OPINION: What are you, a girl?

January 19, 2015 By Steven Doloff Special for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Steven Doloff is a Professor in the Dept. of Humanities at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of Steven Doloff

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I’m on a supermarket checkout line, standing behind a man of perhaps 35 and, I assume, his son, who appears to be about 6. The little boy is not happy. Actually, he’s crying — not sniffling, not wailing — just audibly crying. His father ignores him for a few minutes, and then leans over and asks the boy, in the mildest tone of disapproval, “What’re you crying for? You’re crying just like a little girl. Are you a little girl?”

His son continues to cry, but more quietly.

First I think, this kid won’t have to wait another ten or twelve years for some football coach or drill sergeant to bellow these misogynistic cues into his ear — he’s getting them right now, at 6, from his dad, almost as a fatherly expression of concern. Then I ask myself, if it were the man’s 6-year-old daughter crying, would he really say to her, “go ahead, cry. It’s okay, you’re a girl”?

As a literature teacher, I also note how, if this were the start of, say, a Charles Dickens novel, such a passing and not particularly unusual remark as this father’s would, by book’s end, be made to glow in hindsight with great significance for the fictional child’s eventual social and emotional fate. And then, finally, I remember what I tell my students —that such novelistic devices offer us ways in which to perceive developmental patterns in real lives.

So, had the crying toddler heard these sexually disparaging words from his father before? How many times, or was this the first? Will the father repeat them enough during the boy’s childhood for them to sink in and influence his son’s gender attitudes for a lifetime? I wonder now, of what tale of advantage or adversity did I by chance glimpse an early page? And to what inauspicious outcome might those few thoughtlessly weighted words eventually lead?

As Dickens said in “Great Expectations”:

“…think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of that first link on one memorable day.”