Boyhood: The Shark Experience

On boys toys, feminist mothers and politicized parenting

Photo by Wai Siew on Unsplash

Boyhood: The shark experience

When my son Zephy was maybe five, our family went on a vacation.   We were by the pool when he spied a group of little girl mermaids in sparkly waterproof tails, sitting captivated by a larger, adult mermaid, who was teaching them basic merskills.  Apparently, the hotel was offering, almost certainly at vast expense, a ‘mermaid experience,’ complete with mermaid lesson and photoshoot.   

Zephy was enchanted and begged me to sign him up.  Feeling pride in my gender-norms bucking boy, we went to the front desk to ask about availability and prices.  Predictably, the package was eye-wateringly expensive, but they had a spot open in the next morning’s class, and I agreed to sign him up. 

 But as I was filling out the forms, the receptionist spotted Zephy skulking behind me in his swimming trunks.  “Ah a boy.” she said. “My mistake, sorry.  Boys are sharks, not mermaids.  Shall I sign you up for the shark experience instead?”

The shark experience.  That could be the tagline for the entirety of boy socialization.  Boyhood.  The shark experience.  Zephy’s whole childhood would likely be one ‘shark experience’ after another.  I didn’t want to pay for the shark experience.   

I mumbled some excuse to Zephy about the price being higher than we could afford, and we walked away.  He was disappointed.  It sat badly and it still does.  

I know what it’s like to grow up feeling as though you are part of your mother’s political project.  When I was a child, in the late seventies and early eighties, my mom was a feminist, back when they still called it a “women’s libber,” with a sneer.  Her feminism was the dogmatic, second wave flavor, much more about no than yes.  Lots of things were forbidden.  No Barbie.  No nail polish or bikinis.  No ‘Girls’ World,’ the strange disembodied plastic head toy that British girls of the 1980s used to practice hair-styling and makeup. My mother taught my sister and me to say, with only the tiniest hint of irony, that “pink was the color of our oppression.”  I spent most of the early eighties in a unisex playsuit with a bizarrely unflattering short haircut, craving objectification.  

At the beginning of one summer term, when I was eight or nine, my school sent a letter out to parents.  There would be some changes to the boys’ school uniform- instead of the usual gray flannel, boys would now be allowed to wear denim shorts.  The girls’ uniform would remain the same- a blue and white checked dress.  But, radically for the times, girls could now also choose to wear the denim shorts from the boys’ uniform.  The idea was catnip for my mother.  Our family didn’t have a lot of money and new clothes were pretty rare.  But she read this letter and announced that she was going to buy me the denim shorts.  The boys’ shorts!

 I did not want to wear the boys’ shorts.  The idea was horrifying.  “Can I have a new summer dress instead?” I asked.  “Um, we don’t really have the money for that,” she replied, in much the same awkwardly defensive “don’t-stand-in-the-way-of-my-ideological-mission- with-your-retrograde-personal-desires',' tone that I used to nix the shark experience for Zephy.  “But you have the money for the shorts!” I wailed.  “Well, we have some money, but not very much,” she hedged.  I didn’t get the shorts or the summer dress.   This wasn’t about what I wanted.  It wasn’t really about me at all.

The ladies who sniggered and called feminists “women’s libbers” were gleeful when they saw me craving pink or sparkles.  “You see!” they gloated, “it’s natural for girls to want this! If you deprive them, they’ll only want it more!”  People love to see a dogmatist get their comeuppance and the joy is only sweeter when that dogmatist is a woman and a feminist.  Back then, feminist was basically another word for unattractive; and at some level there is nothing more repellent, more socially threatening than an unattractive woman.  Whatever else she might do or achieve in life, at some basic level a woman’s main job was to be pretty and unthreatening, and little girls were in active training for this social duty.   Pink preserved the social order.  Feminism really only gained any mainstream traction when it gave in and embraced the de-fanged socially soothing pink aesthetic itself.  

