Earrings

My daughter (I’ll call her #3; though she is my only daughter, she is my third child) is on the verge of toddlerhood. Her existence has led to a number of conversations between me and S (wife) over the age at which it is appropriate for a girl to get her ears pierced.

S thought that the best age for piercing #3’s ears is very young, say, before one year old. Her reasoning was that the brief pain of the event would be long forgotten, and our daughter would thank us for taking care of it for her. This is the circumcision model of ear-pierce timing.

This seems spurious to me. First of all, going the earlier route doesn’t reduce the amount of pain involved. All it does is make it the case that the pain of the experience is forgotten at an earlier age. This is of little or no value. Second of all, one’s memory of the pain doesn’t last long, anyway. S was in her double digits before she got her ears pierced. She remembers that it hurt a little (or perhaps just knows that it probably did hurt a little), but she does not remember the pain of it at all. Besides, S should be more than familiar with the fact that time dulls the memory of pain: what else can explain that she has voluntarily gone through labor three times?

My view is that we should wait until #3 is capable of requesting, and consenting in a relatively informed way, to getting her ears pierced. The main reason is that a girl’s getting her ears pierced is not very important, so there is no weighty consideration or emergency that warrants overruling informed consent. If we combine this with the fact that piercing her ears earlier would not in fact reduce the amount of pain she experiences, there seems to be no reason for not waiting.

Moreover, it is important to see how much the discussion concedes to existing gender norms. S and I had no similar conversation about when to get our sons’ ears pierced. We got their noses pierced instead. (Hmm… if this would help with the three-year old’s nose-picking maybe we should.)

Now it’s true that most boys do not ultimately want their ears pierced, while most girls do. But this is because of the beauty norms in place in our culture. Let’s face it: ear-piercing is a form of bodily mutilation that is part of a more general cultural practice of making females attractive to males. I note this not because I’m opposed on moral grounds to bodily mutilation. (I suspect that the mutilation/enhancement distinction is about as tough to parse as the breakfast food/dessert food distinction.) Nor, I hasten to add, am I opposed to attractive women. It’s just that I see no reason to accelerate my daughter’s enculturation into sexist norms. Even if she is ultimately going to accept those norms, she should know what she is doing. This helps flesh out what I think informed consent means in this case. It involves a person not only knowing that getting her ears pierced may be painful, but also knowing one of the causes of her feeling that getting her ears pierced is something she wants to do.

My mother-in-law weighed in on the dispute by purchasing #3 a set of diamond earrings. Did I mention #3 is not even a toddler yet? S thinks they would look very cute on her. I think #3 is sufficiently cute without them.

S has replied to my considerations with an ad hominem (for those readers who are not married, ad hominems are not fallacies in an argument between a husband and a wife). She thinks that I am a hypocrite, and that my arguments are merely sophisticated-sounding cover for the oh-so-typical Victorian overprotectiveness that fathers have for their daughters. This is unfair, I think. I have no problem with #3 crawling around with her arms and ankles exposed, for example. But S points out that I don’t object to her wearing earrings. In fact, I’ve bought her a few over the years.

S asks me whether I am willing to oppose cultural beauty norms for other females besides my daughter. Replying in detail would take me beyond blog-post length. I will say, though, that her question led me to ask: would selective opposition to sexist norms make me more of a sexist than blanket acceptance of those norms?