Boys & Girls

2007

oil on canvas in wooden box with tear-off text

18″ x 12″ x 2″

Behavior is far, far from instinctual. At least in society. We are raised to behave in very circumscribed ways, and we are raised to deny and to obviate many so-called “natural” behaviors.  I intensely dislike the word “lady” because I have so many unpleasant memories of being told to act like “a little lady” when I was a girl.  This meant not yelling, not being too physical, not sitting with my knees apart, not speaking out of turn, not in essence demonstrating any real kind of physical presence in the world.  And certainly, certainly, it meant not to be too sexual. 

This was in the 60s and 70s, but it’s unclear how deeply social changes have been.  To take a trivial example: Halloween. It is still common to still see great divisions between the roles chosen for little girls and the roles chosen for little boys.  As though the old 42nd Street suddenly invaded the pre-K world, little girls are dressed not only as princesses but as princesses meant to please: dolled up and strutted out, these little girls harkens back to the era where a woman’s currency was solely in her looks.  And of course it goes without saying that ugliness and violence on Halloween tend to be reserved for the boys, who drip with fake blood, brandishing cardboard swords and swaggering in superheroes’ outfits.

Human culture displays bizarre contradictions and in this Halloween tradition there is one: despite the way many parents will dress up their little girls, they do not mean for them to be practicing a display of their sexuality. This is a fine line.  There is, on the one hand, displaying a girl’s currency as pretty and therefore valuable, and there is on the other hand displaying a girl’s sexuality.  (Maybe it’s the paying-only and for-free distinction, but that is a different essay.) The parents, while encouraging “prettiness” in their little girls, are not (at least consciously, and I don’t want to go there) encouraging sexuality. 

For even in today’s world “slut” is still a term of great horror.  The term “player” only applies to men.