Raising Trouble

My four-year-old son wonders when he will be old enough to wear lipstick to school.

Vote for worst toy of the year!

"Raising Trouble" has been silent for too long on the absurd hubbub surrounding Brangelina "dressing Shiloh as a boy."

When it comes to gender, members of the media just LOVE reporting with breathless astonishment on research that appears to reinforce conventional wisdom. Sometimes it takes a certain amount of squishing to make it fit said conventional wisdom; cf. coverage of just about every study on daycare's impact on the wellbeing of children. An interesting study presented at yesterday's British Psychological Association (BPA) meeting provides a case in point.

Three-year-old Jim leaned over and gave his four-year-old neighbor, Ivan, a big smooch on the lips. "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" yelled Jim’s dad, making no effort to hide his distress. The kids didn’t seem to notice Dad's outburst, but it’s a message that children, especially boys, hear a lot: "Don’t be gay."

"Why are there no bad guys in our neighborhood?" Ivan asked me recently, after emerging from a movie theater. The previews had presented a full line-up of villains – in 3-D, no less.

Ivan had been trying hard to find some real-life miscreants, wondering daily about the boisterous youth on our block, who do a lot of shoving and yelling: "Are those bad guys?" I’d been assuring him that while these young men could be more polite, they’re not bad guys. Real bad guys are very rare, I always say, but a lot of people do make bad decisions. We can all try harder to be good.

Today I say, "There are a lot more bad guys in the movies than in real life."

"Why?" he wants to know.

"Because," I explain, "the people who make the movies think that bad guys make movies more exciting."

"And they’re right!" says Ivan, triumphantly.

No matter how subtle and cerebral – or in the case of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 tale, wonderfully meandering and weird – the original story, these days, Hollywood will figure out how to transform it into an action movie.

There’s at least one dimension to the Harvard story that I – and the mainstream media – missed the other day. The douchebag angle!

Sex differences are a source of ribald glee around our house. It's gender that's perplexing.