For the first two years of her life, she was constantly mistaken for a boy because she wore gender-neutral clothes. We direct her towards books and other media that do not represent traditional gender roles (no sparkle princesses!). We ask friends and family to refrain from commenting on her appearance and clothing, if they can help it, and to instead focus on skills or interests.

However, our daughter adores the color pink, insists on wearing dresses, and is currently obsessed with accessories.

After a few battles about wearing her sole pink dress when it was dirty, my daughter and I did some online shopping together and she chose a few more dresses to order (all of them were pink, obviously).

I feel like if we push back too hard on her love for dresses and jewelry, it will backfire, and she will only become more obsessed!

It's as though this woman - and all the other parents like her - have never heard of the concept of the forbidden fruit: something that is made desirable because it is not allowed, and which becomes ever more ineluctably appealing the more it is decreed unacceptable, off-limits and taboo.

This is a concept that is central to the Book of Genesis, the Old Testament origin story that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are based on - religions that more than half the world's population nowadays believes in. In North America, where presumably this woman lives coz she's writing to Slate, the Bible and Judeo-Christian narratives are pretty fundamental to the entire dominant popular culture, regardless of whether we as individuals buy into them.

Beyond the OT, the concept of forbidden fruit is also a known trope in many religious traditions, cultures and stories coz it's a basic fact of human psychology that the act of forbidding something automatically piques humans' curiosity about it and desire for it.

How can such a simple, obvious concept that contains such a large grain of truth be so hard for people to grasp?