In How Can I Get Through to You?, family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:

Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

I already feel this with my son. The fact that a radically anti-patriarchal home environment could be undone by a silent 10 second interaction is maddening. My entire childhood experience with gender was focused on shame and how shameful it is to be girly. I don’t want that for my sons and I don’t want the impacts of that for my daughters.

    • SocialistDad [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Might as well be a CEO who looks at how large their biz has grown like yes that’s all me.

      Very apt analogy. Parenting of children is a justified hierarchy that ought to undermine itself over time. If a parent is taking complete credit for their child they are no better than the self-centered CEO. I think the wide range of reactions to your observation happened for a similar reason. Parents have the ability to do a lot of harm, but granting the ability to do good is largely placed in the hands of the larger society. The social infrastructure required to create value in the world is not maintained or provided primarily by the parent, but the training on how to utilize that infrastructure is, at least at first. So to say that the abilities of parents are overestimated is kind of an overly broad statement, but I think the kernel of truth is that atomized liberal society expects parents to handle everything, which just isn’t possible. It’s just yet another false expectation made to make people anxious and feel like they aren’t doing enough.