L’Affaire Limey Jacket
When a boy’s lime green jacket launches a controversy.
A serial “open letter” writer, Angela Nickerson claims her son loves the colors typically marketed to girls, like limey green and purple, even secretly loves pink, and that she’d been buying outerwear at Land’s End designed for the opposite sex, which, she tells us, he prefers anyway. But wait!
I have gotten away for six years buying “girls” clothes for my son, because they are colors or animals or designs that he likes. But now he can read. And if he picks up a copy of a Lands’ End catalogue and finds that the limey green jacket he loves is a girls’ jacket, he will never wear it again — not because he won’t still love it, but for fear of being teased.
Young children are extremely, uninhibitedly conformist. They have to be because that’s how they learn about the world. Their desire to get along with their peer groups is disturbing to adults. It’s also completely normal. We can’t stamp it out; we can only channel it in a socially responsible manner.
Young children adhere to every gender stereotype with exceptional zeal. Girls wear the fluffiest tutus and shiniest tiaras, and boys pretend play dinosaurs, the bigger the better. Again, they are uninhibited about their embrace of gender cliches. It doesn’t occur to them to be subtle. It doesn’t mean much. If your four-year-old daughter acts out like most exaggerated female boilerplate, it doesn’t mean she won’t grow up to be stoic and strong. If a boy gives up turquoise because he doesn’t feel kindergarten approves, what’s the big deal?
Who is all the gender neutrality for?
Like other activists Nickerson wants to force a single “kids” section instead of boys’ and girls’ sections in department stores:
They are kids! Their bodies are so similar — just call them Kids’ Squall Bibs and Pants. Boys can wear all of those colors. Girls, too.
While their bodies still look pretty similar, children are very different socially and emotionally. They are boys and girls, and this distinction is of supreme significance to them.
The way she tells the story, Nickerson withheld an important piece of information from her son. She’s been buying girls’ clothes without bothering to tell him. And, sure, parents make all sorts of decisions for their minor children, and they don’t need to keep the tots posted about every little detail, and sometimes it’s better not to. Did you tell him that this yucky medicine he’s refusing to take is in his hot chocolate? No? Good, as long as he drank it.
That the mom is dressing up her five-year-old son in girls’ clothes is a totally different story. He thought that lime green jacket she bought him was something that boys wear. He doesn’t have the necessary sophistication to distinguish between subtle differences in cut in boys and girls clothing. He trusted his mom to get him what he wants: outerwear that establishes him as one with his buddies.
Now it turns out the jacket was from a girls’ section. (And by the banner shot above, there are boy versions of the favorite lime green, see the second one with the lime green lining.) This is huge for him. He would be upset enough for his mom to publicly complain, but what she doesn’t seem to note is that he would likely be upset with her. If I were his mom, I wouldn’t worry about the lack of color options in the boys’ section of the catalog. I would worry about my son not trusting me ever again.
Nickersen positions herself as a progressive, concerned and loving mom who is helping her son to express his true self while sheltering him from the cruel repressive world. Her son, apparently, begs to differ. He knows what he wants: to be a boy. She’s giving him the wrong tools to be a boy, which will feel like betrayal. Note the worry that he won’t wear the jacket if he knows it is a girls’ jacket “for fear of being teased.” And if the other boys and girls know? It isn’t any individual’s lack knowledge that prevents the teasing, it is the group’s and no one mother has control over that.
Colors don’t matter; essence does. Colors are merely a pleasant fluff topic that everyone has an opinion about. The bond formed with other kids is crucial.
Expats and immigrants go though the same thing. A young Russian man once told me of a time when, shortly after his arrival to the US in the early 1990s, he walked down the streets of San Francisco in a pink sports jacket. He was a masculine guy, to be sure, but he didn’t think much about that jacket until that walk. I don’t know when and how he came in possession of the article of clothing. When you live in scarcity, a jacket’s color is not that significant. Plus, at that time, Russian society was pretty naive about homosexuality. It did not occur to him that clothing color would signal anything like that. After that one walk through the streets of San Francisco, that man no longer wore pink sports jackets.
We are very particular about certain colors because gay men and women are out of the closet, which, I think we can all agree, is a good thing. Straight men, in turn, feel the need to establish themselves as such. It’s not because they are all homophobes as much as because they might dislike unwanted advances just like women do. Plus, they have vested interest in signaling to women that they are interested in opposite sex.
Today’s gender neutral parents are using their kids for signaling. Nickerson makes this explicit: she is a “ woman working hard to raise a boy who will be healthy, loving, and an ally and advocate for all.” Why not brave, accomplished, or wise? Because:
If we are serious about tackling the toxic masculinity which persists in our culture, we must look at the images we market to our children. Boys get dinosaurs that are threatening and aggressive. Girls get sparkly dinosaurs who love each other. What kind of messages do these seemingly innocuous shirts convey?
Subordinating his self to be an “ally” will make a boy “healthy” and “loving” in his mother’s opinion. Progressive parenting guarantees emotional stability and social and moral advancement.
That progressive upbringing is no guarantee that her goal can be reached is plain obvious. Take, for instance, the Hollywood progressive darling Matt Damon. He was raised by a progressive mom and is (or was) in all respects the model progressive of Tinsel Town. Now it turns out that he was in a business of vouching for a hive of sexual predators, some of whom, by his own admission, he barely knew. Matt Damon is a tool of toxic masculinity.
I don’t worry very much about the colors my children prefer, or the type of clothing. I worry about our children growing up to be good men and good women. Are they compassionate? Are they kind? And do they know their peers? Lately that seems like an important thing that must have fallen by the wayside, probably while everyone was focusing on signaling what a proper person they were. That childhood conformity, or what looks like conformity in grade school years, might just be the foundation of peer groups that can do more and be more for each other as time goes by.
