Like many a feminist mother, I’ve tried to raise my sons to question the idea that some things are “not for boys”: playing with dolls, wearing dresses, empathising with members of the opposite sex. It’s something I used to write about often, back when it seemed that self-identified progressives were on the same page about sex and gender. In those days the only people who seemed to find it offensive were out-and-out “boys will be boys” conservatives. I didn’t worry about this too much since it looked as though their views were on the way out.
Ten to fifteen years ago, I was very hopeful. While I didn’t think bequeathing my Sindy hospital to my four-year-old son or letting him dress up as Elsa from Frozen made me the next Andrea Dworkin, it was, I thought, a step in the right direction. I still think it is, only a much tinier one.
There are lots of reasons why it matters that little boys don’t grow up feeling excluded from some Barbie-pink fantasy world of feminine-coded fun. It can show them that arbitrary, socially constructed differences between girls and boys — ones which are used to justify male dominance — are not the same as biological differences; it can enable them to question other “essential” differences, ones which might arise in far more serious contexts; it can, in the end, show them that the Barbie-pink fantasy world isn’t real — that wearing a pink dress and playing with a doll isn’t incompatible with having an inner life — thus avoiding any misplaced grievances about women getting to live luxury bimbo lives “miraculously free of serious opinions”.
It can do all these things, but what I’ve learned since is that it doesn’t always achieve this. Enabling your sons to challenge superficial, culturally contingent gender stereotypes can be a pre-requisite to getting them to question gender as a social hierarchy, one which enforces long-standing expectations of who owes what to whom. If, however, an analysis of gender which accounts for sex, power and resource distribution isn’t part of the “progressive” project — if, on the contrary, it is actively resisted — all you might be left with is cherry-picking. Boys get to do the “girl things” that appeal to them, but the same sex class is left clearing up afterwards.
Take, for instance, the infamous John Lewis “Let life happen” home insurance advert of 2021, in which a boy in a dress trashes his home while his mother and sister passively look on. The advert was soon pulled (on the basis that John Lewis home insurance does not in fact cover the aftermath of such antics), but not before fierce debate raged over whether said boy was a gender-binary smashing hero living his best life or a bit of an arsehole. Needless to say, I was on team “bit of an arsehole” but it was fascinating to see how many self-declared opponents of toxic masculinity and male entitlement were not, with the Independent even deeming it “a glorious antidote to ‘boys will be boys’ messaging”. Really?
In her book Care and Capitalism, the sociologist Kathleen Lynch points out that men and boys can use not conforming to superficial gender stereotypes — or even embracing the most exaggerated feminine ones — as cover for being just as entitled as their more outwardly conservative peers:
Combining toughness with tenderness in a male public persona often masks the perpetuation of male systems of power and inequality. Borrowing some ‘soft’ feminine symbols and practices may even conceal male power by giving it a symbolically acceptable face.
What Lynch debunks here is the myth that playing with (or even “queering”) the surface level elements of gender — which are shifting anyhow — necessarily undermines the underlying structure. Queer theorists like to claim that it does, or even that the two are essentially the same thing (this has always been Judith Butler’s approach). A more clear-eyed understanding of how gender operates would note that there are many reasons why a man might perform femininity, some of them profoundly anti-feminist. Even if he is not being actively offensive, women do not owe him a debt of gratitude for smashing the boundaries that irritate him while leaving the ones which benefit him intact.
If, for example, a man wishes to be a cheerleader — an activity which, whatever its history, is very much feminine-coded — the fact that this enrages a certain type of conservative commentator does not make it a substantive challenge to patriarchal norms. It’s a man leaping about with pompoms (okay, okay, I know it’s very athletic and I couldn’t do it myself etc). Over the past week, news reports about male cheerleaders in the US NFL have apparently caused fans to “flip out” and have “hysterical meltdowns”. It has fed a “gender wars” narrative in which the non-conformity is over-valued by both sides.
Within so-called gender critical environments, it has highlighted the difference between those of us who are actually critical of gender — that is, who don’t believe such activities should be off-limits to male people — and those who use the term “gender critical” to signal that they too think sex is real and politically salient, but are quite happy to enforce gender norms. The responses of the latter are of course a gift to those who want to see the male cheerleader as a heroic smasher of the gender binary. To be clear, I don’t think he is. There’s a time, I think, when I might have done — before I saw how easily apparently gender-nonconforming people could glide into advocating for the silencing of women and the endless expansion of male spaces — but now I think he could just as easily be another man doing whatever he wants. Even so, feminists should support him, not because such men are necessarily on our side. I think we should support him because even if we see cheerleading on a continuum with the objectification of women and their positioning as “support humans” — even if we wonder about the motivations of men who aspire to be cheerleaders — what we still have is an example of femininity being severed from femaleness. It’s a superficial one, nowhere close to the deep-level non-conformity that is often performed by the least ostentatiously “non-conforming” men, but it is, surely, part of what’s needed to change things for everyone.
The “new” gender conservatives — those who are happy for boys to play with dolls yet don’t have an issue with some of them being chemically castrated for it — love to see old-style conservatives panicking over male cheerleaders. I suspect it quells their cognitive dissonance, at least for a little while (see also: mocking parents for having gender reveal parties while viewing identity entirely on a pink/blue stereotype spectrum). It feeds their need to see the “gender wars” as happening entirely between two opposing factions: those who think behaviour should be restricted and modified to “match” sexed bodies, and those who think sexed bodies are either irrelevant or should be modified to “match” behaviour. It suits both sides to pretend feminism — real feminism — doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure the dolls were ever that important
Years on from my letting my sons play with dolls, I’m proud of the men they are becoming. Even so, I’m not sure the dolls were ever that important. Having a broader environment that encourages them to be friends with girls, to understand that girls have their own feelings and internal lives, to know that boundaries should be respected, is much more difficult and much more important. So, too, is making sure they see men doing “feminine-coded” activities that are far less glamorous than playing dress-up.
They need to know that these things are for them, too — but also that they shouldn’t expect applause for them. Then we’d be on the way to real change.
