Much to my surprise I am really enjoying the book. There’s a lot of just-beneath-the-surface bitchiness and cracking of stereotype code. So there I was on Monday evening, trying to read my way through the introduction of Mr. Bennett’s cousin, Mr. Collins, when the daily rebroadcast of Think Out Loud came on the radio. The subject for the day: Gender-Neutral Parenting.
While I consider public media a national treasure well worth fighting for, I have many reasons for not contributing to OPB – the station’s CEO earns more than a quarter million bucks a year, for starters – but even if I didn’t, Monday’s show alone would suffice. I believe the story got started with a couple in Canada that has decided to keep the gender of their child a secret. Not to be outdone on the scorecard for inflating irrelevant topics with a sense of urgency, OPB managed to round up a few folks who perfectly personify the disorder of bringing up children not to be independent, self-directed citizens with critical thinking capabilities but as monuments to those who are raising them.
Let’s start with the use of the term “parenting,” which makes me cringe. You’re raising children, I want to scream. And the word “parent” is not a verb. So the insufferable mother character introduced herself by blathering about herself and her partner, though mostly about herself, and their young child, to whom she referred as their “assigned male child.” As if reading my mind, the host of the program asked her guest to please explain what she meant by “assigned.”
Well, said the parent, lots. She and her partner want the youngster to have lots and lots of choices. Choices regarding whether the clothing he – I’m assuming I can use the term “he”? – wears is traditionally male or traditionally female. Choices regarding whether the toys he plays with are traditionally male or traditionally female. She and her partner have abolished pink and blue, if spirit if not in deed, and are instead parenting toward purple. Isn’t that cool? Most importantly, as best I could tell through all the blathering, they want him to have choices on “gender construct.”
Why? Well, that’s a great question. The parent, who writes a blog about her “boychick,” is very concerned that, according to her, between one and five percent of children are born into some sort of gender- and genital-neutral territory. So she and her partner are buying a lot of shit in order to do something about it. Now that’s what I call grabbing the world by its …
The male parent managed to be even more offensive. Apparently realizing that he’d been pretty much castrated by simply taking a seat in the studio, everything this guy said was said in the tone of apology. He and his wife have two daughters. He lost his job a few years ago so he and his wife, who is a doctor, decided to sit down and talk about their values. Can you imagine?
Assigned Male: Holy shit, I got fired today.
Assigned Female: Oh.
Assigned Male: I think it’s time to talk about our values.
So the father stays at home “to parent,” which I suppose is one of the perks of having a doctor’s salary fueling the checking account. The father figure explained that he’d started “thinking about gender issues” long ago. In college, in fact, when he’d developed a preference – an erection? – for strong, independent women, women who go mountain biking and surfing and who go on far-flung travels by themselves. So imagine the horror he experienced when his mother-in-law gave the older of the two girls a Barbie doll for her birthday. Crisis time, to be sure. He even wrote about it on his Facebook page, and everyone who responded, he said, wrote that when it comes to “parenting,” gender stereotypes abound and there’s not much to be done about them. The painfully earnest, gender-sensitive father was crestfallen by how resigned everyone seemed, and he, in solidarity with the mother of the assigned male child, is committed to tackling the issue head on. And then, as if he’d been kicked under the table there in the studio, this idiot apologized for “stereotyping” about what makes a strong female. Of course he knows women who are able to … repair their own cars.
The best part, though, was this: The host asked him something about what might or might not happen when his daughters “become sexual.” Well, said the assigned father figure, he hasn’t really thought about that, and he hopes he won’t have to for a long while. Even though that sounded like a lie to me, I stand with him in hoping it’s a long time before he has to think about a young person’s emerging sexuality, not for his sake but for theirs.
