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.
My experience wasn't shame but a different kind of embarrassment. I didn't learn that doing unmanly things was shameful, but that it might draw unwanted attention to myself. I have many memories of my mom saying something like "you are a man/boy so you probably want x, right?", and she would watch for my reaction. It was always delivered as genuine and not a rhetorical question. I don't ever remember being told I had to stop doing something because it was girly, I was just lead to traditionally manly things when I didn't give any input on what I wanted.
Whenever someone tried to pressure or shame me along the lines of "be a man do x" as a kid, I interpreted it as an attempt to control me by inventing something to be insecure about. Dumb playground behavior like asking someone why they "walk like that" when they are walking normally.
I learned to identify this kind of pressure as just bullying and not something to believe at such an early age I don't remember being taught it. I just always knew it. This single lesson I think shielded me from almost all of the distress of this gendered pressure put on boys. I never took it as a mark against myself, but against the person trying to pull that crap on me.
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