PRAISE FOR FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

‘Brilliant . . . it makes me want to chain myself to a barricade.’

Tracy Spicer, Sun-Herald
‘Clementine Ford was put on this earth to give courage to the
young girl inside all of us. This is an exciting, essential book from
Australia’s most fearless feminist writer.’ Laurie Penny, author of
Unspeakable Things
‘I’m going to come right out and say it: Clementine Ford’s Fight Like
A Girl should be required reading for all young women in Australia
. . . Reading Fight Like A Girl reignited my feminist fire, my feelings
of frustration . . . Yes, Fight Like A Girl will make you angry. It will
make you feel uncomfortable. But, ultimately, it will inspire you to
create change.’ Marie Claire
‘Clementine is furious and scathing when she needs to be, yet
compassionate and encouraging every moment she can be. This
book  is both a confirmation of sisterhood and a call to arms.’
Bri  Lee, author of Eggshell Skull and co-founder of Hot Chicks
with Big Brains
‘Fight Like A Girl should be required reading for every young
man  and woman, a  brave manifesto for gender equality, harm
minimisation and self-care.’ Claire Wright, The Australian
‘Fight Like A Girl opens our eyes not just to the overt and the
horrific, but to the insidious, the unspoken or the disguised sexism,
urging us against the habit of just making a commitment to equality
and then going about our days beneath inequality’s umbrella.’
Katherine Brabon, The Age
‘Australian feminist Clementine Ford is never one to shy away from
combat or controversy, and her first book, Fight Like A Girl, is
a fierce and personal call to arms in the campaign for women’s
rights . . . Fight Like A Girl is an important book for Australians
young and old, and for burgeoning activists.’ Stephanie Van Schilt,
The Australian
‘. . . a potent mix of memoir and manifesto, equal parts fierce and
friendly; an intimate, witty self-portrait and a rousing call to arms
for women everywhere to know their rage, own it, wear it and
channel it into fighting for change.’ Sydney Morning Herald, The
Age and Canberra Times

‘Fight Like A Girl is fuelled by Ford’s clear-eyed defiance and refusal

to compromise, and by her powerful combination of personal testi-
mony and political polemic. In the vein of Caitlin Moran’s How to
be a Woman or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist.’ Books + Publishing

‘It’s a call to action but, more importantly, it’s a call to reason.

A must-read for all women.’ Fashion Journal

‘Brutally honest and unapologetic . . . Ford tackles society’s double

standards and contradictions, tackling these head-on like a fearless
heroine . . . Fight Like A Girl is a feisty call to arms for modern
women . . . Keep on fighting the good fight, Clem, so that one day
we may all enter the ring with you.’ The AU Review

‘Clementine Ford was one of my very first formative feminist influ-

ences, initiating me into the world of feminism. She is someone whose
tenacity and fearlessness I admire greatly, and she helped me along
the path to becoming the humourless, bitter, lesbian feminist I am
today.’ Rebecca Shaw, writer, SBS and WomanAgainstFeminism@
NoToFeminism

‘Though casual in tone, Fight Like A Girl is persuasive and con-

fronting . . . you finish the book angry—and rightly so . . . It reminds
readers to be angry, because there is a lot to be angry about. It is
a launching pad into a world of intersectional reading, and more
specific advice on how to rock the status quo.’ Lip Mag

‘Never did I realise I held so much rage against the devaluement of

women until reading Fight Like A Girl . . . Confronting, immersive
and influential.’ Diva Book Nerd
‘Ford’s writing is explosive, hilarious and incredibly accessible without
dumbing down the big theoretical issues too much . . . perfect for
teenagers . . . it’s essential that boys read this kind of stuff too.’
Readings.com.au

‘Make no mistake; Clementine Ford is a change-maker. She’s

undoubtedly responsible for introducing feminism to a generation
of women who couldn’t quite get behind their mothers’ Germaine
Greer adoration . . . and this book will do the exact same thing
for a lot of people. It will make them question everything, even
themselves—men and women, boys and girls, non-binary—there is
something in this book for everyone.’ Alpha Reader

‘Fight Like A Girl is a manifesto like no other . . . reading this

book was like finding a new friend to talk about feminism with.’
In Words and Ink

‘A beautiful, bittersweet journey to self-acceptance. A companion to

all those still seeking to forge a sense of self. Clementine Ford has
always been a bastion of shamelessness in a world that would rather
see her defeated, and her book is a testament to the commitment
she has to living fearlessly. I am comforted daily by her presence in
the lives of young Australians, and I’m beyond thrilled that we now
have her unique brilliance committed to these pages.’ Caitlin Stasey,
actor and creator of Herself.com

