You're such a girl!

I’m sure we have all heard the sayings “you throw like a girl” or “you cry like a girl” as we were growing up.  As a little girl, I probably did not hear it as much as little boys, but I did grow up with four boys in my neighborhood and I remember hearing this saying. I remember it was such a huge insult if one of the boys told the other that he cried like a girl. I remember knowing that you never wanted to be called a girl, but not really understanding why.

The stereotype I have decided to write my blog posts around is feminine boys and masculine girls. For my first blog I am looking at the question of why is it such a big insult for a boy to “act like a girl?” The article I’ve looked at pertaining to this subject is Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation By Ken Corbett.  Corbett examines three different areas throughout his paper which are to look at “(a) unquestioned presuppositions not only about that which constitutes masculinity, but also (b) that which constitutes gendered coherence and (c) the relationship of said coherence to psychological well-being.” In other words, his paper looked at why no one questions the presuppositions as to what exactly is masculinity, the fact that gender is routinely associated with anatomy, and the anxiety that comes along with any gender since gender is fluid and lacks coherence.

Let’s go back to childhood for a minute and examine the old nursery rhyme that says girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, and boys are snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. Comparing girls to sugar and spice and everything nice is relaying that girls enjoy hysteria, brightly colored things, and are more sensitive; whereas males enjoy control, aggression, and muted emotions by being made of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. If you look even further back to when children are born, routinely it is pink for girl baby blankets, and blue for boys. This stigma of pink meaning girls and blue meaning boys sticks with most members of society throughout their lives. So when little boys like pink, they are made fun of and called little girls, which is an insult to the gender and masculinity, which has been assigned to them by their physical sex.

Corbett explores that boys are plagued by anxiety because of a sense of ‘otherness’ that is pushed on them if they are not masculine. For example, Corbett met with a boy Mitchell who was constantly picked on at school for being “a girl”. Mitchell just enjoyed colorful things, and was very sensitive to the world around him. He loved music by Bach, playing with dollhouses, and had mostly girl playmates because the girls tended to be less rough with him. His parents actually ended up transferring him from the private school he was in because he was being targeted by boys calling him names, which in turn made him cry, which in turn lead the classmates to make fun of him even more. This idea of “boys will be boys” is more than just those four words; it’s actually more like “boys will be boys by not being girls”. And not only do feminine boys get picked on for not being masculine, they are also associated with being homosexuals because they do not fit into the heterosexual stereotype of what a man is. But that will be another branch of the stereotype to explore in a different post.

Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation.  By: Corbett, Ken. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2009, Vol. 19 Issue 4, p353-370, 18p; DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088484