He's a gentle, happy-go-lucky, incredibly sweet-natured little boy. He's also highly visual. He likes colors. Bright colors. Yellow, orange, pink, green, purple. He likes shiny sparkly things. He likes making beaded necklaces and bracelets. He had a phase where he liked to play with a Hannah Montana doll (liked to hurl her up to the ceiling and catch her and hurl her up again, or fly her through the air like an airplane).
I was trying to find him some damn glitter pens.
He had just become aware that some things are for 'girls' and some things are for 'boys', plus he has a macho little twin brother who can give him a rough time. I was looking for glitter pens in gender-neutral packaging, so that when I gave it to him his brother wouldn't say, "Oh you loser, that's for girls!" and try to crush his soul.
And of course I couldn't find any, because the powers-that-be have decided that glitter pens belong to girls. Along with pink and orange and purple and sparkles and jewelry-making kits. My bright and gorgeous and talented young son had dared to step outside the box of Boy. And a lot of what defines Boy-box struck me as stupidly arbitrary (why the hell does purple, traditionally a gender-neutral color signifying royalty, all of a sudden belong in the girls' section at Gap Baby)? When girls are forced to be in their own little boxes, boys get defined in opposition to that, which creates little boxes of their own. (And I won't even get into the fact that boys learn young that there is something inherently 'inferior' about the girl-box, so that most boys would rather eat a skunk than live out a week or a day or even an hour in a little-girl body. After all, why was it even an issue that the pens were in girl-packaging? What difference does that make other than the values we assign it?)
It's not like none of this had occurred to me before...but there was a click. There was a felt and visceral understanding that shifted me out of myself and began to hook certain experiences into a larger broader context. Suddenly feminism wasn't just an abstraction.