Would you have any issue with your son getting a butterfly painted on his cheek?
One set of parents did.
Diana shared this Twitter thread with me recently, in which a face painting artist tells the story of a boy who wants a butterfly on his face, and his parent resists this request, and have him get a skull instead.
I've been thinking a lot about this and trying to figure out why the parents wouldn't allow their son to express himself through a less typically masculine marking of a butterfly.
It's too simple to say that they are explicitly promoting sexism or that they are willfully promoting toxic masculinity, and they are horrible people because there is a chance that these parents are acting out of love.
One of the most effective and insidious ways people made Gay try to be straight was to be convinced that they didn't have a future and wouldn't be loved.
Unfortunately, this strategy worked, as demonstrated in this heartbreaking clip from Rocketman.
This is one reason why the It Gets Better Project was so effective. It proved this narrative wrong and showed young people that there was a future, there was family, and there was love for Gay people.
While we've made progress, our culture is still filled predominately with images of male success, and happiness is based on traditional gender roles: athletes and businessmen. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions. Parents want their sons to be successful, and many of them are just trying to get their sons to the success that culture shows them, which doesn't include butterflies painting on boys' faces.
Raising a son and letting them explore masculinity in gender non-conforming ways is believing that defining their individuality against gender stereotypes will help them learn to love themselves. Not being a traditional "man" in America likely means that you will feel left out, that you feel lonely, and that you have to work harder to find acceptance. Because sometimes it is the choice. Have your son be themselves and not play football with the other boys, or tell them to compromise to appear to have a group of friends.
We need to think about the men who are successful in a different way. We need to look at people like Joe Biden, who demonstrate that success as a man is about elevating others and expressing strength, not through aggression but empathy. We need to elevate men those successful despite their masculine gender non-conformity for more of our sons to be successful because of their genuine expression of who they are beyond the false binary of gender roles. And we need to acknowledge, name, and deconstruct the fears that so many have of the perceived sadness and lack of a future a boy may have if they want a butterfly painted on their cheek by being themselves.
Our sons are destined to be haunted by our unresolved trauma due to the ideas of masculinity in our culture if we cannot break the destructive masculinity.
Our sons can show us how to let them explore their gender expression if we let their joy be a greater guide than our comfort.
And our sons deserve to have the freedom to love themselves and not face the loneliness that is so often accompanied by truly being themselves.
This is all a lot harder to do than it appears, so yes, those parents really should have let their son have a butterfly on his cheek, but maybe they need empathy, more than scorn to understand better how to be better parents.
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