I think I stopped dead in my tracks on the sidewalk.
“No!” I practically shouted. “Where did you hear that? No!”
It turned out Eli was giving me his very bad takeaway from the very good book “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” written in 1979 (!) by Tomie dePaola (who, Google taught me today, is gay), which his teacher had read to his class.
The gist: Oliver Button likes to tap dance; bullies graffiti the school wall to read “Oliver Button is a sissy”; Oliver Button tap dances with exuberance in the school talent show; bullies revise their graffiti to read “Oliver Button is a star!”
When Eli told me this last part — “Oliver Button is a STAR!” — his eyes shone. Eli likes to dance, too — exuberantly and in public, and recently he tried to insert himself as a contestant in a dance battle at the Maker Faire and accused Phil of "crushing his dream" when Phil dragged him out of the competition.
Eli likes dancing, and sparkly colors, and nail polish, and rainbow face paint, and unicorns. This doesn’t make him a hero; frankly, I don’t think it even makes him any more enlightened than any other child.
It just means he likes cool shit!
But because we can’t have nice things, he’s been teased for some of this cool shit. Last year I wrote about buying him a pair of sparkly pink sneakers; in reality, he only wore them a few times. After our talk about “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” Eli told me, “Some kids at school make fun of me because I like My Little Pony, so I just don’t bring it up anymore.”
Because the truth is, Eli likes My Little Pony, but he also likes Pokemon, and if My Little Pony is going to get him teased and Pokemon isn’t, he’ll just stick with Pokemon. He’s not that brave. He’s not Oliver Button.
Can I be honest? Every time Eli tells me someone has teased him, it’s a girl who’s done the teasing. As someone who was once a girl myself, I have this pet theory as to why: It's because boys and men already have all the power, so girls who like "boy" things aren't much of a threat. If a girl wants to play football, eh, go ahead, we'll crush her. But girls are like: You guys get everyfuckingthing else, just let us have our fucking dolls and leave us alone. You have the presidency and both houses of Congress and now you want a pink shirt too?
On Monday Eli wore this H&M unicorn shirt to school.
"Girls can like boy things, but boys can't like girl things," he said sadly when he came home.
But paradoxically, even though what we do need is for some enlightened men to pave the way, I find something frustrating about the way enlightened men are discovering that this is an issue. Witness this Scary Mommy take on a Twitter thread from a dad whose 5-year-old son was teased for having a manicure: "Parents Are Applauding This Dad's Viral Thread on Toxic Masculinity." (Can you spot a familiar sparkly face? Ahem.)
Women have known for years about the problem of toxic masculinity. But suddenly a man — a straight white man — comes face to face with it and "parents are applauding." Just what we need: another man unearths the problem of the patriarchy. (But: Isn't this actually just what we need? You see my conundrum.)
And after sensitively boosting his tearful son's spirits, he — hold your breath! — paints his own nails too.
What a guy! Applause!
I can't explain why this irks me. Maybe because I can't help thinking: Is this what we need men to do? Get manicures or wear pink shirts? Didn't metrosexuals already solve this for us in the early '00s?
A few years ago, Runner's World published a special report called "Running While Female" about the experience of female runners who have been harassed or assaulted by running. The article was precipitated by a male editor who was shocked — shocked! — to learn from his female colleagues that this was a thing. And not a rare thing, but like a frequent occurrence that I would venture to say 100% of female runners have experienced at least once.
Once again, it took a man to "expose" (no pun intended) something that has never, ever been a secret to women.
A few weeks ago, Mommy Shorts posted an entry called "How to Teach Kids About Consent." The way she phrased the question in her Facebook group was actually about how we are raising our boys, and I think the post ended up being centered around consent because the great majority of the comments were about consent. No means no. Respect girls' bodies.
But here's my take: It's 2018, and "no means no" is honestly the least we can do. "Consent" is critical, but there is so much more we need to teach our children. Of course, duh, you don't touch someone who doesn't want to be touched. Ever since the Kavanaugh hearings, I see a lot of men on Twitter congratulating themselves essentially for...just not being rapists. But there's still a long way to go from being a not-rapist to being a true ally.
Does getting a manicure fall somewhere into that gulf? Maybe. But I think the conversations we need to have with our sons and our daughters perhaps start with "Unicorns are for everyone" and progress to "Why does there have to be a boys' team and a girls' team when you're playing tag?" and end somewhere in the realm of "Speak up about daily microaggressions against girls and women and use your inherent power as a white male to change them."
Because here's the thing: Sure, my kid likes pink, but that doesn't mean he's ready to tackle the patriarchy. He's still a white boy in a world that was frankly designed for the bidding of white men. He still moves through the world as a white boy and reaps the rewards that go along with that. When we're out in public and he interrupts an adult who's explaining something, he gets forgiven because he's cute and enthusiastic. When he's older and he gets rowdy at the playground, no one will call the police.
He thinks in general daddies do all the cooking ("But Mommy, you don't know how to work the stove!" he once said, aghast, when I promised I'd make him some eggs in Phil's absence) and mommies do all the driving, so score for our family on that point. (We're reading the first Boxcar Children book, which was published in 1924, and it makes me absolutely crazy how the girls do all the housekeeping.)
But I know in my bones that despite the way he rocks a pink unicorn shirt, he still thinks boys are stronger than girls, that boys are more powerful, because that's still what he sees in the world around him: powerful men wielding their power. Some of them are wielding it to deny women control over their own bodies and voices, and some of them are using it to show off their manicures on Twitter.
Remember when Jason Chaffetz said he couldn't support Trump and look his daughters in the eye? (And then he supported Trump anyway?) I guess in some way I see that and the Twitter manicure thread as two sides of the same terrible coin: men who have come to enlightenment because of their children, because some wrong has been perpetrated against them, or because they're surprised they think differently about the world now that their children are in it.
There seems to be a whole world of enlightened men (and sure, women too) whose thinking goes something like: "Now that I have a daughter, I have to start thinking about how to raise a strong feminist." Or "Now that I have a son, who in the grand tradition of men everywhere feels entitled to enjoy whatever he wants because the world is his oyster, I recognize how small-minded it is to distinguish hobbies on the basis of sex, although when I was a child I wouldn't have been caught dead with a manicure."
What I'd really like to see is for a man to say not "My children taught me that women deserve better," but "My mother taught me" or "My kickass colleague taught me" or even "Dana Scully taught me." Women: We've been here the whole time.
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