‘As a feminist writer, Clementine has placed great importance on

establishing and maintaining a strong connection with the women’s
services sector, and to those who do the work supporting women
experiencing male violence. The women’s services sector places great
value on Clementine’s writing, and that the relationship is mutually
beneficial really speaks to Clementine’s values. The past few years
have been a watershed for the elimination of violence against women
in Australia, and Clementine’s voice has not only been instrumental,
but has taken up a mainstream space that has aligned with and
reinforced the efforts of the women’s services sector. We love her
for that.’ Ada Conroy, family violence worker
First published in 2018

Copyright © Clementine Ford 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of non-original
material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful,
the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia


ISBN 978 1 76063 233 5

Set in 11.25/17.2 pt Sabon LT Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

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The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
C009448 management of the world’s forests.
 AUTHOR’S NOTE

Readers should be advised that this book contains detailed

references to homophobia, transphobia, men’s violence against
women, online abuse and misogynist harassment. There are
detailed descriptions of rape and assault. Please go gently if you
are likely to be triggered by these things.
There is a much larger discussion to be had about the impact of
the gender binary in regard to our understanding of ‘masculinity’
and ‘femininity’. I encourage readers to seek out the work of trans
and gender diverse writers with lived experience of this, and to
continue to seek out the voices of trans and gender diverse people
within feminism and social justice. Please note that this book is
largely about the harm wielded by cissexist, heteronormative ideals
of masculinity and, as such, much of the broader discussion of
‘men’ in this context is referring to cisgender men who are for
the most part white and heterosexual.
A brief note for readers unfamiliar with some of the terms
found within:

xi
 Boys will be boys

Transgender: The word applied to people whose assigned sex at

birth differs from their gender identity. Please note that gender
non-binary trans people may not identify as male or female at
all, or as one or the other only some of the time.

Cisgender: The word applied to people whose assigned sex at birth

accords with their gender identity. For example, I am a cisgender
woman who was assigned female at birth and who identifies as
a woman.

Cissexist/Cisnormative: The presumption that cisgender experi-

ences are superior or standard, and the discrimination directed
towards trans people and issues because of this.

Heteronormativity: The presumption that heterosexual experi-

ences are superior or standard, and the discrimination directed
towards queer people and issues because of this.

Cis-het: Shorthand for someone who is cisgender and heterosexual.

Disabled person (as opposed to person with a disability): I follow

the lead of the disability activists I know who subscribe to the
social model of disability. The social model dictates that people are
disabled not by their bodies or conditions, but by the reluctance
or outright refusal of a broader ableist society to adapt itself to
their needs.

This book is not meant to be a definitive guide to toxic masculinity

or how feminism responds to it; it would be impossible to cover
everything. Trust me, I have had numerous anxiety spirals about
this! It’s better to consider this book as just one contribution to
a larger conversation. I  hope very much this is a conversation

xii
 Author’s note

that you will keep having not just with me but with your friends,
family and community.

In solidarity,
Clementine Ford
June 2018

xiii
 INTRODUCTION

In 1996’s The Craft (an epic ride of a movie about four teenage
witches who join together to form a coven—shit goes down, people
get hurt, don’t mess with the gifts you’re given etc.), Manon is the
spiritual deity who can be invoked to bestow power on his devotees.
In describing Manon to newcomer Sarah, coven leader Nancy
(played to gothic perfection by Fairuza Balk) says, ‘If God and
the Devil were playing football, Manon would be the stadium that
they played on; He would be the sun that shone down on them.’
The fabricated deity of Manon wasn’t intended to represent
patriarchy (although you have to question why the spiritual being
created as a figure of worship for teenage witches is written as a
male figure—something something male scriptwriters, something
something don’t understand women), but I’m going to steal the
analogy to explore how a system that oppresses everybody by, in
part, reinforcing regressive stereotypes of binary gender can be
continuously unseen even by those oppressed by it.
Like Nancy’s explanation of Manon to Sarah, the concept
of patriarchy is hard to explain. It is especially hard to explain

