28: The Dinosaur T-Shirt to Toxic Masculinity Pipeline with Kirstie Beaven

Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast. I have been so excited to share this week’s episode with you. Our guest today is Kirstie Beaven from Sonshine magazine - a publication dedicated to raising boys for a more equal world. Kirstie and I talk about how seemingly innocuous things like dinosaur t-shirts and shark pants send a message to our kids about who they can and can’t be, how they should expect to be treated, and how they should treat others. Kirstie gives us a fascinating history lesson on how kids’ clothes became gendered (spoiler, colonialism and capitalism have a lot to do with it) and why these have massive repercussions for gender equality. We also talk about why Kirstie is low-key obsessed with pants (the underwear kind), and why we can’t just empower girls in a vacuum; we also need to be teaching boys emotional literacy and allowing them to have an identity outside of the ‘big boy’, or the sporty one. Just a heads up that we talk about some distressing statistics around sexual harassment, suicide, and violence towards women and girls, but not in explicit detail.This is without a doubt one of my favourite episodes we’ve done on the CIHAS pod - if you’ve never listened before then this is a great place to start, even if you don’t have kids. Don’t forget to leave a review in your podcast player if you enjoy this episode - or let me know what you think in the comments below. Find out more about Kirstie’s work here.Follow her on Instagram here.Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here’s the transcript in full:INTROKirstie: That's one of the things I really want to do, is just gently point out the things that we take for granted that we say are normal or natural, but they're not. They're totally constructed. Many of the things that we just take for…oh yeah, pink and blue. Pink is a girls’ colour, blue is a boys’ colour. We think of that as completely normal and it's totally made up and it's so recent.Laura: Hey, and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about appetite, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I'm Laura Thomas, I'm an anti diet registered nutritionist, and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter. Today I'm talking to Kirstie Beavan.Kirstie is the founder and editor of Sonshine Magazine, raising boys for a more equal world. Sonshine is a print and digital quarterly, as well as a social profile for parents who want to change the way we talk to and about our sons, to create a better society for all children.I've been so excited to share this episode. We recorded it a while back and I'm really glad that you're able to finally listen to it. It's such a great discussion about gender inequality and why seemingly innocuous things like how we dress our kids have really long term implications for their emotional development and the roles that they learn to occupy in society. Kirstie is a wealth of knowledge about the gendered history of kids clothing, which you won't be surprised to hear is entirely rooted in capitalism, rather than any real biological or physical differences between sexes. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation, and if you don't already, you need to get your hands on a copy of Sonshine Magazine, which is available in print and digitally. I'll link to it in the show notes so you can order yours. It would make a really lovely holiday gift for your co-parent or some other parents that you have in your life, maybe even for yourself. But before we get to today's episode, I'd love to tell you all about the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber to the Can I Have Another Snack? Newsletter. And of course there are cool perks like being able to comment on posts, our Thursday threads, Snacky Bits, and exclusive posts on intuitive eating, weight inclusive health, and responsive feeding. But more than all of that, being reader and listener supported means I can better control who comes into this space. In other words, we can keep the trolls and the fatphobes out. And if they do sneak in, at least they've had to pay for the privilege, and I can still boot them out. Having control over who comes into the space is essential for creating a safe, nurturing space away from diet culture where we can discuss difficult topics like how we deal with diet-y friends, gender division of labour, and body shame. All the way through to more light hearted stuff like the weird shit that mummy influencers say. If you're still not convinced, then here's a recent testimonial from someone in the CIHAS community. So they wrote: “I wish I had access to the advice and information you share when my kids were little, but it's still valuable now that they're nearly adults for a couple of reasons at least. Firstly, having only been diagnosed as autistic in middle age, I have had a complicated relationship with food for most of my life. From childhoo...