Here’s my thing: I remember talking about this in university, in the early 90s. And I know someone who was 4-year-old boy in the mid-80s who loved My Pretty Pony, and he grew up to be an average straight guy, for whatever that matters.
What I want to know is how to get past this particular Groundhog Day scenario. It’s – it’s important, but it’s also gotten so damn boring.
I think it’s a matter of giving up on collective stereotypes. People use them because they are easy, not accurate or fair. Categorizing things, people, and situations can be useful and even necessary - but I use my own categories, and retire them when no longer useful. Notions of sex, race etc are classes of person which people identify as being collectively rather than personally real. So “girly” means whatever you think it should mean. FWIW, the same applies to “weak” as well. Put the responsibility on the speaker to tell you their version of what the label means, and deny whatever baggage supposedly comes with it.
As long as people assume that they automatically know what is meant by girly, black, cis, manager, conservative, scientist, homeless, etc then people will keep running in circles WRT to these things without essentially knowing anything.
This is a subject I’ve had to come to terms with recently. I want my daughter to be intelligent, self-confident, strong-willed, …etc. She proves to be developing on this track everyday. However, she loves girly things. This at first made me very nervous, because I thought it equated to a higher possibilty of her blindly conforming to the prevailing expected female gender roles. It wasn’t until I noticed that she identified with the character Honey Lemon, from the movie Big Hero 6, that I realized I will have to drop my picture of what my independent daughter should look like. I now realize that I have to integrate those “girly” emblems when we build science projects and such. It works too. She loves her pink-colored home made lava lamp, and her purple (with gold glitter) soda bottle vortex generator.
Like a lot of nerdy boys, a lot of the bullying I experienced involved accusations that I was not properly masculine, so I habitually thought of myself as some sort of outsider with respect to gender. And I see that in a lot of discussions of misogyny in nerd culture, there’s usually someone arguing that they can’t be sexist, because they, as a nerd, were bullied for not really being masculine. Of course, that misses that there’s more than one model of masculinity, and the male nerd is one of them.
More important, though, is that the rejection of a model of masculinity usually doesn’t involve much positive acceptance of feminine traits.
There are some curious exceptions: there’s the curious thing about long hair in men, which is somehow simultaneously a subversion of gender roles, and an affirmation of masculinity. Notice how often male protagonists in fantasy literature are described as having long hair.
The other day, I caught myself: I was in a store, looking at a set of four reusable plastic sporks. I hesitated to buy them, because one of the four was pink. And, y’know, pink. Never use pink. Because… Oh.
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