereotypically opposite gender allocated costume. For example, the boy wanted to be a princess and the girl wanted to be Spiderman. The mother’s role in the scene was to be opposed to their child’s choice, and to repeatedly tell them, “They could not be that, because it was for girls/boys.”

The main point of the experiment was to analyze other customer’s reactions to the fictional mother/child situation. And, while most customer’s minded their own, some were very outspoken about the issue, the majority of which were against the boy being a princess and the girl being a superhero.

One response, in the girl scenario, was that if the mother did not “get this type of behavior under control” it would only get worse. While, other responses were directed at the children, most offering more “appropriate” choices to the children, while simultaneously trying to dissuade them by saying “I really think you would look nicer in this.” The last response was, in my opinion, the only one that held water. This customer told the fictional mother that “it really wasn’t a big deal” and that her only concern was the fact that the child might “get teased badly at school.”

And, while I can see the final responders point, and agree with it to some extent, I really don’t see why it matters what a child wants to be for Halloween. After all, Halloween is about dressing up as someone else, right?

Further, I feel the rigidness involved in our society’s definition of gender roles, is one of the main contributing factors to the lack of progress in regards to discrimination and oppression.