Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Squash It Like A Cockroach


Today's child-rearing advice, from a Christianist minister:

"So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, 'Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,' you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, 'Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.'
It's a real problem for these folk.  It's all supposed to be essentialist, whether determined by some divine party or the weirder type  of evolutionary psychology.  But at the same time you gotta beat it into the children.  Not to mention the fact that this roaring and yelling gentleman (audio at the link)  usurps the right to define what being male or female might mean.