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.
The problem is that the lines between fundamental philosophical questions and politics are very blurred. For instance, we can see the brainworms of neoliberalism give rise to silicon valley existentialism, and a resurgence of western buddhism as a cope for living under increasingly precarious conditions.
I believe I conflated the first idea with the formal name for the second idea. Because I also think its very stupid to say, as a human being born and raised in the capitalism, that existance itself should cease because of some universal truth, without examining ones own biases and utter lack of knowledge about the nature of the universe first. Thank you for the resources.