FROM AN AUTUMN JOURNAL
23
catapult into her mother, she is being a snuggly bunny; let a little
boy catapult into his mother, he is being a savage. Let a little girl
destroy another child's plaything, it is wholly accident and requires
as much comforting of the destroyer as of her victim; let a little boy
do the same thing, he is patently in need of psychological recon–
struction. A girl cries, every mother for yards around comes cooing.
A boy cries, he must show blood for his emotion to be taken as any–
thing but a temper tantrum. The sexual bias was perhaps most
amusingly demonstrated in an incident earlier this fall when
J.
and another little boy, playing together, discovered an insect climb–
ing a tree and each grabbed a stick to try to nail the creature. The
other boy's mother moved forward and putting a hand on either
boy's head murmured, " Let's
watch
the bug climb the tree." Her
pedagogy had, of course, just the opposite of its intended effect
• of "channeling aggression into more constructive activity" and turn–
ing to me she sighed:
"M
ust
they be so bloodthirsty?" Yet this
same mother, not three days later, chucklingly reported to me a
conversation she had overheard between her daughter and another
girl-child in which the two exchanged the most murderous senti–
ments: "I'll kill you dead." "No, I'll kill you deader." And her only
comment was: "Those darling little baby-voices !"
I record these scenes with full awareness of my prejudice as
the mother of an only child, a son, and of my guilt too for being
so susceptible to the dominant mood of my immediate social group–
it has become my nightly occupation to reassess, in the light of
reason, the unfair judgments I form of my little male offspring each
public afternoon. But the difficulty I have in permitting my son the
decent and necessary assertions of both his humanness and his mas–
culinity (I am not speaking of depredations which are undesirable in
either sex) excites my curiosity about the motives which are deter–
mining our changing sexual culture. Is this cherishing of daughters
and demasculinizing of sons intended to restore the balance of sexual
power lost in the parent generation? But surely it is not their mas–
culine strength which the husbands I know best are asserting in their
unwholesome domination of their wives, but their own sense of
having been demasculinized somewhere back in their beginnings–
therefore what advantage can these mothers think to gain for their
