Comments on: Happy Father’s Day?

By: ADM

ADM — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:11:34 +0000

squick x infinity

By: Rad Readr

Rad Readr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:06:13 +0000

That is a tough post on Clio Bluestocking’s blog.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:51:30 +0000

This one deserved a long[er] thread by this time, but all day long it was just too depressing to address, much less to even click on the links. I suspect other commenters felt the same way. Those guys profiled above are pretty pathetic.

By: Bavardess

Bavardess — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:00:34 +0000

I found both those posts incredibly disturbing. In the case of the TV presenter, if he’d been sexualising his 3 or 4 year old daughter in that way (with a male babysitter), it would have been viewed as completely inappropriate (if not abusive). But because it was a boy, it seems to be accepted on the continuum of displays of ‘normal’ masculinity. The story brought back some long-buried squicky memories of teenage babysitting – having a 40 year old man leering at me and making sexual comments while his wife was upstairs getting ready. Blech.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:48:11 +0000

Susan–good point. Whereas girls become victims of the poking, grabbing, and leering (as well as psychological bullying) at adolescence, it’s *little* boys who are subjected to bullying in toddlerhood, as your comment and Clio B’s original post suggests.

A small person in my family was teased at AGE 3 because some neighbor boys saw him outside wearing a dress while playing dressup. Boys are bullied so young to fear not just gender queerness, but are even menaced to conform to a shockingly narrow range of play activities.

Are other boys’ and men’s sex/gender identities so unstable that they’re really threatened by a three year-old playing dressup in his own yard? Apparently so.

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:05:05 +0000

A little more, prompted by all this. My brother is the youngest of three; my parents were divorced when he was a toddler, so he was raised by my mother, with two older sisters. None of us are shrinking violets. When I was in high school, I babysat for a couple who lived near us. He was a psychiatrist… he kept saying to my mother how hard it must be for my brother to be raised with “such strong women”. My mother always took it as a “threat” that her son would be gay. But none of us were less “strong” to make sure it didn’t happen!

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:50:03 +0000

It’s so squicky I can’t really get my head around it.

But real…

By: Lilian Nattel

Lilian Nattel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:40:21 +0000

It’s unspeakable.