Manly Thor's Day Special

Social Convention ≠ Arbitrary
Pastabagel has an interesting and challenging post about what parents should do when their son says he wants to wear dresses. It's interesting and challenging because his answer is that you should not let your son do this.

He isn't quite sure how firmly he wants to say this however. First time, he wants to be all rational and agreeable about it.

So when the girl says “I want to use the boys’ bathroom” or the boy says “I want to wear pink dresses” they aren’t revealing their gender identity or their sexual preference. They simply have encountered a social rule that they can’t understand rationally, and they are looking for you to explain it.

If we stop right there, we can begin to see the problem. The obvious question is, "Explain what?" There is very little to explain.

Question: "Why can't I wear a pink dress like my sister?"
Answer: "Because boys don't wear dresses."
Question: "Why don't boys where dresses?"
Answer: "Because they don't."

And anybody who has ever played the why-game with a child knows this can go on forever. That's because the why-game doesn't seek an explanation. As Pastabagel notes, the child is looking for limits in exactly the same way they do when they misbehave. Your son isn't stupid, he already knows that boys don't wear dresses and he already knows that you don't like being asked "why?" twenty times in a row. (By the way, he still knows this even if he has seen a boy on television or in a movie wearing a dress. He's a boy, he knows how to recognize transgression when he sees it*.)

So what does the child want? He may not necessarily want anything at all. For the most part kids and adults just do stuff without thinking why. The more important question is, "What does he need?" but let's leave that aside for a minute and go back to what Pastabagel wrote:

What matters is not that the child presented the challenge to the rule, what matters is the parent’s response. Is the parent going to enforce the rule, permit me to break the rule, or signal that in fact there is no rule at all. It’s not about permissiveness, it’s about acknowledging reality.

And there is the real rub. The reason the challenge is so difficult is that it forces the parent to take a stand. The child is not, as I say, seeking anything but they are putting you in a position where you have to act and you don't want to.

Why don't you want to act? Well partly because you don't feel comfortable with what you already know is your response. You don't want your son to grow up to be a transvestite. If you're a good enlightened parent you don't want to say that because it makes you look, well, bad. You don't hate transvestites and you don't hate gays and you'd still love your son if he grew up to be either or both but you'd really rather that didn't happen.

In fact, either of those eventualities are way off the scale. You want your son to grow up to be a pretty typical man in all sorts of ways. You want him to be a healthy, handsome guy who gets a good job in a good field, marries a good woman and has children. But you can't quite bring yourself to believe that is okay for you to want this enough to signal to your son.

Why not?

Mostly you can't do it because of a move that Pastabagel makes elsewhere in his argument. This move:

Gender, as the left is fond of pointing out, is a social construction. Boys get blue, girls get pink. It’s not biology that determines that, it’s just a social convention. In fact the rule is so arbitrary it used to be the opposite and through some clever marketing and accidents of history, it switched.

"Social construction" is a pretentious way of saying, it could have been different. In some cases, as in the case Pastabagel cites, it actually has been different. In other cases, not so much. Despite a lot of pretending otherwise, for example, there has never been a society that was really tolerant of male homosexuality. But Pastabagel's first premise is sound; many social conventions regarding gender identity have been different in the past.

Now "gender" is a lame word in many instances but it applies here. These are factors about being a boy or a man that are socially determined; not "constructed but "determined". And I say that because notice how the word "arbitrary" just slips into the discussion here.

What's wrong with "arbitrary"? What's wrong is that there is nothing arbitrary about social conventions. Consider this possibility. Your son grows up to be a teen and he and his friends start harassing an effeminate boy at school. You get a call from the school and confront your son and he says, "Your rule is just arbitrary, for most of history what I am doing was perfectly acceptable. We aren't physically hurting the boy, we're just letting him know where his place is." You're not going to accept that. You're going to tell your son that he is wrong and you are right and that's the end of that. And you may even remind him that our society takes this particular "social construction" so seriously that it is willing to use the criminal justice system to discipline boys who harass boys the way he has been doing.

To go back to my earlier question, "What does he need?, the answer is that your son (or daughter) needs authority. They need you to tell them and show them what kind of person you want them to be. You are their father, you not only have the right to do this, you have an obligation. They need to know that you stand for something. The day will certainly come when they, as adults, come to you and tell you that they can't or won't be some of what you want them to be but, for now, they need to be shown.

And, yes, because you are a good parent, you will forgive and accept them when they tell you this.

Yes, I did write "forgive". You are an authority because you are a parent and that is what authorities do. Authorities who say, "Decide for yourself" about everything aren't authorities.


* And it is transgression, the adult male who wears dresses wouldn't like doing so if wearing dresses was the normal thing for boys and men to do.