An old friend recently sent me this article showing how teaching girls to play in the dirt is necessary for building resistance to germs as adults. Similarly, I think we can all see how teaching boys proper hygiene (for goodness sake men, wash your hands after you pee) is a goal with which we can all agree.
Much of this blog has been dedicated to showing how simple things like hygiene are tied to gender, and that therefore gender as a construct can be both powerful and harmful.
The problem with gender is not that boyness or girliness is bad as a whole, but rather that they are invented, not deliberately, but by tradition and history. Maybe most of the things that we bundle in with masculinity are terrific, but that doesn't mean that we should unquestioningly accept the entire bundle.
We should pull the bundle apart, trait by dirty trait, and keep what we like from both traditional genders, and learn from the dozens of non-traditional genders that have erupted in direct response to those traditional genders.
We should teach boys how to enjoy being clean and made up, and we should teach girls how to enjoy being covered in mud. A healthy person can do both, and the more we learn about the world through modern science, the more we learn that it is impossible to be healthy without a little soap... and a little mud.
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Thanks for the blog & the link, Nuri. As a socialized-girl who was actively encouraged to get dirty, I've often thought that being able to withstand grimy situations as an adult was related to my early exposure. I certainly had a much easier time in post-Katrina NOLA than a lot of other female-bodies folx.
And the gender-tracking is another aspect of this socialization difference. I think that it was another way that I did not "fit in" with the girl crowd -- I never got sick or shied away from playing in piles of leaves like the other pre-teen girls I grew up with.
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