1
 Boys will be boys

to those people who have either never heard of it or whose only

experience of it is in laughing sarcastically at feminists and all our
LOL TRIGGERED paranoia. Patriarchy isn’t a visible building
that we can walk in and out of. It isn’t a wardrobe of clothing we
can run our hands through, whose fabric we can feel and count
the fibres of. It’s in the air we breathe, the gravity that keeps us
weighted to the earth. It is a language we learn to speak from the
moment we’re born, but it has no pattern of speech, no formal
sentence structure and no written alphabet.
It’s the stadium that the game of life as we know it is played
in, the sun that shines down on it and the grass that carpets
the ground.
I knew there was a reason I hated football.
Some people are resistant to discussing patriarchy or its impact,
because they understand it, not as a form of structural power that
is woven through every facet of our lives, but rather as something
hysterical women whinge about in order to make men feel bad.
But it isn’t feminism or the challenges it throws down to patri-
archy that creates the cultural expectations placed on men that
lead to their self-doubt, to their increased levels of poor mental
health (and the subsequent refusal to talk about such things) or
to the shame many of them feel for ‘failing’ to measure up to the
so-called rules of manhood inflicted on them from birth. Although
the system of patriarchy is designed to privilege masculinity (with
an emphasis on cis-het masculinity), it also demands of men a
conformity to rigid constraints that, depending on their ability
to move freely within these constraints, carries a degree of harm
and oppression.
In her no-holds-barred TED talk on patriarchy and how to
dismantle it, Professor Ananya Roy, a scholar in urban planning

2
 Introduction

and global development, says, ‘Patriarchy also defines the identity

of men. It is as much the enforced script of proper masculinity—
how to be a real man—as it is that of proper femininity.’
Roy’s thinking echoes that of the great feminist and civil rights
scholar, bell hooks. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity
and Love, hooks writes:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is

not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of
all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation,
that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an
individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself,
he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power
that will assault his self-esteem.

I think of this quote often when trying to wrap my head around

the ways in which some boys and men are able not only to cause
catastrophic harm to girls and women as individuals, but also
to collude with each other to perpetrate pack attacks that range
from the mildest forms of sexual harassment (if such a thing can
ever really be dismissed as ‘mild’) to the kind of orchestrated,
ritualistic gang rapes and assaults that have become more visible
now (if not necessarily more common), because of the sickening
trend of filming them and sharing them so that even those men
who weren’t able to join in physically can at least vicariously
consume the humiliation of a woman or women and thus deepen
their connection to the Brotherhood of Man.
It needs to be understood that we are not talking about outliers
here, or people who are inherently evil. Some of them perhaps
are; most of them are just easily led. They may be drunk on the

3
 Boys will be boys

thrill of being part of a pack or too afraid to speak out and risk
the pack turning on them. And if our sons and brothers and
friends and partners and nephews and cousins and fathers and
husbands are all susceptible to a bit of ‘follow the leader’, to
‘getting carried away’, to not speaking up, to laughing along, to
putting themselves and their preservation first in a patriarchal
system that rewards complicity among men—if they are all at risk
of surrendering to weakness and supported to do so by a culture
that refuses to understand the gravity of the problem, none of us
can ever really be safe.

Two weeks before I sat down to write the introduction to this

book, a string of things happened that confirmed to me just how
far we had travelled into the fog of toxic masculinity.
The first was the disappearance and presumed murder in early
June of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Qi Yu. Less than
a week after she went missing, a  nineteen-year-old man—her
housemate—was arrested and charged with her murder. At the
time of writing, her body had still not been recovered.
That same week, a  twenty-two-year-old comedian named
Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered as she walked home after
work. Her body was found in the early hours of the morning on
the soccer pitch of a popular inner-city Melbourne park, less than
900 metres from her home. A nineteen-year-old man surrendered
himself to police a day or so later, after CCTV images  of his
face had been released to the public. Between the discovery of
Eurydice’s body and the arrest of the man charged with her
murder, a detective from Victoria Police gave a press conference
in which he advised people to practise ‘situational awareness’, as

