No, I really didn't want to take the shortcut, entailing as it did a thicket of bamboo. Rats live in bamboo. I hate rats. It looked damp and it looked scratchy. I was already scratchy. I had given up my one free afternoon to go on a school trip to the zoo. I don't much like zoos. They make me sad, uneasy about the imbalance of power between us and animals. Anyway, there I reluctantly was, helping to herd a wiggly-waggly line of children back up the hill to school, when the teacher, bright and young, suggested the shortcut, and because I did not want to appear churlish I said: Great! So in she and a small group of girls went, and out they promptly came again. It's too dense, she said. It's too hard, said the girls. Shame, said the parent helpers with thinly veiled relief. C'mon kids, we said, resuming our march. A posse of boys ignored us though and charged on in regardless. Stop, we said. Come back now. But, rampaging through the bamboo, they were deaf to our pleas.
I might have put it down to some natural male impulse. Boys will be boys! However, I have just finished reading the cross-dressing British artist Grayson Perry's book The Descent of Man, in which he argues much of what is wrong with the world today can be traced to the hegemony of outdated models of masculinity. It suits us, he says, to believe gender is somehow influenced by our genes, no matter how little scientific evidence there is to support this, because it lets us off the hook as parents, as teachers, as a society. "We love to think that boys are naturally more physical, less well behaved, more stoic," he writes, when, in reality, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are all guilty of conditioning them from birth to act like "men". I read this a little smugly; yes, maybe, I thought, but that is not how I have brought up my son. Perry doesn't absolve anyone, however, least of all an urban, liberal, middle-class mother like me. Sure, he says, you might be raising your boy as a "free, loving, tender, empathetic, gentle soul," but, if you had to choose, would you rather a son in a tutu twirling a pink fairy wand or a daughter in dungarees waving a plastic sword? In spite of my best intentions; I'd be a liar to say I'd take the "sissy" over the "tomboy".
Karen Walker's latest campaign for her new line of men's sunglasses features the psychedelic pop musician, Connan Mockasin; his platinum hair in a bob, his chest bare and hairy, a pencil moustache above his perfect red lipstick. He is like some kind of distorted Marilyn Monroe. I find the image both unsettling and, if I am wholly honest, unattractive. Although I suspect Mockasin sets out neither to challenge nor to please, but simply to present a version of himself, when I examine my distaste for the ad, I am uncomfortably reminded of my own conflicting ideals and inclinations. That while I want my husband to be soft and gentle, to equally shoulder the burden of childcare, to be a thoroughly modern man, I chastise him for his lack of chivalry, and in the bedroom what I desire most is a show of manliness.
From Trump's long record of degrading women to the online slut shaming of young women, Perry is right that horrific instances of sexism and brutality abound in everyday life. He is right that few of us are as free from prejudice as we might like to think. Despite ourselves and despite centuries of patriarchy, I wonder if change is afoot, whether there is more cause for hope than Perry credits. I think of the teenagers I know whose attitudes toward gender are so much more fluid than my generation's. Of how the children at my daughter's school do not blink an eye at their peer, who, while born with a penis, chooses to identify as a girl. And I think of my son's response when I asked him what it means to be a man. "A global citizen" he said. "A person who looks after the world and cares for it and does his bit."