In one sense, the sneerers were right. The childhood lack did make me crave these things in adulthood.  I do now spend an absurd amount of money that I don’t have on clothes.  I love fake nails that mean that I can’t type; crippling heels that mean I can’t walk.    There’s a small part of me that wants to be totally incapacitated by femininity.  

I’m still not sure that deprivation is the best way to get a child to truly embrace an ideology.   But I now realize that in those early years of second wave feminism, that kind of bulldozing, simple messaging was necessary.  Because over the long term, I’m grateful to my mother for holding the line and do believe her project was a success that improved the course of my own life in immeasurable ways.  

Her willingness to challenge gender roles and expectations left me with an aptitude for critical thinking, as well as a deeper sense of self belief, a basic knowledge that my concerns were as important as a man’s.  I grew up believing that I could be the main character, not the sidekick, that I could write about my opinions for a living and be the one making the jokes, as well as the one laughing at them.   It’s no coincidence that many of my closest friends in adulthood- women that I met and liked instantly with no idea how they were raised-  turned out to have had similar upbringings, with similar outcomes.  Our mothers broke the back of the constant gendering of girlhood.  Now we get to be full people, not just women.  

I try to think about this when I encourage my sons to break free of the roles assigned to them, to challenge masculinity norms and help them embrace new possibilities.  I tell myself that  these things don’t always go in a straight line, but instead play out in complex and unexpected ways.  That my children aren’t instruments of my will and it’s good that they are pushing back.  That in the longer term, this is worth fighting for.

There’s a lot to unpack in my mother’s political project, even on its own terms.  In her version of feminism, girl socialization was the system that needed changing.  Whatever boys were doing was to be admired and emulated.  At minimum boy socialization was default normal, not open to question. The whole thing certainly reinforced a value system in which masculine is aspirational, feminine is lesser.

This framing was probably necessary for the reality of the times, but it also missed something crucial.  In all its dissecting and questioning of the harmful messages aimed at girls, it not only failed to recognize what is good and important and aspirational about girl socialization, and what the culture of girlhood might have to offer boys.   It also rendered invisible the harmful messages of boy culture.

Over the last couple of decades, the cultural trappings of boyhood have become increasingly violence and aggression focused.  This itself is part of a wider process of gender segregation of childhood. As it dawned on late-capitalist marketeers that by treating boys and girls as two entirely separate sets of consumers, they could double sales, movies and tv shows, clothing and toys have been pushed further to gendered extremes.  In almost every toy store now, there is a neon pink girls’ section filled with a mix of sparkle-studded objectification, domestic drudgery, and caregiving responsibilities; and a khaki and camo-hued boys’ section devoted in large part to mass slaughter (with a few emergency vehicles to mop up the bloodshed.)

Most of the feminist critique about the intensification of gendered marketing has focused on the ‘pink washing’ of girl culture, a kind of hostile takeover of girls’ brains by sparkly princess-fronted corporate masterminds. Less attention has been paid to the increasing ‘battle-fication’ of boy culture. But in the same time period, somewhat invisibly, toys aimed at boys have become increasingly aggression focused.  

Lego is a good example of this trend.  Classically gender neutral, in 2012 the company attempted to attract more girl customers by launching the “FRIENDS” line, with pink packaging and all female minifigures.  (it is notable that “Friends” was the branding they chose for a female-only line, as if friendship itself is a feminized state.)

And while girls got friends, boys got enemies. When a group of researchers from the University of Canterbury monitored the content and marketing of Lego sets since the late 1970s, they found that as the brand became more gender segregated, the sets aimed at boys became steadily more violent.

Whereas in 1978, only a tiny fraction of the sets contained weapons and those were mainly obscure medieval ones, now nearly a third of the sets do, nearly all of them guns.  Close to 40% of the images in the Lego catalog now contain some sort of violence, with the fastest growth being in shooting.  

