2. The Infliction of Masculinity Upon the Boy Child
They always point to this business of boys not being allowed to cry, like that's the big one for boys facing sexism for the first time. No, that's not really it, because mainly when you're little, you cry over skinned knees, and it doesn't mess you up inside to suppress crying over physical pain. Actually, you feel quite good about yourself. I'm skinned and bleeding, but proud and resilient. No, it's adults. Or, rather, the status of being a child.
Be a good boy and hug and kiss all the aunts and grandmas as they ooh and sweety-talk you. Okay. But don't smile and crawl up into someone's lap when you want cuddling, 'cause that's annoying if you're a boy. Girls can. Boys can't. Then, show us how tough you are, little man. Do this. Do that. Show off for us. We'll get mad if you act shy. Shy is for girls. Now, sit solemnly and politely at the supper table like a gentleman. What do grownups want from little girls? Cuteness. Niceness. Sweetness. Love. What do grownups want from little boys? Obedience.
Do what we want you to do when we want it. Be who we want you to be when we so indicate. Can I go outside now? Say excuse me. Excuse me. Whew! When I grow up, nobody can boss me around! That's obviously part of adulthood, being bossy. Adults are bossy people. Hmm...
* * *
Someone did something bad, and the grownups aren't sure if it's me or one of those girls, but guess who's gonna get it? Right...not always, though. This time, the girl is trapped by the evidence, good, 'cause girls get by too often...but they don't spank her very hard. You see, they get her by disapproving, which works because usually she gets approval for being a good girl. What gets me is, I'm a good boy, I want to be told I'm nice, sometimes, too!
But they have this way of assuming girls are nice to get approval but boys are nice -- when they're nice -- out of fear of the consequences. They like to scare boys when boys are bad. They yell. They glare. Walls of hate and anger. If you stare back tough, they get mad. If you get too scared and cry, they get mad. You're supposed to look guilty and ashamed. But they aren't satisfied unless you're scared of them. Being able to scare people must be part of being an adult. Threatening. Hmm...
Well, I'm okay this time. The grownup doesn't punish me and merely says what I just said: well, I guess you're okay...this time. Glare. They think goys are bad inside. I am still guilty of being a boy.
Childhood for boys is the pits. Girls get theirs later, when sexism really messes them up. But childhood is the first experience in life. And anyone can tell girls are great and boys are guilty when you're little. Well, I'll just show them!
* * *
And so it goes...along with most of the other boys I grew up with a bit of resentment towards the girls. I guess we thought they had an overly cozy relation to the grownups. The grownups would assume nicer things about the girls, look more approvingly upon their activities, and they had this way of speaking to the girls that sounded like they had something important in common.
And that something had a lot to do with the rules. Girls were thought to be good citizens, obedient, well- mannered, nice, and even if some weren't and most weren't always, it did seem as if most of the girls thought that they were supposed to be like that. It was generally understood that if girls were around you had to act as if adults were around because many of the girls were like spies...they would "tell on you".
* * *
Sometimes, when a person is observed deviating from others, negative labels come into play: weirdo, freak, and oddball are terms that underscore the tendency of people to reject individuals who are "different". Conformity to norms...is often considered desirable behavior, whereas deviant behavior is ignored or punished. However, some people feel that being different is important. For these people, it may be more important to be different than it is to conform.
ó Lawrence Wrightsman and Kay Deaux, Social Psychology in the 80s 1
I started thinking of myself as special a long time ago. Part of it was not liking the way the adults treated me, in a sort of "children's lib" sort of way: if I wasn't acting like an immature brat, and was basically "doing it right", I felt I deserved warmth and respect from adults. That was the deal, wasn't it? But a lot of the time, I felt I wasn't receiving it, and was in fact getting a raw deal from teachers, principals, other kids' parents,...and over a period of time I observed that it seemed to happen when I was being seen and thought of as "one of the boys". So there developed this strong sense of "hey, take note and file this away for future reference: I'm different from them!"
And so I was. I never was much inclined to start fights, and I was a good elementary-school student. Inevitably, someone accused me of being too much like a girl, and that completed the picture ó I had been feeling a growing resentment towards those boys who seemed to confirm the grownups' anti-boy assumptions, and so rather than goad me into proving I was a real boy after all, the sissy-baiting just gave a finer focus to how I thought of these matters: I was different, I was more like one of the girls, I was as good as any of the girls, not immature and babyish like so many of the other boys...and I was proud of it.
* * *
Girls, I've heard it said, are passive, uncompetitive, weak of will, unable to make their own decisions, and lack the ambition that boys have. I was very competitive -- I was competing with the girls. For good grades. For display of mature self-discipline, keeping myself in line. For a self that I could dare to think of as being good even by girls' standards. For a chance at collecting on the benefits of being considered nice.
