here we have a feminist mother in her natural habitat, trying to force her son to do girly things because he's a cis gendered white male
how many years do you think it'll be before the kid commits suicide after these episodes of child abuse?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/why-im-teaching-my-son-to-embrace-girly-things/article29629855/Quote
The other day I was sitting in the park with James, 3, when I picked a dandelion and handed it to him as a present. “No way, Mummy,” he said, pushing away my gift. “Flowers are pretty and I’m a boy.”
And I thought: That’s it. I’m signing him up for ballet.
Until recently, I’ve been quite happy to be surrounded by boys in all their stereotypical boyishness. I don’t have to struggle with what most parents of girls I know refer to, shudderingly, as “the whole princess thing.” And frankly, from an aesthetic as well as political perspective, I have always been glad of it.
Thank god for boys, who just muck about in their saggy track pants, smashing up toys and teaching each other to belch the alphabet (Freddy, 7, can now get all the way up to “K” in one breath). Sure, they’ll destroy the furniture building forts, but at least they won’t fill your house with plastic engagement rings and insist on wearing hideously flammable poly-blend prom dresses for five years straight.
Boys loathe that stuff, and as a feminist mom so do I – so we’re on the same page then, right?
Wrong.
As James gets older and begins to discover himself, I realize that he is being guided just as much by what he vehemently rejects as what he genuinely loves (zombies, magic, ice cream, dogs and dancing). Some of the things he now pushes away he truly seems to dislike (yogurt, itchy sweaters, going to bed), but other things he is starting to turn on for reasons of obvious cultural conditioning.
James isn’t entirely sure who he is yet, but he definitely knows what he’s not, and that’s 1) a baby or 2) a girl. Lately, anything that falls into either of those two categories is verboten to him.
When his older brother complained about having to watch Frozen because it was “girlish,” James instantly struck it off his list of favourite movies and now refuses to play Elsa and Anna even when his best nursery school girlfriends insist.
You might think this is no big deal, that my son is just behaving “naturally,” but I’m automatically wary of notions of biological determinism. When he hands me back a flower because pretty things are for girls, I think, what’s next? Kindness? Decency? Dancing?
Jerramy Fine is an American expat in London and what you might call a professional princess advocate. She’s a royalist by trade and nature and her latest book, In Defense of the Princess, is an unapologetic argument in favour of letting your daughter drown herself in plastic tiaras and fairy-tale fantasies.
In her view, “second wave princesses are headstrong and independent. They engineer their own fates and believe that respect is a precursor to love. And if there is one thing any of the modern princesses are not doing, it’s sitting around waiting to be rescued.”
I’ve known Fine for years, and the whole time she has been trying to convince me of the inherent value of princess culture and all things pretty, sparkly and “feminine” (her term – and one I automatically reject). She even dragged me to the Princess Diana biopic after I made her come with me to see Meryl Streep play Margaret Thatcher.
This post was edited by duffman316 on May 4 2017 07:56pm