Makeup classes
Not everyone will be pleased that Wellington’s Evans Bay Intermediate School has now scrapped its controversial ‘‘glitz and glamour for girls’’ makeup class. Some will say this is the PC anti-joy squad at work again. Surely a makeup class, which was itself asked for by some girls, can do no harm? And probably it would have been harmless enough. After all, how much damage can come from one hour a week spent on lipstick and eyeliner?
The bigger question, however, is whether this is the best use of a school’s always limited time and resources. The main aim of education is to open the horizons of children, to see different things and to consider different ways of living their own lives.
Arguably the makeup course would tend to reinforce old stereotypes of girls, the traditional expectation that their main life chances lie in making themselves attractive and getting a man. This is the feminist argument promoted by Human Rights Commissioner Jackie Blue, who criticised the course. No doubt some of the school parents who disliked it had the same view.
One possible way of avoiding the criticism, perhaps, would have been to open the course to boys as well as girls. That would make it an equal opportunity move presumably acceptable to Blue.
Only, though, at the expense of reality. It would be a brave, and admirable, lad who would sign up to such a course, and a very rare one.
If the makeup course for girls encouraged stereotyping, what would the bad male equivalent be? Perhaps something like ‘‘How to be a he-man: being tough for boys.’’ This would teach 12-year-old boys how to enhance their physical strength and their macho stoicism, how to suppress emotions and never cry a girly tear.
And no doubt some boys would enjoy this course and possibly it wouldn’t do much harm since it too would last for a mere hour a week.
But it would encourage behaviour that is all too likely to come naturally to many boys and is all too likely to persist when they grow up. Educators would do better to open boys’ eyes to other ways of being male and living a good life.
The girls-only glitz and glamour course would take us back to the days when boys did woodwork and girls did cooking. Those days are long gone, for the good reason that manual skills and cooking are good for both boys and girls to learn.
A similar point applies to the plea that the makeup course aimed to teach the difference between ‘‘sexually provocative’’ and ‘‘appropriate’’ appearance. This raises some deep issues about gender roles and particularly about women’s freedom and men’s expectations.
These are important for both boys and girls to think deeply about, and they lead naturally to issues of harassment and power. Some Evans Bay parents rightly noted that a makeup course seemed odd in the days of the #MeToo movement.
But all of these very serious matters are better dealt with in school sex education classes than in make-up sessions for girls.