cloudboy
Posts: 7306
Joined: 12/14/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
I get a bit snarky when I see the idea that feminizing a male is degrading. Above, you use the word "degrading." What word would you chose to describe the real life scenes below wherein a boy, with the support of his parents, is trying to swim against the tide? Here is an innocent person (a child) trying to be himself -- yet b/c its "role reversal" there's hostility, shame, and condemnation in the air -- for the boy and the parents. This quote here is about the parents, who clearly are not into degradation, "they didn't have the emotional strength to take him out in a dress every day, to deal with the double takes and the implied judgments." --- Ellen R. and her 10-year-old son, Nick, live in a small New Jersey suburb. Nick sometimes spends hours a day drawing gowns for his 36 Barbies and designing them for himself or his dolls, using fabric, ribbon and rubber bands. For a while, Nick was able to keep his interest hidden. But one day in second grade, a friend stopped by unexpectedly and saw Barbies sprawled in the living room. The boy ran out of the house. In school the following day announced to the class, “Nick plays with dolls.” “Everyone looked at me,” Nick told me. “I wanted to yell, but you’re not supposed to yell in school. So I said it wasn’t true. But no one believed me.” He was quiet for a while, concentrating on an uncooperative lock of a Barbie’s hair. “He was my friend. That was the worst part of it.” In the two years since, Nick hasn’t had a single play date. Ellen’s conviction that Nick shouldn’t be ashamed of who he is runs deep. Yet she nonetheless battles a fear of being shunned. “When your kid’s girly in preschool, the other parents might think it’s cute. But it’s not cute once your kid is in elementary school, especially the older he gets. I sit next to parents at events, I volunteer with the P.T.A., and it’s hard not to wonder, are they out there making fun of me and my kid?” --- For that reason, last summer, as Alex’s parents contemplated his start at the local elementary school, they feared children there might bully him. So they decided to forbid dress-wearing to kindergarten. Alex didn’t take it too hard. By then, his dress requests had petered out to every few weeks anyway, and he typically wore boy clothes, though he still liked wearing a rainbow-bead necklace and nail polish. Besides, his parents had told him that socks, shoes, nail polish and jewelry were up to him — a way to express himself while safely testing the waters. Toward the end of the first week of kindergarten, Alex showed up in class wearing hot-pink socks — a mere inch of a forbidden color. A boy in his class taunted, “Are you a girl?” Alex told his parents his feelings were so hurt that he couldn’t even respond. In solidarity, his father bought a pair of pink Converse sneakers to wear when he dropped Alex off at school.
< Message edited by cloudboy -- 8/27/2012 2:58:33 PM >
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