Shirley Temple is a Star!

Shirley Temple is a star!

S! T! A! R!

She can do the rumble,

She can do the twist,

She can do anything just like this!

Girls do a curtsey,

Boys take a bow.

Boys go *kiss* *kiss*,

Girls go WOO!

Girl readers in particular possibly remember chanting this in primary school. There were moves too. Do you remember them? I have a vivid image in my mind of three girls standing on one of the metal benches near the oval (you had to do it out of sight of the teachers, see). I’ve forgotten how the moves at the start go, but in my memory, the girls do a curtsey, just like the song says, and then bow low. They come up to blow two quick kisses, and the jump off the bench whilst simultaneously throwing their skirts up high and flashing their knickers.

Within the rhyme scheme, I think that “woo” should probably be a “wow”, but we always said “woo!” when we jumped. I also remember performing this for our male classmates. It was a big deal, it was hilarious, it was risqué. We were literally working up to flashing our undies at unsuspecting boys. And when we did they usually ran away. This counted as playground entertainment in the early to mid 90’s you see; we didn’t have the internet or phones. Hell, tazos and tamagotchis were still years off.

It’s kind of fucked up, though and I can’t stop thinking about it at the moment. Those last two lines in particular. Boys go *kiss* *kiss*, girls go woo. Boys throw some kisses around and girls lift their skirts. Boys press the right button and girls will let them in. Is it an equation, boy kisses go in, exposed undies come out? Or just a statement of fact re gender roles? Boys make the first move, girls then put out? I know it’s a stupid kids’ song, but doesn’t that make it worse? If it’s not to be taken too seriously, why do the lyrics have such serious connotations?

I can’t pinpoint for you the moment I became a feminist, it’s been a gradual process, and I’ve only been properly aware of it for the last 18 months or so. When I was 6, I thought that song was silly, and a bit scary, and it made me slightly uneasy, I think. But I didn’t for a second think about what it meant, I just accepted it as normal, just a song we sang. I don’t know that I even knew who Shirley Temple was, I just knew it was the name of a delicious mocktail my mum bought me once.

Another thing I readily accepted as a child, but find bizarre now; almost all my teddies were male. I had one female teddy that my aunty made from a floral patterned material. Flowers obviously equalled girl, so I named her after my aunty. The other teddy she made used a red fabric, and I named him Red Bear (I’ve always been very creative). I can’t think of another soft toy that wasn’t a boy in my imagining.

I actively sort out male things; I liked them, which is fine. I liked Tonka trucks and digging in my sandpit, I liked Lego and building things with my wooden blocks. Even when I went through a Barbie phase, my favourite thing was my Barbie car. Oh yes, there was a Barbie phase, but it lasted a very short time and then… here’s the kicker, I was ashamed of it. I am *all* for kids playing with non-stereotypical toys, but why was I ashamed of my stereotypical phase? I got rid of those Barbies faster than you could rip off one of the Barbie dresses, but not before mutilating a few of those plastic beauties. If you want to look at this metaphorically, I literally pulled the head off stereotypical femininity before going back to trucks and pretending my lapse into girl-ness never happened.

I thought girl stuff was stupid, I identified as a tomboy, I didn’t want girl toys because I thought girls were crap. I had a lot of female friends but right through primary and high school I would often say things like “I much prefer the company of the boys”, “I don’t fit in with the girls”, “girls are so screechy and stupid”. Why did I hate women? How did I reconcile this within my own identity as a woman? I’m still working some of that out, and I do wonder if my own self-worth was damaged by these beliefs (it must have been, surely?). What I do know is that I don’t regret any of this. I am not ashamed. I’m not sure I could be the feminist I am today if I hadn’t had to teach myself how to not hate women first.

The other night I had a lovely conversation with two female friends about how we are all only just now discovering make up. All three of us identified as being not particularly “girly” during the phase of our lives where many girls learn how to apply make up, do their hair and dress themselves well. And now all three of us are discovering things like how to make our eyelashes curly, what lipstick colour suits us, or what kind of clothes look nicest on us. While it would have been nice to learn this sort of stuff years ago, maybe, there is a certain empowering feeling, actively seeking out this kind of lady knowledge now, as an adult. It feels like something I am doing, not something that is being forced upon me. I’m not, by any means saying that women who have had their face and hair shit together since they were teenagers are not empowered, or not feminists, just that it’s working for me. I am working it. It is a part of my feminism, and I love it.

And if I could go back in time and stop my younger self from performing the Shirley Temple song, I wouldn’t. Because my younger self enjoyed it, she got a thrill out of it, but most importantly it made her feel a bit weird. And that little niggling feeling has been burrowing inside me since the very first time I watched three girls jumping off a bench with their skirts in the air. That little feeling stayed with me through all these years, it has manifested in strange and interesting and complicated ways, and though I didn’t know it then, thinking that song was a bit weird was the first feminist feeling this lady brain ever had.