Raising the girl: “you’re going to need a shotgun”

Every once in a while I’ll post a cute photo of my daughter to the facebooks.  And every once in a while one of my facebook friends will post something like “what a cutie!  You’re going to need a shotgun!”  And thus they imply that I’m going to need to resort to violence to protect my daughter’s precious virginity from callow, sex-crazed boys.  And it pisses me off.

I really really don’t want to be the kind of Dad that gets all possessive about his daughter’s sexuality.  I want her to enjoy sex, have sex whenever she’s ready, and equip her with enough self-confidence and information to make sure she’s engaging with herself sexually on her terms, not anyone else’s–not the boys she dates, the girls who are her friends, or her parents’.  How her mother and I are going to accomplish this we’re not exactly sure, but it’s a goal we have for her and one we hope to achieve.

I admit I didn’t always think this way, especially when I was younger and wondering what it would be like to have children.  But my wife shared with me a story from when she was a teenager and she informed her mother she was having sex.  Her mother cried, not because her daughter’s “innocence” was lost or some such nonsense, but because she was so happy for her.  My wife’s mother thought it was important for women to have sex with the people they loved, and wanted her daughters to have as many partners as they saw fit.  It was a contrast to her Catholic upbringing, which treated women’s sexuality as property and shamed women for having healthy sexual appetites.  She was so delighted that her own daughters would not have to live with that kind of psychic oppression.

I think this will be important for my son to see as well.  He needs to be raised with the same values, not only to see his sexuality respected, but also to respect the sexuality of others, particularly that of the women in his life.  (I recognize, too, that one or both of them might be gay, but the lessons are still the same.)  Both children are going to be bombarded with sexist and essentialist societal mores in the media and by their peers, and I can only protect them from that for so long. 

So once again I’m not sure exactly how we’re all going to instill these values, but I’m glad nonetheless that we’re at least thinking about them while the children are young.  This is tough stuff, and I have a feeling we’re going to need all the time we can get.  I also have a feeling that I don’t have nearly as much time as I might otherwise hope.

Boys stuff

I half-saw an interesting documentary on Harper Lee that my wife was watching the other night while I was fighting Sith in The Old Republic. It’s been years since I read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or saw the film, but I was instantly reminded that here was another piece early 1960’s media (the book came in 1960, the film two years later) with a decidedly feminist bent. Scout is the female protagonist (as a child) and also the book’s narrator (as an adult). Once again, I find irony and audacity in a (celebrated) 50-year-old film smartly challenging traditional gender roles better than the movies of today.

While I was researching the book this morning, I was reminded of the scene where Atticus gives both Scout and her brother Jem air rifles for Christmas (admonishing them not to kill mockingbirds when he does so). And it got me thinking about the astonishing degree to which “boys stuff” and “girls stuff” is bifurcated today. Go to any big box retailer’s toy section, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You’ll find a few aisles of nothing but pink plastic trinkets and dolls–the girls stuff–adjacent to aisle upon aisle of diverse toys of all stripes for the boys. This arrangement was present when I was a boy, too, but to a far lesser extent. True, there were some girls toys and some boys toys, but the vast majority was just “kids toys.”

There’s been a lot written about the effect of this narrow stratification on girls, and I won’t attempt to recreate that here, but Margot Magowan is of course a great source if you’re interested. But what’s also interesting to me is not just how this affects the way girls see themselves, but also on how boys see gender roles as well. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that boys are perfectly able and willing to play with “girls toys,” this clean division reinforces in boys the notion that there are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” toys for each gender. Any girl who dares cross over out of the pink is potentially seen as committing a subversive act that eschews traditional gender roles and potentially undermines a boys burgeoning sense of his own masculinity. In the same sense that pinkifying large swaths of toys places them essentially “off limits” to boys, boys are encouraged to see girls as excluded from their realm, and can be made to believe that girls are, properly, to be relegated to their appropriate aisle.

There is a very real fear that society is emasculating boys (at the hands of feminism, domineering mothers, fathers who don’t hug, etc.), and I suspect that the marketing strategy that creates solidly defined masculine and feminine spaces has evolved as a reaction to that. The danger, of course, is that masculine and feminine have become defined as what we consume, rather than being defined as who we are and what we stand for. As Laura Fine suggested in Southern Quarterly in 1988, Scout’s father Atticus Finch models a unique version of masculinity, using “qualities of heroic individualism, bravery, and an unshrinking knowledge of and dedication to social justice and morality, to set the society straight.” A boy thus infused with this vision would, I suspect, develop a concept of gender radically different from, and less fearful than, the one society seems hell-bent on imposing on him.

Boys need ’em too

In general I’m a fan of Margot Magowan.  She’s a friend of mine, and I agree with her more than I disagree, notwithstanding the whole penises in the vodka thing.  And although her blog, Reel Girl, has historically been about the sexist stereotypes girls are exposed to in the media, she’s begun saying “children” more, which is pleasing to me.  She wants to imagine “gender equality in the fantasy world.”  But then she also get stuck thinking like this:

The lack of visible, heroic females in the real and imaginary world sells girls short, affecting who they are and who they will become. I think it’s horrible that the so called imaginary world is so sexist and limited.

…

I started Reel Girl because I wanted to create a resource for parents on the internet where they could go to find great stories, movies, and toys that support girl empowerment. I wasn’t able to find the kind of information I was looking for in one place.

Don’t get me wrong.  These are great sentiments, but they’re narrow.  Delivering non-gender-stereotyped characters to only one sex is not going to effect “gender equality in the fantasy world.”  If boys continue to receive the same tired tropes reinforcing their privilege, they will continue to discard nonconforming visions of gender.  The bottom line is that boys need to see non-stereotyped female characters as much as girls do.  Any hope for cultural change depends on that.

Now, I have two kids, one of each.  The girl has autism, so she consumes media in unique ways.  They boy’s just a baby, and really doesn’t consume much media at all (yet).   But it struck me as I browse for movies for both of them that I keep returning to the past for good examples of female leads.  Even when I was a child, I had female heroes (Jane Goodall comes to mind immediately), and one of brothers’ favorite animated films when we were boys was “The Secret of NIMH” with its female protagonist, Mrs. Brisby.  My daugher’s favorite movie is “The Sound of Music,” which strikes me today as feminist and subversive–Maria is outspoken and challenges authority, Liesl is the sexually aggressive foil to Rolf’s withering and callow “masculinity,” the Von Trapp boys flee to Maria seeking comfort from a thunderstorm mere seconds after little Greta proclaims that “boys are brave,” and it’s the nuns who heroically risk their lives and convent to spirit the Von Trapp family to safety.  It’s such an irony that such a hugely popular film from the early 1960’s can so casually challenge stereotypes that appear more deeply ingrained in our culture today.

But if I showed this movie only to my daughter and insulated my son from it in the name of “girl power,” I’d really be doing my daughter a disservice.  It’s not fair to dangle the promise of equality in front of her if the boys in her life never engage in that same pledge.