Is it Safe to Be a Boy?

When I was a girl, it would have been nice if my world had been nicer to girls.
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Back then, if you got praised it was for being unobtrusive and doing your domestic chores. For staying inside the box where you belonged. Your mother’s highest compliment was, “Aren’t you a good little housewife!” Punishments were harsh and rewards were demeaning. If you weren’t a pretty child, you’d hear the grown-ups worrying about it. Your father might have been proud of your cleverness in science or spelling, but once you passed age twelve, he kind of lost track of where you were inside your head. 

It takes decades, and dozens of personal battlegrounds, hundreds of social missteps and several thousand miles of riding a motorbike to find another place, to recognize yourself outside the identity assigned to you. Is it wrong to be glad you gave birth to boys and not girls, for fear of subtly, subliminally extending this hereditary chain of mother-daughter disempowerment? For fear that you might not quite know how to parent a girl?

I taught my little ones to nurture plants and care for the natural world; to love flowers and bubbles and all things beautiful; to grow, gather, cook food; to explore, to play-fight and to stand and stare at skies and water. Unafraid, because they were boys, and any mistakes I might make would be all my own, uncomplicated by the fear of past lives.
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I watch my children, and try to measure in them a confidence and strength I wish I had known at their age—and I see their innocence, too: the vulnerability of untried inner resource, the easy triggers of embarrassment, the fragile lines of communication, the teenage tension between coolness and warmth. They are not automatically tougher for being male; if they are more resilient than I was, it’s because they have been treated gently. At home, anyway. Not always outside the home, and sometimes it’s because they are boys. 

If there’s something you wouldn’t say or do to a girl, then don’t do it to a boy either. Are you happy for your daughter and her buddies to exclude a boy from their badminton group simply because he’s a boy? If two kids are playing chess, should the boy be expected to let the girl win just because he’s a boy and she’s a girl? Do you use coarser language in front of boys than you would in front of girls?
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As for jokes and social media funnies—try gender-swapping and see if the post is still amusing. I once unfriended a relative simply because she shared a nude picture of very young men on social media. If she’d be uncomfortable with middle-aged men gawping at very young women, why was it OK for her to gawp at very young males in the nude?

The world has much to learn on how to bring up girls undamaged, free-spirited and strong—and part of this depends on whether we bring up the next generation of men secure, resilient and gentle. Because harm spreads across the lines of generations and gender.

Please, world, be kind to boys too. Don’t be harsh on them because you cannot read their emotions. Don’t propagate the jokes that belittle males any more than you would joke about females. Don’t demean a whole gender for the sake of whoever damaged you.
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Be gentle with my children for the sake of theirs.