WHEN I was a little girl, I refused to wear bows in my hair. I shuddered at the pink dress my mother picked out for me to wear for my first day of kindergarten. The first -- and only -- Barbie I ever received, I cut all her hair off. Did all of this make me any less of a girl?
As a middle school girl dissatisfied with her weekly allowance, I regularly baby sat for two Swiss boys who lived down the road from me. One boy, Vincent, liked to play with his mother's tampons -- he thought they worked an awful lot like toy rockets. His younger brother Benedikt liked to put hair ties in his hair.
For some reason, though, society feels compelled to clearly delineate how girls and boys should be different when reality shows the distinction is far from clear. All you need to do is look at how clothing stores market different styles of clothing based on gender. Old Navy, one of America's most successful and ubiquitous clothing stores, has shirts for boys with witty graphics on the front saying, "This year I made the Dean's List ... Just not the good one" and "Want to know what it's like to be a winner? Just ask." Another shirt declares, "Vote for me."
Little girls, on the other hand, get to choose from shirts that say "I like to study ... boys" or "attitude" or "sassy." All the shirts have delightful pink, periwinkle and lavender pigments. Years later, though, girls must suppress their sexuality when boys start calling. Society needs to get its propaganda straight.
Perhaps the average mom or dad buying their kids' clothing doesn't believe a shirt can really affect a child that much. This is just one example though, and a quite pervasive one, of how subtle and constant society's efforts are in trying to separate boys and girls into utterly facile categories.
In "Night to his Day: The Social Construction of Gender," Judith Lorber reflects, "Why is it still so important to mark a child as a boy or a girl, to make sure she is not taken for a boy, or he for a girl? What would happen if they were? They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world." Based on these shirts, boys are the smart ones, the winners, the trouble-makers and the leaders. In other words, boys are given agency and self-confidence. Girls, however, may learn to see themselves as only tangential to anything of importance. Conscious or unconscious, society sends a resounding message to girls to sit on the sidelines while the boys must take the lead.
Today, in a world where both women and men thrive in academia, business -- almost any profession -- very few people still consciously believe women should be denied independence. Old Navy probably does not design its shirts with the malicious intent to propagate sexist ideas. So why, then, do so many clothing stores have clearly demarcated "Boys" and "Girls" sections? Why do moms and dads paint their little girls' rooms pink, and their little boys' rooms blue? Surely there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about a hue.
People commit these social sins through simplifying what, in fact, cannot and should not be simplified. We live in a world where lesbians and gay people feel more and more comfortable with being open about their sexuality. On many city streets, it would not be uncommon to see transgendered people or transvestites -- and all the kids out in the country have televisions to witness them, as well. In an already confusing and difficult world, humans feel uncomfortable when former conveniently simple concepts like "man" and "woman" become much more complex. If someone doesn't fit into a neat little category, it's much easier to discount her as an anomaly rather than part of a larger truth, that people simply cannot be stuck in monolithic categories-- and they certainly don't want to be, either.
Joan Scott writes in "Gender and the Politics of History," "'man' and 'woman' are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendental meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions." Other than race, no other concept has been so false and yet so powerful in oppressing billions of people around the world.
There are so many short-haired, soccer-playing girls out there like me when I was young that people had to create a term for it -- "tomboy." Long before girls, and many boys, knew what "social construction of gender" meant, they were rebelling against it. Hopefully one day the adult world will catch on to what the kids out there already know.
Marta Cook is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. She can be reached at mcook@cavalierdaily.com.
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