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The Wellington Aero Club had an open day on Saturday. For a little girl who spent happy hours poking around racing cars in Te Papa a few months ago who likes to go to the airport to watch the planes, and her daddy, this seems pretty much like a heaven-sent afternoon, and that’s how it turned out.

As well as the pictured cockpit sessions in the pictured CT-4E and CJ6 Nanchang, Ada got chances to hop into the pilot’s seat of a Sounds Air Cessna Caravan, although we missed out on the Trojan when the owner needed a bio break.

While I attempted to explain the Trojan and Corsair’s features for aircraft carriers—the Corsair had it’s wings up—I don’t think Ada really grasped the idea of planes that land and take off boats.

The only real disappointments of the day were the tiny two-seat plane, whose owners shut up shop just as we arrived to have a look (I suspect Ada may have been so wedded to it because it looked, well, child-sized), and missing out on a chance to go up for a flight in the Catalina, which had run out of seat allocations by the time I asked. She was, however, a little trooper about it; she was really upset, but avoided any kind of tantrum. I need to make it up to her with a trip on a plane when I can afford it.

One not-so-minor irk, though: a few women earlier in the day had heard my plan and suggested that the whole business was about Daddy using Ada as an excuse to do something. Yes, yes, I know it’s a standard cultural trope that men only do things with their kids to have an excuse to buy things for themselves, and that little girls can’t possibly be interested in aircraft. It’s a bullshit sexist trope, too.

See this? Different (and longer) perspective on what I was getting at here.

Ada with axe and dragon

Ada’s cousin had his third birthday party and wanted a knights theme; being somewhat concerned about the prospect of a gaggle of three year olds with swords I did what any responsible parent would: I bought Ada a sword, a shield, and the biggest axe I thought she could handle.

As it happened, it all went smoothly, not least because the knights had a dragon pinata to slay.

It has, however, given me a mighty new peeve: the tomboy; when I was telling a temporary creche worker about Ada’s weekend with axe and shield, while she was playing with trucks in the sandpit, said worker described her as a tomboy, which got a fairly visceral negative reaction from me.

Firstly, it’s not terribly accurate. Ada has begged, pleaded, and wheedled on the topic of nail polish until she has some bright yellow stuff of her own. This is not, as I understand it, the sort of behaviour one associates with the word; like her mother, who enjoys long evening gowns and fencing, Ada has tastes I would refer to as “well-rounded”.

But more fundamentally it’s that the very idea is a kind of third state of gender; it’s a peculiar construct, because on one level it lacks the wholly negative connotations of the closest equivalents I can think of for men (all of which, like, say, ‘effeminate’, leave the listener in no doubt as to the second-class status of the object). On the contrary it can be viewed quite positively by some. The problem, for me, anyway, is that it’s also got a big chunk of essentialism and denial of feminity about it. Because, it says, you are interested in cars and trucks and building castles, you are not a Real Girl. If you were a Real Girl you’d be uninterested in those things and interested only in Proper Girly Things.

I reject this—I see no reason to assign “interest in building things in a sandpit” as being an inherently masculine activity, and I see no reason my little girl should be assigned a kind of not-girl status for liking them.

I don’t even feel like Pooja Chopra’s father and I are members of the same species:

WHEN Pooja Chopra was 20 days old, her mother Neera was forced to make a choice - kill her child or forfeit her marriage.
Neera decided to keep her daughter, defying the wishes of a bullying husband who wanted the baby destroyed.