Tonight, as I cleaned up the dinner plates, for some reason I started singing "Maria" from West Side Story. I'd like to be able to give you some context, but I can't. It just came into my head and I started singing it. Half the time I sing while doing stuff I don't even realize I'm doing it. This does tend to get me some odd looks in the grocery store.
"Maria. I just met a girl named Maria."
Kiernan asked, "Why did you say that?"
"What?"
"About meeting that girl."
"Because it's a song from one of my favorite musicals, West Side Story," I replied.
"Why do you like it if it has the word girl in it?"
He's four and we're already dealing with this weird gender exclusion stuff. Kiernan has told me about playing at school and not wanting the girls to play superheroes with the boys. Sometimes he says that girls can't play superheroes, except for Stella. She is grandfathered in because she had a superhero identity from the outset. She is Lavagirl. But the other girls are excluded from this. Whether or not they care is not a question I can answer
One day after school the kids were all running around and playing. A couple of the girls staked out a bench as their territory. At some point Kiernan approached and they told him, "No boys!" He found this confusing, coming to me and asking why they would say something like that.
"That's not very nice," he said. "They're not being very nice."
I pointed out to him that he has done the same thing, that he has told me about not playing with the girls at school and not letting them play superheroes. He saw nothing odd about this double-standard, and gave me the look that Calvin gives when, as he says, his mom "goes off on one of her irrelevant tangents again."
This gender stuff, they get it from the jump. No matter how hard you try to be open in the early stages, in your language and your play, they just pick up on the differences and those blossom into biases. This isn't necessarily bad. It just is. But it's interesting to me. Things like pink being just for girls. Or identifying a character in a book as a girl because she's wearing a bow on her head (something he did very early on). We didn't make a fuss over pink being a girlie color. We made a conscious effort to avoid this, but still it took root.
The exclusion thing is easy to get. It's all over the place in books. He saw it in Calvin & Hobbes during the period when we were still [unadvisedly] reading those books to him. Calvin has a anti-girl club called G.R.O.S.S. Get Rid Of Slimy girlS. That boys vs. girls stuff is a natural part of growing up. I know that. I just would never have expected to see it at four years old.
"Why do you like it if it has the word girl in it?"
Oh my son. How long do I have before you realize that's the main reason to like anything?
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