The ideas are already starting to form. We do a workshop with nine-year-old boys in grade 4. I have an eight-year-old son, so this is very near and dear to my heart. We ask them the question, “What do you not like about being a boy?” The number one thing on this list that some young boys put together was not being able to be a mother.
We talked to a boy afterwards and asked him what he meant by that. He told me that from what he sees on TV and around the world, it is always moms that get to care for the kids; it's always moms that get to be loving. Dads are always portrayed as dumbbells, goofballs, klutzes. At age nine, this boy already knew that was potentially inaccessible to him as a boy.
There were other things on that list, like growing hair everywhere and smelling bad, which we couldn't do much about, but there was also having an automatic bad reputation. So at age nine, these boys felt that the thing they didn't like about being a boy was that people would automatically assume they have a bad reputation.
So to Rosemary's point earlier and to what we're trying to say at White Ribbon, this is a terrible system especially for women and girls, but also for men and boys, when our nine-year-olds are telling us that.