nocountryforslaughter:

Men have a lot of freedom, but not when it comes to gender expression.

For all the scare articles about the pressure on little girls to be Disney Princesses™, from girlhood to womanhood, females have a lot of options for gender expression. For the most part, women can stand wherever they want on the masculine/feminine spectrum and it’s not shocking. We stopped freaking out about the “Oh my god, women want to wear pants!” thing a really long time ago. Women wandered into the traditionally masculine realms of self-expression and ambition and now it’s just normal.

Not so with masculinity. It is still as rigid and well defended as ever, despite a few David Bowies or Johnny Depps in the mix. Just look at last year’s total freaking meltdown about a J. Crew catalog that carried a photo of a woman painting her young son’s toenails. Just look at the way the more delicate boys of the world are bullied by their classmates and accused of being gay. Just look at the gender imbalance in the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder in children, with gender disordered pre-pubescent boys outnumbering girls at a rate of up to 30 to 1. When a girl is boyish, or even claims she’d rather be a boy, it’s cute. She’s a tomboy. When a boy is girlish, wanting to wear dresses or try on some makeup, it’s a mental disorder and needs an immediate medical intervention.

There are GID boys aplenty in Ken Corbett’s Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities. Corbett is an analyst specializing in the condition, and he has to assure a lot of parents that their sons are not doomed. That the bracelets or the pink clothing or playing dolls with girls rather than wrestling with other boys is not a sign that he’ll turn into some sort of tragic transsexual like the kind on the cop shows, hustling on the streets and then murdered and left in a dumpster.

“Traditionally,” Corbett writes, “boys and masculinity have been characterized by aggression, muscularity, exhibitionism, dominance, and phallic preoccupation. This view of boys is something of a normative mainstay. It is what we expect of them: ‘Boys will be boys.’ … Modern efforts, my own included have mostly been directed at understanding phallic narcissism as a symptom, a defense, or a manifestation of character pathology.”

In other words, not only can young boys survive experimenting a little with their psyches intact, but perhaps the behavior we expect from boys, the dick-swinging machoness of it all, is actually a sign that’s something wrong.

The parents become tragic figures, huddled on Corbett’s couch. They love their sons, but they can’t help thinking there is something terribly wrong with them. They find them embarrassing, really, when they are out in public and a stranger tries to let the boy know that, gender-wise, he’s out of line: “No, that toy is for girls.” One boy’s mother feels obligated to push back: “It’s a toy, a toy, not a gender,” and later tells Corbett, “I’m giving this woman a lecture in gender theory. Not good.” The parents feel fiercely defensive of their sons, but without really understanding why they are this way. The same mother, a women’s studies academic, chafes at her son’s “parodic femininity,” with his focus on pink and princesses. Another father mourns the fact that he did not get a son, he got someone in between that he cannot connect with. He wants to take the boy fishing, but the boy wants to “princess dance.”

The parents seem like they would prefer the defense, the phallic narcissism, the overly aggressive, fights, troublemakers, because that at least would be recognizable. If the parents have anxieties that their sons are gay, they don’t voice them, or at least Corbett wisely omits them. Because that is just another layer of assumption, that the feminine boy is gay, that he has to be gay, because then we would once again be in the realm of the understandable.

You should read this if you get a chance.

FINALLY. I’ve been trying to make this point for years now, only to be met with eye rolls at best. Now I’ve got an article to back me up lol. READ IT! :D