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.
i dunno if it's still around as much as it was when i was younger, but it could be. among parents and the broader culture, there was this notion that boys are "easier" to raise as children. not because they get into less trouble or get injured less, but less taxing emotionally and psychologically is how the story seemed to go.
as i've gotten older and watched my friends and family do their best to try and raise their boys into men untraumatized by toxic masculinity.... i am not hearing the "boys are easier" sentiment much anymore. it's still around of course, in movies and TV and among people that don't see any room for improvement.
when i think about it now and in the context of parents struggling, it really sounds shitty. like maybe it is/was "easy", because no one is/was expected to investigate or even care much about a boys' emotional development, aside from tamping down on most forms of human expression and fit keep them in the mold.
I was certainly an easy child to raise and I had no idea how to emotion until I was an adult in therapy.