4
 Introduction

if being hyper aware of our surroundings isn’t something women

especially have been practising since childhood.
A makeshift memorial site was established at the place where
Eurydice was found, and an evening vigil was planned to remember
her. That morning we woke to the news that in the dead of night,
someone had desecrated the site with a twenty-five-metre-long
cock and balls drawn in sticky white paint. Emergency service
workers tried to remove it in time for the vigil, but it proved so
resistant to their efforts that, in the end, they had to cover it with
a tarpaulin.
Just let that sink in for a moment. A  woman was raped,
murdered and dumped on a sports field. And in response, someone
chose to draw a giant dick pointing at the flowers that had been
laid to honour her. The actions of a child, surely? Unfortunately
not. The man ultimately arrested and charged was Andy Nolch,
a thirty-one-year-old man from within the comedy community
who had railed against what he saw as the media’s demonisation
of men in the wake of Eurydice’s murder. He later told Fairfax
he had done it as ‘an attack on feminism’.
The same week of Qi and Eurydice’s murders, an eleven-year-
old girl was abducted in Newcastle and sexually assaulted for
several hours by a man in his late forties. When he was finished,
he dumped her by a train line and she walked nearly one kilometre
to get home. That little girl worked bravely with police to identify
her attacker, and a man was arrested less than a week later and
charged. When his name and photograph was released to the
public, I watched as online comment sections overflowed with
astonishment at how normal he looked—as if feminists haven’t
been arguing for all of eternity that predators don’t carry badges
that formally identify them as such. Five days after the rape and

5
 Boys will be boys

murder of Eurydice Dixon, a woman was dragged into a car on

Lygon Street, a busy strip in Carlton, less than two kilometres
from where Eurydice’s body had been found. She was raped and
then dumped at her home. A few days later, two men handed
themselves in to police. They were cricket teammates.
This was one week of high-profile cases in Australia, and I
haven’t even raised the fact that every week approximately two
women are murdered in this country by a current or former
intimate partner. (Indeed, less than a month after this, three
separate women were murdered on the same day.) In the after-
math of Eurydice’s murder in particular, men everywhere fell
over themselves to insist that ‘not all men’ are responsible for
crimes such as these; that, in fact, most men are good, decent,
wonderful people who would never tolerate gendered violence
and would always, always, always stand up to intervene when
they saw it happen.
The truth is very different. Most men struggle to speak out
against sexism and abuse, not necessarily because they’re bad
people, but because patriarchy impacts us all and the pressure to
conform to it is intense. That doesn’t mean they aren’t very good
at pretending. Entire organisations are built on the appeal of
rewarding men for just showing up, festooning them with white
ribbons and bending over backwards to call them champions,
ambassadors, heroes and any other celebratory title you can
think of that effectively heralds men for being basically okay
humans some of the time. Only a few days ago, I read an article
in which a quite famous male parenting ‘expert’ crowed about
how wonderful it was that men had now increased the time they
spent with their children to up to forty minutes a day! Well, hell,
let’s have a fucking parade.

6
 Introduction

This is a book about what lies beneath all of this. It’s a book
about patriarchy, gendered oppression and toxic masculinity. It’s a
book about how gender inequality and the specific kind of ­violence
meted out to women is maintained because all three of  these
things work together to keep structures in place that are harmful
to everyone, but more superficially beneficial than not to men.
It’s not a book about how men are shit. It’s a book about how
the systems we live in allow men to get away with doing deeply
shitty things.

A month before I published my first book, Fight Like A Girl,

I faced one of my toughest challenges yet as a feminist: I became
the mother of a boy.
I often hear from parents that they’re frightened of having
girls in this world. We know what violence can be done to our
daughters, and people on the whole seem desperate to find a
solution to this. (Practise situational awareness!) Curiously, this
search for solutions has yet to include looking at ways to change
the behaviour of boys. Instead, we see general pleas to recog-
nise  the humanity of girls and women by positioning them in
relation to men: she’s somebody’s daughter/sister/mother/wife, so
you must treat her with the reverence with which you treat your
own daughters/sisters/mothers/wives.
But who is ‘he’, the Shadow Man thought to be responsible
for all this harm? Is he a mythical creature who hides in the
cracks of alley walls, emerging only to wreak havoc on the women
who will later be considered naive and foolish for failing to take
their own safety seriously? Is he a monster? A loner? A basement
dweller getting his kicks out of harassing women on the internet

