| My son, the sexist pig? |  |
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When my first-born was young, I was determined to raise a nonsexist child.
There would be as many play cooking utensils as cars, as many dolls as dinosaurs, exposure to as many positive female role models as men.
As usual, the children shall the lead the adults.
“No, mommy, men!” my son declared as I plopped in a tape of kids’ music in the minivan cassette player.
What did he just say?
So I ejected the tape with the clearly female lead singer and put in a Raffi tape. I looked in the rearview mirror and l saw him in the backseat — smiling, blissfully happy in some sort of musical male bonding moment.
OK, I thought, music is a personal thing. It’s OK to have a preference for masculine voices. No biggie.
But then he and I were on the floor playing with his Duplos one day when he surprised me with yet another amazing malecentric moment.
“Do you want to fix the truck?” I asked, handing him the colorful Duplo mechanic — a female mechanic.
“No, men!” he said and flung the female Duplo piece across the floor.
I started to freak — was I raising a sexist child? How could it be when he wasn’t exposed to anything more subversive than “Sesame Street” at the time? Was I sending him some subliminal message by being a stay-at-home mom?
I needn’t have worried because many of the pink-blue differences between boys and girls are apparent from birth, and may even be hardwired.
And, now that’s he’s almost 19, he’s hardly sexist, although he and his peers aren’t quite as enlightened as I imagined they’d be given their post-feminist moms and the progressive area in which we live. They still sometimes fall into some of the same gender traps of generations past.
So I was curious when I heard about a nine-week program in Vermont, called Gendertopia, that looked at different ways gender is portrayed in popular culture.
It was designed to “help young people identify the subtle signals used to express gender and how not being aware of those signals can lower self esteem and possibly lead to an increase in at-risk activities like substance abuse or dropping out of school,” according to Christopher Neff, the executive director of Outright Vermont, the social service organization behind Gendertopia.
"We often see a lot of homophobia or transphobia that happens on the basis of how someone looks. If you are making fun of me because I am wearing a pink shirt and that's sort of expressing my femininity, my feminine side, that translates into homophobia, but it has nothing to do with whether I'm straight or whether I'm dating boys or whether I'm dating girls. It has to do with the fact that I'm wearing a pink shirt."
Although the program was run at the Queer Youth Center in Burlington — the name alone freaked out some people — the focus wasn’t just on sexuality but on gender.
“We're really clear that gender and gender identify is separate from sexual orientation," Neff says. "Hugh Grant and Russell Crowe have the same sex, they're both male and they're both heterosexual. But they have very different gender presentations. One is sort of seen as much more masculine than the other."
Would a program like that have helped me with my “No, mommy, men!” son? Perhaps.
How important is it to you to raise a gender-free child?
Do you think there should be more programs like Gendertopia?
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