Helping Our Boys Thrive Admist Skewed Images of Gender and Sexuality

You know that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy spies the man behind the curtain? That's kind of how I feel after reading The Achilles Effect.

After reading the book, it's impossible to miss the gender-oriented messages that are everywhere. Case in point: I had a few minutes to waste before interviewing Achilles author Smith earlier this week. To pass the time, I clicked on Google news. In less than 2 minutes, I stumbled across a story about a new potato chip that's being marketed to males. The bag is black; the product is bold and spicy. And it's going to be launched at a party featuring MAXIM magazines Hot 100 Girls. What does that tell our sons about what men are expected to be?

But there's hope. Parents remain powerful influences in their sons' lives, and there's much we can do to counter the stereotypical message that our boys are receiving from the pop culture. Here a few suggestions from Chapter 7 of The Achilles Effect:

• Expose your sons to TV shows, movies and books that feature well-founded male and female characters. TV shows like PBS's Arthur are a great choice for preschool-aged boys.
• Watch and read with your boys, and ask questions. Try asking your son what he likes about a particular book or TV show. His answer may surprise you -- and it might give you the opening to share your thoughts, or to suggest other books, movies and TV shows that he may like as well.
• Talk about the stereotypes. My boys know that I hate the bumbling Dad stereotype that's present in so many TV shows. I may not be able to control what the TV executives put on TV, but I can be sure that my boys know it's not reality.
• Model good behavior. Make sure your sons see males partaking in housework and childcare, and women playing sports. Maintain a healthy attitude toward food and exercise, instead of obsessing over body shape and size.
• Watch your language. Comments such as "man up" are not helpful for little boys. Boys and girls (as well as men and women) should be allowed to cry and express emotion and vulnerability.
• Teach media literacy. Help your kids see behind the curtain. My kids have become pretty savvy at dissecting the hidden messages of TV commercials. (Have you seen the new Capri Sun commercials that seem to imply that if you love your son, you'll buy Super V? Interestingly, the commercial also seems to imply that moms need to withdraw from their older sons, lest they completely smother them.)
• Create balance. It's OK for your son to play with plastic weapons and trucks. But he might want to play with dolls or a toy kitchen set also. Offer your boys all kinds of toys, and involve children of both sexes in household tasks such as cleaning and yard work.

 Coming up next week: A Q & A with Achilles Effect author Crystal Smith!

I Feel Pretty

My 13- year-old son is wearing my prom dress, a pink, sparkly thing straight out of the 1990s.

For some reason, my Mom held onto that dress for 20+ years. It hung in her closet, unloved, in limbo, for all those years. I certainly never asked her to hold onto the dress; prom, in my memory, was a disappointing event that only drilled home that fact that I was not pretty or popular enough to snag a boyfriend. Maybe my Mom hoped that someday I'd see the dress with clearer eyes, that someday the dress would remind me of a young, happy time. Perhaps she simply couldn't bear to part with a dress that had cost her so much. (Prom dresses aren't cheap, you know.) Whatever her reasons, my son and I both agree that she didn't expect THIS to be the dress's next stop. In the words of my son: "I bet Grandma never thought I'd be wearing this dress!"

He's right, of course. I have four boys. None of us ever expected that dress to see action again. But he's a theatrical one, my 13-year-old. He's involved in music and dance and gamely agreed to play the part of Mama in a lip sync production of "Welcome to the '60s!" When he came home and told me he needed a pink, sparkly dress, I knew just the dress for him. We headed over to Grandma's, grabbed the dress and within minutes of returning home, my pink prom dress was swathed around my son's body.

It fit him. (Well, mostly.) My pink prom dress, the one I wore at age 16, fit my 13-year-old son. The pink satiny material hugs his sides and I look on with wonder. Was I that small as a teen? The dress, in fact, is a little tight on him and he asks how I managed to breathe. I try to picture myself in the dainty dress, the dress with a small, narrow waist which opens into a full skirt. I don't recall feeling dainty in the dress. I recall feeling ugly and out-of-place.

For 20+ years, I have recoiled at pictures of myself in the dress, have slammed shut the closet door every time I stumbled across the dress at Grandma's, because the dress served only as reminder of my physical unattractiveness. How could I have chosen such an ugly dress, I wondered?

But now that the dress is back in service -- draped over seat of my van, hanging from my kitchen cupboards, hugging the not-at-all fat body of my son -- I see that the dress is not ugly. It's actually quite pretty: a lacy skirt overlaying pink satin; a wide, pink sash at the waist; a bosom decorated with tiny irirdescent beads. And from this perspective, I'm willing to acknowledge that maybe I wasn't ugly then either. If I could fit into that dress at age 16 - and fill it out in ways that my 13-year-old will never be able to -- clearly, I wasn't as large or ugly or ox-y as I once thought. I look at the dress now and shake my head at the sadness of it all. For 20+ years, I thought my 16-year-old self was ugly. It took my 13-year-old son in a dress to show me my errors of perception.

Fellow writer Dara Chadwick, author of You'd Be So Pretty If..., argues that moms of boys need to be just as concerned about girls' body image issues as moms of daughters. "Healthy self-esteem and self-respect are the foundation for healthy relationships," Chadwick wrote on her Psychology Today blog. "When girls don't feel good about who they are or the bodies they live in, they somtimes act out in unhealthy ways...And they're often not alone in this acting out behavior: our sons are with them."

It's taken 20 years -- and my son in a dress -- for me to even realize that I had body image issues as a teen. My goal now, as a mother of boys, is to make sure my boys see the person behind the dress, not just the dress or the pretty figure.