It wasn’t that long ago that, and in many cultures, it remains so, the birth of a girl was a disappointment, a failure, at the very least nothing to be excited about. Now all I seem to hear is Girl Dad this, Girl Mom that. Aren’t you so glad you had a girl? I bet you were so relieved when you found out it was a girl. Do you think you would’ve been disappointed if it was a boy? What is most surprising to me is that people say these things to me specifically because I’m a feminist. Which means that there is still the belief that feminists are just a bunch of man-haters, hell-bent on their subjugation and/or eradication. I find this to be really unfortunate.
You have a boy? Let me tell you how much they suck lol.
Recently a woman I follow on Instagram wrote about her experience with friends, family, and strangers as the mother of a baby boy, and I was appalled at the things people had said to her. Boys are a nightmare, loud and dirty, girls are smarter and more fun was the general gist, comments that aren’t very different from the stereotypes of boy and girl children that society has cultivated for decades, but according to this mother of a sweet 9-month-old infant who happens to have a penis, they are relentless. Is this really our best response to the patriarchy? Is this really how we plan to dismantle this system of oppression and empower girls and women? By saying, yup men are a nightmare, and you too, you precious innocent baby with the endless possibilities of life laid out sparkling and hopeful before you, will also turn out to be a menace to society simply because you have male genitalia. So your denigration begins now. This ignorant, toxic, and utterly banal reaction to the patriarchal oppression we all suffer actually fills me with a decent amount of rage. And I resent that people proudly espouse this as feminist rhetoric. This is not feminism, this is a vindictive reversal of misogyny. We can do better than this.
As we all place our girls on queenly pedestals far out of reach of the grubby little hands of boys, we now enthusiastically encourage them to excel in math and science, to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEOs all the high powered, high paying jobs that for centuries have been dominated by men. Fine, great, sure, anyone regardless of gender should have a shot at being a high-ranking cog in the corporate wheel of capitalism. However, I never hear of boys being encouraged to become nurses, day-care workers, preschool teachers, stay-at-home fathers, death doulas, secretaries, jobs typically occupied by women that generally center care work. Well, those jobs don’t pay well so we want to encourage all children to strive for financial security, you might say. Mmmm indeed, perhaps if more men were to enter those fields, we’d suddenly decide those positions deserve higher wages. What I’m getting at here is that we are doing a real sexist job of burning the patriarchy to the ground and at the end of the day we are still upholding male ideals and values, and striving to fit into a world designed by and for men. We are still desperate to be accepted into the boys club and when some of us are, we celebrate it as a win for feminism, but I just see it as a tragic rejection of female values and work. Until society’s values become rooted in a healthy expression of emotional intelligence, strength, empathy, nurturance, courage, communal concern, intuition, leadership, and independence in all people, a balance of the masculine and feminine, of sun and moon, water and fire, then we aren’t truly changing anything.
The war on pink
Another popular weapon in the war against misogyny is kids’ clothes. No more pink, no more tutus, no more glitter or sequins, no more dresses. Unless you are a boy, then in this instance it has become popular to encourage you to be more fabulous. But no more beauty, and no more fun for girls. It’ll make them vain and stupid. People love to compete in the Virtue Olympics and Motherhood is a very popular category. I don’t dress my daughter in pink. No Disney Princesses in my house! My daughter will never take ballet. Only SPORTS! There are certainly valid reasons for not wanting your daughter to partake in the above trends. Personally, I don’t like branded clothing, including Disney, because it makes me feel like a walking advertisement. But if Luci really wants or is gifted a Disney something or other I’m not going to forbid her and set it on fire just to prove a point. It’s just not that serious. Feminism is about choice, right? So how are we communicating that to our girls by continuing to create rigid rules about acceptable behavior, clothing, and activities? I had to run to Target the other day when I realized that we have a 6-9 month size gap in Luci’s stash of clothes. The seams of her 3-6 months leggings were positively sweating under the pressure of her chunktastic thighs. By no means did I expect Target to be leading the charge in gender-neutral kid gear, but the children’s clothing lines comprised of organic linen rompers and unisex cotton gauze shifts dyed with plants in hues of terra cotta, saffron, and sage, shit that I would buy for myself honestly, are not in my price range. Ethical Peasant Chic is for another tax bracket. So my options, in a pinch, were blue and gray leggings with trucks or pink and lavender with flowers and birds. First of all, trucks are dumb. Second of all, Luci looks fabulous in blue, it really makes her eyes pop, but this was a fascist shade of navy blue that reminds me of the uniforms of prison guards and my Catholic school days. And plain gray. I was numb with aesthetic boredom. Now pink and lavender with flowers and bird motifs - yay for spring and new life and the complexity of botanical intelligence and the altruistic behavior of birds like cooperative-breeding in fairy-wrens, for example! Ideally, there would be more color options outside of pink, blue, and the only unisex colors of the rainbow, green and yellow. Where is the mauve, the eggplant, turquoise, saffron, emerald, rust, fog blue, shall I go on? Alas, confined for the moment to this depressingly banal consumer market, I bought the “girly” leggings. Had Luci been a boy I still would’ve bought the girly leggings because the world is depressing enough without dressing babies in Autocrat Azul.
Boys will be boys.
I’d like to have another child in a few years, a buddy for Luci, and I would be overjoyed to have a boy. I want to experience the magic of a boy babe and a girl. But mostly, I want to raise children who, nurtured, loved, and encouraged in curiosity and play, will go out into the world to love, nurture, and encourage exploration in those around them. Mothering an empathetic, tenacious, nurturing, intuitive boy would not present any inherent hurdles over which I would have to arduously climb so as not to unleash onto the world another beastly little misogynist. Children reflect the love and care they receive and sadly boys are treated are more harshly than girls. They are taught emotional repression as survival at an extremely young age through shame and withdrawal of physical affection, so it’s no wonder a lot of them grow up to be emotionally stunted fuckwits stalking tinder for women to smash and dash. But what if we were to love the absolute crap out of little boys, teenage boys, grown-up boys? Kiss ‘em and hug ‘em and hold them while they cry, raise them to be ooey gooey little gents, who wash dishes and do laundry without being asked, care for elderly parents, protect the perineum of their birthing partners, quit their jobs to parent children and support the ambitions of their partner, to fight for the rights of oppressed peoples and our more-than-human kin. Boys will be boys would have a profoundly different meaning, wouldn’t it?
Let’s be slightly more imaginative whilst obliterating the patriarchy, shall we?
And now…..
Things that bring me joy:
Poetry about girlhood.
Fingernails described as crescent moons, and this spin on that image from Tracey M. Atsitty’s poem Downpour:
how my nails chip before the moons push on through
Crying for the sad and desperate young woman I used to be.
The pale, half-light of 6 am when I open my eyes to see Luci patiently staring at me.
Elena Ferrante
SPRIIIIIIIIING
I can't explain to you how much I loved this! Everything you tied into the bigger picture and message was amazing. I really love reading your post because I know I am going to be entertained and educated. I wanted to pull my favorite line and tell you what it was but I can't pick one, there were so many great ones.
Loved this. I ended up a “boy mom” and I love it; his dad and I are raising him to be a kind, empathetic, responsible human. We work really hard to talk about and deconstruct toxically gendered behavior, more than ever now that he’s in middle school. People should have choices, period.