Note that it is Angelina who is forcefully "turning her child into a boy." It couldn't be the capricious fashion sense that toddlers themselves have been known to express. It couldn't be Brad. Or the nanny. No, it's the mother. Because mothers are the ones who bear the sole responsibility of embedding us all in our proper places in the patriarchy, and if something goes wrong in this process, she is the only one to blame.
Then there's the "parenting expert":
Some parenting experts think that indulging Shiloh's masculine behavior is a mistake. "Little girls have never been women before," Glenn Stanton, director of Family Formation Studies at the conservative organization Focus on the Family, tells Life & Style. "They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like. It's important to teach our children that gender distinction is very healthy."Note that this "expert" isn't some child psychologist or specialist on early childhood development. No, it's a spokesperson for Focus on the Family. And here's the real kicker. If you ask Focus on the Family and their ilk about men and women, they'll yammer on and on and on about how men and women are "naturally" different, how these alleged differences in temperament and ability and propensity and disposition are all biologically based - planted in us by a loving God who intended for us to have different and complementary roles, in which women are inferior and subservient to men, of course. But here's where they never connect the dots. If this is all so natural, and biological, and part of the Great Design for the Universe, why does it take so much coercive socialization to get girls to be girls and boys to be boys? Couldn't an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God do better than that?
"But here's where they never connect the dots. If this is all so natural, and biological, and part of the Great Design for the Universe, why does it take so much coercive socialization to get girls to be girls and boys to be boys?"
ReplyDeleteWow. I've never thought about this before. What a huge contradiction. How embarasing for them.
All you can really do is laugh at this kind of shit, but it's pretty damned depressing that this is the most common reaction to a little girl who doesn't rigidly adhere to gender norms. I realize once again that this is why I never read the comments on most websites. Sad, sad, sad.
ReplyDeleteWell when i was a little girl i had long blond hair, my mother put me in dresses in the summer, made me into a right little girl. I was told i had to be friends with girls and not boys, this was inforced by telling me only girls could come in the garden and play. I had girls toys only. Im 30 years old now, im a lesbian, and most of my clothes are out the mens.
ReplyDelete