Soap Operas In Their Heads
Left to her own devices, my daughter Emmeline can play quietly by herself for hours, and sometimes does. Most of the time she'll draw or illustrate, color, do crafts like beadwork, and every once in a while she'll play with dolls or stuffed animals.
More often she'll play with her brothers, and that sometimes doesn't go well -- each of my kids has their own idea on how they want to spend their leisure time, and each of them wants to lead the activity. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as it were.
Emme is, by many measures, a girly girl -- she likes to wear dresses, loves the color pink, is obsessed with cute furry creatures (especially cats and kittens) and has a gargantuan assortment of pretty dolls and cute stuffed animals. But I think partly because she's wedged in between two boys, she's not exceptionally girly on a social level. So I always think it's interesting when her best friend, Vicky, comes over to play.
Growing up, I never much cared for dolls, and had a limited interest in action figures. Every so often my friends and I would play with action figures, but usually after a few minutes we'd get bored and move on to something else. Whether it was playing Star Wars or Army or throwing a ball around or riding a bike, it usually involved some other kind of kinetic activity. Having said that, I wasn't exceptionally (or really even marginally) athletic, but I went along for the ride because that's what the other boys in the neighborhood with whom I played wanted to do, and ultimately, their companionship was usually more important than the activity itself.
Vicky and Emme will spend hours in Emme's room (or Emme in hers, when the playdates happen at her house), playing with dolls. And they develop these elaborate fantasies involving the dolls -- Vicky is often the leader, coming up with stories about the dolls going to work or going to school, having adventures, intertwining stuff completely out of their own imagination and often padding it with scenarios or characters from TV shows, manga, anime or stuff straight out of the newspapers.
It's often entertaining to watch, or to listen to. My favorite incident involved the one time where they couldn't find a boy doll to serve as the groom for the wedding they had staged. Emme just brushed it off and said, "Well, I guess we'll just have a gay wedding then."
It's funny, but it's also reassuring to hear that my kids are integrating basic societal changes like that in their play time -- even stuff that would have been inconceivable when I was their age.
Anyway, I've never been a big fan of shoujo -- that brand of anime or manga aimed at girls -- because it often seems like a lot of character development and dramatic situations, but little more (and I like my anime laden with sex and/or violence, just like my movies and TV shows). Likewise, I've never been a big fan of soap operas (though I admit I do find Fox's soapy prime-time drama "The O.C." a guilty pleasure). So while Bonnie spends a lot of time watching shoujo anime, I don't for the most part. Just don't like it that much. But if it's got mecha, vampires or samurai, I'm all over it.
At the risk of making a sexist generalization, when I listen to the girls play, I can certainly understand why so many girls and women enjoy such fare. Clearly, it's a pattern of play and creativity they've cycled over and over again since childhood, and is familiar, comfortable and reassuring territory.