A woman recently wrote to the New York Times Social Q column about her daughter being uninvited from a boy's birthday party. According to her letter, which you can find here, the girl was initially invited, but the parents decided to uninvite the girls because they determined the party's superhero theme was too masculine, and planned a separate party for the girls.
Now I see there are a couple issues, the first is the parents being overly concerned with making sure everyone has a good time. My mom did this too, but in the much more reasonable form of making sure there was a good variety of games and party favors so there was something for everyone, and yes sometimes this meant the girls would get one thing and the boys would get another. Parents do this all the time, but to have two different parties because you assume girls wouldn't like the original party is dumb, and sends a message to the kids that boys and girls are so different they need separate parties to have fun. Nope.
Look, themed parties are fun, but at the end of the day the theme is little more than decoration, a way for the birthday kid to express his or herself, not please the guests. Whatever the theme is, at the end of the day the kids really only care about playing together and eating cake.
In this case we have parents probably making the insulting assumption that girls don't like comics and superheroes. Well, some might not, but how do you know if you never even encourage them to check 'em out? If you purposefully keep girls away from things like comics and video games, you tell them "these aren't for you, you won't like them, and you're not supposed to like them."
And no, this is not the same thing as girls-only princess parties. I honestly don't care who gets invited to those (although personally I'm not a fan of them in general), but saying that having a boys-only thing is okay because some girls have girls-only princess parties is a false equivalency. Comics have both male and female superheroes; it's not inherently a boys-only genre, so why do we keep acting like it is? And why are we passing that "comics are for boys" attitude down to our kids at such an early age?
What I will say is this: if I have kids, they will be exposed to video games and comics regardless of gender. If they like it, great, we'll dress 'em up and take 'em to comic conventions. If they don't, that's fine too, but I'm not going to assume my son would like comics and my daughter will only like princesses and ponies.
PS: it's rude as hell to uninvite someone from a party without a good reason why they're no longer welcome. If you don't want someone there, y'all better think of that before sending out the invites.
PPS: I know the parents can plan the party however the hell they want, what they did isn't illegal, just awful.
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