Toronto-based writer Crystal Smith, author of The Achilles Effect, What Pop Culture is Teaching Young Boys about Masculinity, tracked the language used in toy commercials targeting boys and girls, turning the results into an infographic in which the most common words appear in the biggest letters.  

In the girls’ graphic, the biggest word was LOVE, with FRIENDSHIP,  FRIENDS and FUN also prominent.  For boys, the biggest word by a huge margin, dominating the entire page and dwarfing every other word in the cloud was BATTLE.  Almost every word in the boys graphic, including ULTIMATE, WEAPON, STEALTH, ATTACK and ENEMY related to fighting in some form, with the only obvious exception being VEHICLES.  

 It’s hard to know how much effect that growing up in the shadow of this aggressive, caricatured vision of manhood has on their development, but the little research that does exist suggests that these choices matter, and the toys kids play with can have a lasting impact on their value systems.  

One group of researchers found that boys who had played mostly with stereotypically “boys’ toys” as children were significantly more likely to hold a range of sexist views as adults than boys who had played with more gender neutral toys .

The adolescents in their survey who had played mostly with ‘boys toys’ were less likely to want to see equal numbers of men and women in the workplace, were less likely to identify as feminists and were more likely more likely to “think about girls’ bodies and how they looked than their thoughts and personality” than the boys who had played with more gender neutral toys.  They also considered themselves more likely to punch someone if provoked, and were even less likely to read or enjoy English as a school subject. 

 It’s hard to unpack how much of this effect is down to the toys themselves and how much to do with parenting values more generally.  After all, parents who make the effort to give their sons gender neutral toys are usually the same parents who hold more progressive values around gender as a whole, something that is likely to be reflected in all kinds of parenting and lifestyle choices.  But these toys are important symbols of those value systems and the messages we send to boys about who and what they should be in the world.  

The only problem is that my boys love this stuff.  Just as I tortured my 1970s feminist mother with my cravings for Barbies and kid make up, my boys love battles and fighting and weapons.  Despite my best efforts, our lives are dominated by mini-murder.

My powerlessness in the face of my sons’ passions has been such a defining part of my parenting experience, it can sometimes feel hard to believe that these differences are socialized rather than innate.  It feels like I spend my entire life trying to socialize them away from these preferences, not towards them.  It’s hard to summon any kind of conviction that some unseen forces of culture, let alone my own flimsy, conflicted parenting could go head-to-head with something as robust and immovable as biology and win.  

I’m torn about what to do about it. When I try to steer them away from Nerf battles and towards books about feelings, it’s hard to know whether this is a political quest or a psychoanalytic one.  I wonder how much this is just my own personal baggage, me trying to coerce my children into meeting my own needs.  After all, surely “good” parents cultivate and support their children’s ‘natural’ interests, follow their lead and don’t try to mold them according to their own desires and agenda.  When I try to challenge gender norms with the boys, is what I’m doing closer to teaching my children to say please and thank you (good), or more like being a tightly wound baseball dad with a child who hates baseball (bad)?

I don’t want to turn my sons into a political project that tramples all over their own preferences and passions.  But then again, the world is heavily gendered.  If we sit back and do nothing, my boys are already a political project, just not mine. 

My mother simply forbade the ‘problematic’ toys.  Maybe I am too lazy for that approach, or my children are less obliging.  Weary of all the arguments, I have uneasily settled on a philosophy of expansion rather than deprivation, attempting to add in rather than take away.  They can have the Nerf guns and the battle movies, but I try to inject some critical thinking, to call out the stereotypes when I see them and add in other things too- books about emotions and relationships, TV shows about middle school friendship dramas, dollhouses and My Little Ponies. Some of it takes. Most of it doesn’t.

But I keep telling myself that as with my own childhood, it’s a long game.  They are young, trying things out, trying to find their place in the world and trying to fit in.  I believe it is worth it, and I just keep hoping that at some level it is all sinking in.