Recently we at Half Price Books Outlet experienced some rearrangement that was most likely ill-advised. I’m not sure whose idea it was to make me in charge of the Parenting section—but they made a mistake. Not only do I not know anything about parenting besides the fact that I hear children need water, sunlight and they cry all night, but now I find myself getting frustrated at nearly every parenting book I take a peek inside. At first I figured that I was pretty safe if I kept anything pre-2005 off the shelves but that was before I found this gem.
It’s a Baby Boy!: The Unique Wonder and Special Nature of Your Son from Pregnancy to Two Years had some promising credentials on the front (at least I think that’s what all those extra letters mean) so I thought it would be fun to quickly flip through it.
That was a bad decision.
Of course little ole feminist me is taken, like fate, immediately to page 84 which is subtitled “Gender Stabilization”. Oi vey, here we go. Let’s all just Picard face-palm now and get it out of the way.
“By the age of two-and-a-half, your son will develop a curiosity about and an awareness of gender differences. He’ll want to imitate his father or older brothers. During his toddler-preschool years, he may develop a clear-cut sense of the fact that he is a boy. He’ll be conscious that boys have penises and girls don’t.”
I’m pretty sure there’s some fault in that. First of all, as Luce Irigaray would point out, even if a boy is aware of his penis and is somehow magically aware that penises are sexual organs that separate his biological sex from the sexual organs of a biological female. It has nothing to do with the gender that boy may find himself identifying as later in life.
It reminded me of a story from the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. She recounts the situation a human sexuality professor she read about encountered. His son who was in first grade wanted to wear plastic barrettes to his first day of class. While there he was tormented by his male classmates, who told him he was a girl because he was wearing the barrettes. The boy’s father told him that he was a boy because he had a penis and that he should tell the other little boys that just because he wore barrettes, that didn’t make him a girl. So armed with this new knowledge, the boy went back to class to defend himself. There the boy who made fun of him replied, “Everyone has a penis, but only girls wear barrettes.”
Meaning and Pleasure2014 