Why is it considered bad for boys to be feminine but good for girls to be masculine?
Many girls feel a stigma attached to being “too girly” which really irks me. I want to explore why this stigma is there in my next posts. I’ve just realized that when I was four I decided I liked purple better than pink. It wasn’t true, I really did prefer pink but I was trying not to be a girly girl. Being girly was embarrassing. It was uncool. Boys teased me and thought I was silly if I acted girly. Boys are never faced with a similar stigma about being a boy. It is always okay for them to like blue or to like ‘boy’ games. If they are particularly ‘macho’ or boy-like this is fine too. However, boys are taught to strongly resist being more ‘like a girl’, to strongly resist being feminine. When I was young the boys used to say “Eeew! Girl germs!” whenever they accidentally touched a girl. We girls started retaliating with, “Eeew, boy germs!” but we didn’t really mean it. We still thought boys were cool. The boys thought girls were not cool. Being girly was despised.
Girls were allowed, even encouraged, to be tomboys. Boys were not allowed to be feminine, to be a ‘sissy’. This is extremely unfair to boys/men who are more feminine, and I know that this has harmed a lot of men who felt they did not fit into the idea of ‘masculine’ as well as they were expected too. My sister is a six-year-old extreme “tomboy” who used to say that she wanted to be a boy. My dad helped her accept being a girl by showing her that “it’s better to be a girl, because girls can do anything, but boys can only do boy stuff”.
This restriction against boys being feminine can be very harsh, but it is not reverse sexism. It is an example of how boys and men can be harmed by the sexism against women in society. Boys aren’t allowed to be feminine (but girls can be tomboys) because being feminine/female is seen as worse than being masculine/male.
I shall explain why I think masculine is seen as worse than feminine in later posts.
Tags: avoidance of femininity, be a man, boys can't be sissy's, don't be a cry-baby, don't be a girl, don't be girly, feminine is considered inferior, femininity, femininity and masculinity, man-up, masculinity, sissy, sissy boy, stigma against being feminine, tomboy
October 8, 2008 at 3:38 pm
[...] are not considered worse or inferior to ”male” or our concept of ”masculine”. It is as cool to be female and to be feminine as it is to be a boy or to be [...]