Girls are different

Bijou and Karen were determined to raise their sons by gender neutral non-sexist anti-misogynist socialization. Their clinical experiment soon proved discouraging. Bijou returned from mommy and me sessions nonplussed.

Given a teacup and saucer, the girls played like grownups. The boys played frisbee. Given toy trucks, the girls rolled them on an imaginary road; the boys smashed them together. She concluded: the girls use the tools for the intended purpose; the boys made weapons.

A generation later, Elizabeth Bea calls me to discuss her day. She talks about friends, her new clothes, her clothes.

I ask about her booboo from a fall.

"It’s better. It hurt but then it didn’t anymore and I looked at it in the mirror and it’s still red and my butt is big and ..."

"What?"

"It’s still red ..."

"No, what did you say after that?"

Michele butts in: "She’s been saying that her butt is big. I don’t know where she got that from."

"I wonder that you wonder."

"She’s only four and a half! It starts so young."

Girls are different....