The Heterosexualization of Youth
When our son was born, someone gave him a really cute t-shirt that said “Chicks Dig Me” with a picture of a baby chick underneath.
Cute, right?
He wore it for a few months while it fit him — it was a cute little shirt. I loved the baby bird the most.
He also had shirts that he wore less or not at all that said “ladies man” and things of a more direct nature and one that I tossed into the donate pile that said “Little Flirt.”
No. I draw the line at calling a child a flirt. Even if it doesn’t strike you immediately when you see a kid (boy or girl) wearing something like that — think about it for just a minute or so and tell me it isn’t creepy.
The thing that bothers me the most about sexualized clothing for kids is the straightness of all of it. The assumption that all children are straight until they state otherwise. We don’t say this outright — we don’t label our children as heterosexual to our friends or families or doctors or teachers. That would be odd, right? But we do, in numerous ways, tell them and the world that they are, in fact, straight.
With or without religious indoctrination or a cultural predisposition to dislike homosexuality, we are programmed with heterosexuality-as-normal in our society. Boys flirt with girls, girls like boys. It’s on clothing, it’s in our story books and movies, it’s reflected in how we refer to our children and those they bestow their affections upon.
It seems totally harmless. A little boy and girl whose parents are close friends will probably have many people refer to them as boyfriend and girlfriend; they will probably even joke about their eventual wedding. It is subtle, this predilection towards the default as heterosexuality.
This is a real conversation I heard at a birthday party about a four-year-old boy and his future “wife”:
Mother: Yeah, his future wife will have her work cut out for her.
Other person: …or husband?
Mother: Well, I think he’s a little young to assume he could be gay.
But not too young to be straight and already have a future wife? The assumption here that gayness is somehow inherently adult, and hyper-sexual and therefore reserved only for grown ups but being straight is innocent and can exist from infancy. In other words, you are born with the slate of straightness, the presumption of straightness. You have to discover gayness, later in life. It isn’t assumed you are nothing until you yourself declare yourself gay or straight. You don’t get that choice from the beginning. Innocent until proven guilty — straight until proven gay.
In an age when marriage equality is the law of the land, we live in a world where straightness is default, straightness is conferred and it’s incumbent upon those of us who figure out the default mode doesn’t fit to break the identify given to us and cultivate a new one.
What if we didn’t assume our children had any one sexual orientation?
What if we didn’t buy them shirts with cutesy but sexual phrases, or joke about their future arranged marriages to our friends’ opposite sexed children?
It seems benign, I know. Especially if you are straight — you’ve never had the moment where you feel so embarrassed and disoriented that your sexual and romantic preference seems so abnormal from the world around you. But children absorb the world around them from a very early age; they understand at some level what is normal and acceptable and what is not. And what if they discover themselves to be different from the paradigm thrust onto them from birth? I grew up in a supportive family — religious, but not dogmatic. My mother’s sister is a lesbian and had a partner for the better part of my childhood. But when I finally admitted to myself that I liked women, I was terrified. To be different, to disappoint everyone, to not look and feel normal.
There is a reason why LGBTQ youth suicide rates are so much higher than their straight peers. Finding out you are so different than the default expectation can be devastating.
So as you’re browsing the spring and summer clothes for the kids in your life, maybe pick the ones that have goofy cartoons, or positive sayings, or maybe just cute stripes. Find stories and movies and books that have a theme other than the “boy meets girl and they fall in love” trope. Promote them, too. You might unknowingly change someone’s whole life.
