A friend asked if I’m scared my son will be gay. Right now, the question seems irrelevant. And right now, like any mother, I love my son in all his specialness. Like any mother, I just want him to feel accepted. I don’t want him to change; I want the world to change.
By the end of the article, it’s clear that Matt (who is seven) is taking small steps towards a socially-acceptable masculinity. But it’s hard to pull that off, and as he gets older the standards he’ll be expected to live up to will become more stringent, and the punishments for failure more brutal. The result, all too frequently, is to teach boys who don’t fit in to hold themselves in contempt. Frankly, if I were a parent of a sensitive, gentle boy, I’d seriously consider home-schooling.
Matt and boys like him are why sexists who talk about the need for boys to be correctly gender-socialized drive me up a fucking wall. They should all be beaten up, insulted, and isolated every day for five or six years until they can begin to understand the torture they want to condemn wimpy boys to.
Boys don’t need gender socialization – they need to be rescued from gender socialization.
Via Ms Musings, who has some good comments..
My God, that is exactly me when I was 7. I did fine without homeschooling. But then I grew up in pretty liberal comminities like Eugene and Flagstaff.
Dammit, “communities”. That’s what I meant to write.
AMEN to that.
My 2nd grade teacher told my mother that she thought I was ‘retarded’ not only because i had trouble reading but, and I’m not joking, I “acted too much like a little girl, something is wrong with [my] brain”.
Please, rescue them from ‘gender socialization’
No, not homeschooling. That’ll teach them that (1) the world is scary, better keep away from it. (2) I’m being homeschooled because other boys might beat me up. Therefore, other boys are bad company and they wouldn’t like me and I’d better keep away from them.
An alternative school would be better. I’m in the process of checking it out for my 7-year old.
I’m an advocate for homeschooling. I won’t get into it here, but let’s just say I’m definitely going to push that with my kids (though I firmly believe that since it is their education, it should be their choice, to some extent).
Masculinization fucking sucks ass.
(That’s about as ‘masculine’ as I get. The F word that’s not feminism. OMG!!!!11!!)
I think back to my age, and I was the exact opposite of what Barry mentions. I lived for gym class, and the special treat was the sport of 8-year-old kings – DODGEBALL! (And there’s a place where we can relive our lost youth – PDX Kickball (and Dodgeball)
I *eventually* learned to enjoy art and music, but definitely didn’t like the classes they had in my school.
It’s a good thing you found such a delicate, feminine creature to shack up with then.
BTW, I broke the trowel in half using it to beat cutworms to death. Again. Be a dear and bring home another one, wouldja’ ? :p
Since I’m the guy who calls himself PinkDreamPoppies, I don’t suppose it would surprise anyone if I said that I was a pretty effeminate kid. Fortunately, and I still don’t know how this happened, I was utterly ignored by my classmates for the entirety of my school career. I was almost never threatened with violence and was rarely teased, or if I was, don’t remember it). I think it’s because I was skinny.
To say that I am pro-homeschooling might be an understatement. Like James D, I will allow my children to make their own educational choices, but stories like the one ampersand posted only serve to strengthen my conviction that it is the best choice available right now. Not to hide from the world but because forced socialization of any kind is simply unhealthy. I was homeschooled for part of my life, and I never got the impression that the world was any scarier than it really is, nor did I live under any delusions that it was all sunshine and roses (though we did have a rosebush in a sunny spot until my black thumbs killed it at age six). In further esponse to Helen, I’m not a boy but I can say that I never felt that my parents were keeping me from other children or that other children were somehow bad. However, I think that ampersand may possibly have been making a simplified statement by implying that he would only homeschool his children if they did not fit the social norm.
“Boys don’t need gender socialization – they need to be rescued from gender socialization”
Hear, hear, ampersand. This is so right. Btw, if anyone is interested in this issue I’d recommend John Stoltenberg’s book “Refusing to be a Man” in which he talks about how patriarchy forces men to be “real men” by positioning themselves against women. I really believe that a part of third wave feminism must be to break down masculinity. Its really, really important if we ever want feminism to succeed.
I’ve already started changing the way that I phrase things since my son was born. Where once I would usually have said “be a man,” I now say “be an adult.” That’s just one of many things, obviously, It’s not much of a change, but when I think of how many of my mannerisms he’s bound to absorb, well, it just makes sense. I have no idea what to do about education outside the home though…
I don’t remember effeminate boys being picked on particularly when I was growing up. On the other hand, the chicks seemed to dig them.
p.s. I lived in a scarily conservative neighborhood.
splitred must have grown up in some places that are far outside the norm. Homophobia & abuse (both verbal & physical) were the norm for effeminate guys in the places that I grew up. And in the places where others I have heard from grew up. But that’s just anecdotal. And chicks both didn’t dig them & were discouraged from such things w/ epithets such as “fag hag.”
