new thread
My wife and I were shopping at Khol's after lunch today. I was walking along, minding my own business when I heard the voice of a little girl I had just passed say to her mother, "Mommy, HE can't have a ponytail!" I didn't slow down to hear what her mom said to her, but just kept on going. The kid couldn't have been over four years old, but she definitely was under the opinion that I, personally was off base somewhere. Strange.
Steve
Until all people are truly freethinking you ,I and every guy with long hair will have to deal with this from time to time.
Your hair looks great btw!
Indoctrination is a strong word. I'd say it's more about social introduction. Cultural and social norms aren't something we're born with. We learn them as we grow up. Once we're older and we've been thinking in terms of these norms for so long, they seem natural, and seem like that's the way it's always been. But it's not.
The world is damn complicated, and it's hard teaching kids everything. It takes time. While we know that there are a great deal of different kinds of people, it'd a hard concept for little kids to understand. So parents often boil it down to simple ideas as a starting point for kids. Take the hair example. To get a child to understand the difference between men and women, a parent might tell their child that all men have short hair, and all women have long hair. It's simple, it's easy, and the child will understand. But if the child is confronted with something different, like a man with long hair, they'll be confused. And kids can be brutally honest, so if they are confused, they'll say something like "that man can't have long hair", because to them men are supposed to have short hair.
The best thing to hope for is that when the kid gets older, her parents take the time to explain and make her understand that things in the world are more complicated than simply black/white yes/no.
Terry
High!
When I was about six or seven years old, I myself was not only a victim of that social indoctrination: I remember asking my father about "that women on the ten deutschmarks note" (see above) - and he answered me that also men can having long hair! He himself, by the way, never had long hair and still does not...
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
A similar experience happened to me a few years ago when I was walking along a sidewalk towards a shopping center... I heard some bicyclists approaching, then the mother of 2 children saying, "watch out for the lady up ahead!" When the kids carefully passed me, they both simultaneously turned around and looked at me, and then said loudly to their mother, clearly correcting her, "It's not a lady: it's a man!!"
I just smiled and kept on walking...
I think of it as, "an education" (in real life!) --in other words, you and I, by example, are teaching children that yes, a male can indeed still be a male and have long hair, too!!
- Ken