I found my Elementary School subjects often interesting, and read ahead, becoming an insatiable bookworm. As a social misfit, I had nothing else to do at school. I had no sense of myself as a victim of sex role stereotyping, or as a person rejecting my sex role; not then. My understanding was more simplistic: I was different from other boys and was proud of it. But every year I had fewer and fewer friends and more and more tormentors. The more I was taunted for it, the more I was inclined to go out of my way to demonstrate that I was proud, rather than ashamed of my differences. This was attracting teacher attention a bit, as well, as I made some of them nervous by being such a gentle neuter kid, and there were occasionally efforts to get me to "participate", which meant be with the boys and try to be more like them.
I can recall times when I tried to be more social with other boys ó hanging out with neighborhood boys and going to summer camps, that sort of thing ó but often enough what this did was surround me with guys teasing me and trying to make me change. From adult supervisors, there was often an attitude of "That's what he needs", and there were some harsh and impatient adult contributions to the process. The exceptions to this took a protective form, with adults intervening to chastise or punish the other boys for picking on me, or sympathizing with me as a victim of bullies.
I was lonely a lot from upper Elementary years on up. Since I was by this time thinking of myself as being like one of the girls (and that was okay), I was fairly open to having girls as friends during years when boys weren't supposed to like girls. There was a lot of mutual ambivalence there: girls in general weren't too swift on being friends with boys any more than vice versa, and I simultaneously admired and resented them in a mildly hostile respectful competitive sort of way. And my image as a weird boy seemed to repel girls, too, after I was about ten years old. So, while I occasionally had some girls for friends, it didn't happen often, and there was less and less of that as I got older.
Gradually I withdrew more and more into myself and my imagination, and became more and more of a teacher's pet, and as the tormenting increased, I began doing as the girls were allegedly prone to do: tell the adults when the boys were picking on me and depend on official power and disciplinary actions to protect me from them. Naturally, this didn't make me any more popular with the guys.
* * *
One day a girl decided to cut in line in front of me, an incident I found annoying mainly because she gave me a look that would curdle milk just before pushing in front of me to talk to another girl.
I objected, and when the man came out to usher us into the building, we were arguing hotly. He asked her what the problem was and we both told him. But our stories didn't exactly coincide.
He looked at me and stated that he doubted she would lie. When I told him otherwise, my testimony netted me a ten-minute wait while the line filed in, followed by a lecture about telling lies and a threat to haul me off to the principal.
After all, I'd committed two unforgivable sins: I'd implied that it was equally likely that I might be telling the truth, that I was as good as girls...but, worse, I'd implied that he should assume it equally possible that this nice little girl was lying, and was as bad as boys. These attitudes were coming off him in waves.
When things like that happened, I burned with resentment towards girls and towards the unfairness of it all.
* * *
One day in fifth grade, a guy in my class decided that I needed to get into a fight, and he held his fist up to me and whispered, "After school". He kept doing this all day long. When the school bell rang, I started home my usual way and sure enough, there he was, insisting that I fight him. I refused, and also refused to avoid him. I just kept walking. He started hitting me over and over again, convinced (I think) that eventually I would have to start fighting back. I just kept walking, thinking that I could endure this long enough for him to get tired and bored and he would quit. But it hurt, and eventually it made me start crying, and that enraged and frustrated me. I turned back and went into the library and got solicitous attention and ice from the concerned librarian. Long after it had stopped hurting, I was still crying, furious and outraged.
When things like that happened, I burned with resentment towards boys and toward the unfairness of it all.
* * *
Meanwhile, I was reading books, and I stumbled across some in the library that listed all the ways girls were supposed to be, according to the world, and then said it wasn't true. The books told me women could do the things we were all taught to think only men could do. They listed specific things and gave examples. They also pointed at male behavior that everyone said was universally and unavoidably part of the male package, and objected to it; echoing many of the tired old "boys are this and boys are that" statements I'd grown up with, these books said men don't have to be that way, shouldn't be, since these things are objectionable, and insisted on change. The seeds were being sowed in my head; they would grow.
Already, I'd unconsciously formed a way of thinking that rejected sex roles and stereotypes, but there were things I couldn't put it into words yet -- the complex mess of personality and behavior traits that are part of sexist masculinity and femininity norms. Simple stuff like girls in sports, boys holding babies, that I knew, and the doctor/lawyer/Indian chief realm of sexism...do is an easy realm to grasp, but do is only a part of be. And what I hadn't yet realized was the way breaking rules could cause the world to reject you, one person at a time, for not being "right".
It seems strange to me now, but I didn't understand that my social situation had much to do with me being more like the girls than most guys are. I had all the symptoms and had read, unknowingly, the diagnosis, but didn't make the connection. Like feeling dizzy, achy, and so forth, finding out you've got a temperature, but not relating the two facts.
Because you see, after all these years, I was still waiting for someone to tell me I was okay; I had gotten a lot of approval as a little kid, but as I grew older, it seemed to be shrinking away, confined more and more to recognition for my good grades in school. Like water droplets expanding until they join and make a puddle, the torment and hatefulness in my life was expanding to become the general background of my day-to-day life, and I didn't know the reasons for the generalized unfriendliness that made me not at all sure that I was okay at all.
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