I was minding my own business on Facebook the other day, when I came across this story about a J. Crew ad featuring a sweet mother and son, both playing with nail polish.
Freaked out reactions soon followed.
Fox News, of course, had nothing positive to say: “This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a FoxNews.com Health column about the ad.
Not surprising, of course.
Slate had a nice rebuttal, but I haven’t seen that much outrage about it from the left.
Kids like to play. All kids. It’s part and parcel of our nature to play. That’s how we learn. We mess around with twigs and sticks and rocks and leaves and toys and dirt and dolls and army figures and whatever else we can get our grubby little hands on and we play. Adults should play more.
What on earth could be more fun to play with than brightly colored paint you put on your body?
This is less about gender and more about kids playing make believe. Girls wear their mom’s lipstick and their dad’s jackets. Boys put on mother’s heels as well as purloining their father’s briefcase. Or vice versa and in multiple permutations.
Now, some kids may use this play to gender identify with the parent. And some may not. Some may indicate they have gender dysphoric issues and some may not. But to say that a child playing with paint on his nails is doomed to a life of confusion is just silly.
My boys both enjoyed a bit of dress up and nail polish in their wee years, and now that they are tweens they are currently focused solely on guns, dirt, reptiles, and fart jokes. Make of that what you will, but I have don’t think a dab of OPI’s “Ladies and Magenta-Men” will have any influence at all on a child’s orientation.
I am struck though, by the idea (inspired by my wise friend Jordan T. Maxwell) that “Make Believe” is just a few letters off from “Make Belief,” which is to say, a radical act of acting out and making a belief of what is possible, yes? And calling that possibility of difference into the world.
In that case, perhaps the Foxians are correct in their fear that mothers painting their nails with sons will radically change the world through the power of play.
I hope so, anyway.
This article appears in April 8 • 2011.