Not to hide from the world but because forced socialization of any kind is simply unhealthy.
I agree in principle, but feel it’s only honest to point out that homeschooling is a kind of forced socialization of its own (although possibly only slightly more than growing up in a particular family is forced socialization by that environment). Somehow we feel ok about it if the socialization agrees with our values . . .
I really believe that a part of third wave feminism must be to break down masculinity.
I don’t think real masculinity is anti-fem(ale, inine, inism) any more than it’s anti-quiche.
But if you refer to the overblown self-regarding testosterone-poisoned posturing that passes for masculinity in mainstream Western society, then I’m with you.
Sennoma, that’s exactly the kind of thing I meant! :)
However, I think John Stoltenberg would go further than that, saying that “male” and “female” are artificial constructions – so the idea that “masculinity” or “femininity” exists should challenged. (I’m a bit obesessed with these issues at the minute as I’ve just been writing a review of the book).
I liked dodge ball too……
homeschooling is a kind of forced socialization of its own
Well…I see your point, but I just can’t see family in that light. If anything, I think that compulsary schooling has taken away from family, which should be the most important relationship(s) in a person’s life. That is NOT to say that I don’t think that one ought to be exposed to a wide and vast variety of non-relations, or that I think one should remain tied exclusively to one’s parents and siblings for life, but that it is the basis for all relationships. Every homeschooling family that I know goes out into the world, makes friends, explores – just without the confines of age groups and gym class.
I feel that I’m really taking this off topic, so I’m going to stop now. Should anyone wish for clarification, though, I’d be happy to take it to email.
Hello Everyone: I am married to a man who is very
passive and unmanly acting so to speak. I have 2 boys and I fear for the example that he sets for them. He doesn’t stand up for himself or teach his kids to grow up to act like men. He doesn’t discipline his children unless I say something first and then its still like undermined. I talk to him about it all the time, but it just doesn’t do any good. He makes promises about going to discipline the kids but he never does anything about it.
My Dad, without calling it that, did to me what you would probably call trying to gender-socialize me.
You know what? I don’t blame him.
He was trying his damndest to protect me. He saw his oldest son getting the living daylights kicked out of him more days than not, and was worried. He was trying to ‘toughen me up’ out of sheer necessity.
I understand Amp’s point about homeschooling–but that’s now. That just wasn’t done in a working-class family in 1970 :-). So Dad was trying to help me ‘cope’ the best he knew how. I must point out that he never made me feel bad about myself, it wasn’t done with contempt. Dad was (and still is) more ‘conventionally masculine’ than I will *ever* be, but he has his sensitive side, and didn’t feel ‘put out’ that his oldest son was completely sensitive and gentle. He was trying to get me to be ‘more manly’ for my *own* protection, and always put it to me that way.
Didn’t work, but that wasn’t his fault.
And, believe me, the atmosphere I found myself in every day taught this boy who didn’t fit in ‘to hold himself in contempt’. My poor father had no part in that. I learned that right at school.
And people wonder why I’m glad I have only daughters :-)
i have a few reservations about home schooling, having seen examples of domineering or overprotective parents, but it beats the juvenile prisons most kids attend. open-source education is going to enable the deschooling movement. once my mom taught me to love to read, school was just doing time, but i didn’t let it get in the way of getting an education. our neighborhood was scientists’ kids, lots of nerds, lots of jewish or foreign kids, so geek pride wasn’t a problem, and scouts was a supportive place to be real men, not macho. still, as a kid dealing with anxiety and depression and probably add, i was not at the top of the social pecking order, and was socially isolated. this was an avantage in some ways, as i didn’t have much social pressure to conform to gender roles or other social norms. i got play in the woods a lot and my peers were the authors i read, more humanist and radical than most kids’ peer groups..
my new affinity group has dodgeball on saturdays, i’m gonna try to make it soon.
denise:
so far, i’m empathizing more with your husband than you. he sounds passive-aggressive, which is a defensive response to aggression. have you guys tried assertiveness training, any kind of counseling or conscious working on process? What are the boys like? What would you change and why?
How do they feel about your expectations? Is there stuff in your husband’s history that results in him being this way? Maybe he’s holding in a lot of anger because he’s scared it would come out in destructive ways. Not that i would know anything about that, said the aarvark, arbitraily.
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I have a sensitive 6 year old. Although he’s not what I would call effeminate, he’s far more interested in say, the view of the sky through the trees then the ground ball. I actually call him Ferdinand sometimes.
I love his sensitivity although it can be a problem. His little ticker is subject to breaking over whatever slight.
As for the schooling issue- Both of our sons are in a Montessori program here in Chicago. Community is item one in this school. Because of the way classrooms are structered–3-6 year 0lds 6-9 etc., all the children experience being the newbie and the mentor at some point in that classroom. Empathy is promoted. Literally.
Plus the sports programs suck.