Boys and Boas
Written By Barbara Hey
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Firefighter and Spider-Man costumes? So last season. Henry preferred the classics -- feathers and tulle.
In preschool, my son Henry's favorite dress-up outfit was a combination of any or all of the following: pastel blue princess dress, gold lamé skirt, multicolored sequined tube top, pink tutu, and a scarf printed with A Chorus Line tickets, held together with tape and worn as a cape.
While Henry in glitter and tulle made his dad a bit queasy ("What's up with Henrietta?" he'd ask), I saw Henry's precocious cross-dressing as evidence that he was oblivious to the gender rules of our culture, that he'd not yet experienced the full-bore peer pressure that abrades the distinctive sparkle of many a child.
More to the point, he was a boy with an older sister. He didn't realize that unlike his sister, he soon would be facing limited fashion options.
I had pointed Henry toward the boy dress-up path, supplying him with an array of gender-appropriate costuming. His blue cardboard trunk came packed with vests, jackets, and assorted accessories for such pragmatic boy fantasy figures as policeman, firefighter, doctor. All the costume pieces seemed carved from plastic -- thick and unyielding, hard edged, outgassing chemicals now probably banned by the EPA. Henry didn't think much of his box of mini manly professional wear.
Meanwhile, his sister Hannah had a stockpile of twirlable billowy formal wear, much more compelling on a visual and tactile level. Her pink cardboard chest was overflowing with diaphanous skirts and veils, pearlescent silky tops and elbowlength gloves, a couple of feather boas, all in shimmering, sherbet colors. Not one real-life-mimicking uniform in the
One afternoon Henry visited the kitchen wearing a Cinderella gown over a navy blue Big Dog T-shirt, fancied up with a bridal veil and one white glove. He headed for the string cheese as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
"Why are you wearing that?" I asked. He ran his hands down the silky folds of the skirt and said, "I like it." Apparently to his 3-year-old eyes it was the perfect snack-time attire. I didn't probe, nor did I get the vapors, because for one, I'd learned most oddities of behavior pass without intervention, and two, his dad worked at a women's magazine and his grandfather was a hairdresser -- the gender divide was fairly fluid in our family.
And so, Henrietta stayed awhile. Until he was 5 or so, Henry spent an occasional day at home looking like a juvenile drag queen. He never went to school in dressup, never asked to be the Little Mermaid for Halloween, and never gussied up in the company of pals -- only with his sister. She freely shared her wardrobe with her brother/mannequin. Henry liked seeing her all excited at the vision of him in satin, and together they'd bounce on the bed, twirling and preening with a glee that bordered on hysteria, particularly if there was a camera nearby. Their collusion made it hard to discern if he was in a tutu because he enjoyed it or because it entertained Hannah.
She was also his aesthetician, painting his nails in color and glitter, which he did proudly display in public. Henry later told me that another schoolboy had better nail polish -- the only memory of his cross-dressing days he'll now admit to.
As kindergarten loomed, I wondered if I should make the organza go away. I wanted Henry to be true to his inner being, yet it seemed wise to avoid unnecessary turbulence. If a little girl dresses like a boy, she blends in; pants and T-shirts cross all gender lines. But when a boy goes princess, he stands out, and I wanted to prepare Henry for the limits of the real world. Also, in the back of my mind, maybe I hoped Henry would be a "regular" guy -- a boy who barreled through life, got hurt but kept playing, whatever the game. But he's never been that boy. Sweet and cautious, he's never risked going near the ball for fear of being trampled by peers, and at 5, when he heard Stevie Nicks sing "Landslide," he cried uncontrollably.
During Henry's glam phase, I checked with our favorite preschool teacher, Dee Otte, who has an instinct for when to divert and when to ignore an idiosyncrasy. She'd helped me many times (when, for instance, my daughter insisted she would not sit in a circle, but in a square). Watch his intensity, she said: Does he enjoy dressing up like a girl or does he absolutely have to do it?
Now after 15 years of teaching, Otte has seen numerous preschool boys in gowns and pumps. "Most do it because it's fun, or because they think it's funny," she says. "High heels make a great noise when you stomp around in them." For Henry, these clothes were fun.
At the time, I didn't know any other little boys inclined to sequins, but later Henry's younger cousin became Dorothy for an extended period. "It was Halloween and his two friends were going to be the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow," says his mother Diane, who lives in Massapequa, New York. But when Joseph, then 4, saw the Dorothy ensemble, there was no way he was going to be anything else. "He insisted. He wanted the wig, he wanted the ruby slippers."
When he wore the full Dorothy getup to the school Halloween party, the other kids didn't question his costume choice, but a few parents did. "They were freaked out I'd let him dress like a girl."
For months after, Joseph dressed as Dorothy to watch TV, and for an even longer time, he'd squish his feet into the ruby slippers. But then again, "who wouldn't want magic slippers that could take you anywhere you wanted to go?" Otte points out.
I know now that most boys are done with all things froufrou by around age 6 or 7 (and squirm years later when you show them -- or magazine readers -- the photos; Henry, I applaud your forbearance). But at the time, all I could do was talk to Dee, quietly and on the sidelines, and wait.
It was at around age 5 that Henry, and later Joseph, began to absorb the standards for boy behavior, and found other outlets for sensory-gratifying dress-up. Joseph turned to baseball uniforms and clean white shoes; Henry became a Power Ranger.
Henry also shifted to wearing underwear as a hat, another manifestation of imagination that needed to be confined to the home. He began to create his own garments, taping his feet, arms, and hands with layers of colored masking tape that eventually needed to be painstakingly extricated off his body with scissors. Tape and scissors; he'd become a guy, his own kind of guy.
It's a StageBetween ages 3 and 5, boys may don gowns and heels at home or in the school dress-up corner simply because girls' clothes are colorful, sparkly, and fun to touch, says Claire B. Kopp, a developmental psychologist in Los Angeles.
Plus, young children don't see gender as rigidly fixed. A 3-year-old boy may believe he'll be a mommy one day, says Claudia Quigg, director of Baby TALK. A 4-year-old girl may think if she puts on a tie, she could be a dad. It's not until around age 5 that gender constancy -- the realization that one's sex doesn't change over time or as a result of clothing or hairstyles -- sets in.
At the same time, Kopp says, kids now notice how others respond to their actions. A boy may dress unconventionally to see how peers, parents, or teachers react. Sooner or later he'll find his answer and be chastened peer-style with, "You're a boy and you can't wear that.
