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It’s
Different for Girls
I’ve
spent much of my daughter’s life trying to resist her being
pigeonholed by gender. I think it’s been a pretty decent success.
At four she still loves trucks and tools and all the colors
of the rainbow (plus pink). She wears dresses and gets them
dirty and carpenter jeans while playing with her dolls. We’ve
started to have conversations about why there are so few women
working on the Delaware Avenue rebuilding crews, and my husband
has been threatening to bake a cake of gratitude for the ones
who are there, especially the one who drives a steamroller.
We’ve found a set of actually traditional old stories with
strong female characters to read instead of hokey heavy-handed
modern versions. I think we haven’t been rigid enough to cause
backlash but have generally kept her sense of possibility
open. (This does not mean that she doesn’t do anything traditionally
female. I’m not silly enough to aim for that. I’d have to
keep her in a bubble, and there’s, well, a whole other host
of problems with that.)
I’m sure when we get into teenagerhood there will be a whole
different round of challenges.
But having recently had to think about the prospect of raising
a boy (turns out we got another girl), I realized just how
much harder that seems to me. There are many things that make
parenting boys and girls different in our current world, but
one recently struck me in a new way: the safety considerations
involved in encouraging non gender typical behavior are opposite:
Women and girls are more at risk of violence if they conform
to gender expectations. Boys and men are more at risk if they
don’t.
There are exceptions, of course. Lesbians are still at risk
of violence in some areas just for being who they are. And
hyper-masculinity in other contexts leads to a high chance
of being involved in violence, especially as a perpetrator.
But as things stand now and here, violence at the hands of
a romantic/intimate partner, probably a man, is still one
of the largest gender-coded dangers looming in my mind’s eye
for my daughters. Also violence at their own hands in the
name of twisted goals about body image and sexuality.
Trying to teach girls to resist usual gender stereotypes about
passivity and assertiveness, physical strength and willingness
to use it, self-worth associating with beauty, relationships
and domesticity, and related issues is one clear way to fight
that. Riot grrrls are not immune to abusive relationships,
and they’ll need some explicit messages about what’s OK and
what isn’t, but my gut tells me they’ve got at least some
protection.
But for boys it’s different. Encourage a boy to wear pink
or skirts if he wants, play with dolls, not be ashamed to
cry, and while you are probably on track to raise a stronger,
more complete, healthy, secure man in the long run, you’re
exposing him to more risks in the short run. A girl may be
teased briefly for wearing flannels and jeans. Or might not.
A boy in “girls” clothes is 100 percent assured of some sort
of explosion in most mainstream contexts (unless he passes
as a girl). The range of what boys can’t do without bucking
gender “rules” is smaller, but the backlash when they do it
is many times larger. Witness the numerous recent news reports
of young boys who had been labeled “sissy” or “gay” being
beaten up, harassed, and even committing suicide. As a parent,
this sort of prospect would worry me approximately 10,000
times more than the vanishingly rare chance of my child stumbling
across a pedophile kidnapper.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give boys the kind of freedom
they deserve. It just makes it more complicated.
And if our sons are not inclined toward behaviors that will
likely get them bullied, then, too, we have to worry about
them becoming the bullies. As Liza Featherstone wrote recently
in Bitch magazine about her four-year-old son joining
in with others in his preschool class to condemn the boy who
wears princess dresses to class, “I don’t want my sweet little
kid to think he has to be a violent thug just because he has
a penis.”
I have, at least for the time being, been spared having to
address this directly with my own children. I am partly relieved,
because it’s far less clear to me how it should go. And partly
I feel a little disappointed and even guilty for having been
exempted from some of the hardest and yet most important work
in combating sexism in our culture. I salute those who are
doing it.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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