7
 Boys will be boys

because he’s never talked to one in his entire life? A sexual deviant,
a criminal, a sadist?
In some cases, yes. (Okay, except for the bit about living in
the wall.) But in the vast majority of cases, no. These Shadow
Men live very much in the daylight. And just like the women they
victimise, hurt, belittle, betray and wield power over, they also
have familial connections. They are probably somebody’s brother/
father/husband. They are more likely than not somebody’s
colleague, teammate, friend.
In every single case, they are somebody’s son.
And yet, we never hear anyone say that they’re afraid of having
a son in the way that they fear having a daughter. Why? Why
are they not afraid of how the world conditions boys to ignore
sexism? To dismiss emotions that are considered ‘too feminine’?
To become macho, to express entitlement, to believe themselves
worthy of privilege and praise just because they have grown up
hearing how special they are? To hurt women, either alone but
sometimes together, because it makes them feel powerful?
Our culture is geared towards privileging boys. They are
supported to be our leaders, our bosses, our CEOs, heads of
households and legislators. Indeed, the world we live in has been
designed by men with the purpose of elevating them to (and
keeping them in) power. The patriarchal system under which we
all labour is designed to uphold this power while punishing those
who challenge its existence in any way. Within this structure, boys
are given the space to unfurl and grow, to creep further and further
outwards, while girls are forced to retreat ever more inwards.
Every excuse is made for boys to allow them to continue on
this path to greatness, even as it creates a rigid blueprint for what
masculinity and its inscribed power is supposed to look like.

8
 Introduction

Because everyone knows what boys are like. They’re rambunctious.

They like to roughhouse and fool around. Boys are drawn to
adventure. As children, they like dinosaurs and toy guns and
clothes emblazoned with cars. They have no such thing as an inside
voice, preferring instead to roar wherever they go. Boys are messy
and boisterous, barrelling through the world with an admirable
lack of restraint. Here comes trouble! Trouble is their middle name!
Boys take care of each other. They have each other’s backs.
They look after their mates. Mateship is very important to boys.
Boys don’t cut each other’s lunches. You don’t go after your
mate’s missus and you aren’t allowed to date their sister unless
you get permission. Boys respect each other’s property, especially
when they’re married to it or share the same DNA. Boys respect
each other most of all, and close ranks against anyone else who
threatens that. Don’t dog the boys.
Boys like girls. They tease and hit girls because they like them
so much, pulling their hair and pushing them around in accordance
with the strength of their crushes. Boys are red-blooded. They
go after what they want. They can’t help themselves. Girls have
to be on their guard around boys. If girls fail to take the proper
precautions to keep themselves out of harm’s way, they only have
themselves to blame. Boys don’t mean to hurt girls. They just lose
control. They make mistakes. Hasn’t everyone made a mistake
at some point in their life? They don’t deserve to have their lives
ruined over it. Boys have promising futures. They shouldn’t be
punished for a lapse in judgment, an action that was entirely out
of character. Where was the girl in all this? Doesn’t it take two
to tango? Shouldn’t she have been more careful? She should have
known what she was getting into, dealing with a boy. It’s not as
if we don’t know what boys are like.

9
 Boys will be boys

Boys will be boys, after all.

The kind of boyhood that’s codified by mainstream cis-­
normative western society is not an innate state of being. Boys
can and will be many things, but what the boys in our world are
currently conditioned to be as a rule is entitled, domineering,
sexist, privileged and, in all too many cases, violent.
We have the power to change that.
In Fight Like A Girl, I took a phrase that’s commonly used to
denigrate girls and repurposed it as something more powerful. My
intention with this book is to do the same but in reverse—to take
hold of a common sentiment that’s bandied about without thought
and expose just how damaging it is for everyone, boys included.
Boys Will Be Boys takes aim at toxic male spaces and be­
haviours that are used to codify male power and dominance, but
that also secure protection from the consequences of them. I’ve
looked at how gender inequality is first learned in the home and
then filtered down through pop culture, and how this provides
the perfect launching pad into even more damaging practices
later on—the embrace of online abuse, rape culture, men’s rights
baloney and even the freezing out of women from governance
and leadership.
Of course, there are people who are reluctant to unpack this
reality. There’s a prevailing belief that toxic masculinity is little
more than laddishness. That it’s part and parcel of what it means
to be a man. But I think we should all be deeply concerned about
allowing masculinity to be constructed in such a dangerous and,
above all, lazy way.
As the mother of a boy, I  don’t believe that he’s incapable
of controlling his impulses or distinguishing between right and
wrong. And as a citizen of the world, I don’t accept that this is the

10
 Introduction

best we can offer to boys and men. Why is the perceived freedom of
boys to exert their power over space, bodies and society considered
so much more important than the dignity and humanity of those
harmed in this process, including the boys and men unable or
unwilling to collude in this power?
One of the many benefits that will come from dismantling
patriarchy is the liberation of boys and men from its grip. Boys
are not born with a disdain for girls or for the parts of themselves
that are coded as feminine. The unapologetic, unselfconscious
desire for affection and tenderness that pours out of little boys
is not a gift given to them by nature to be enjoyed briefly before
receding against the grain of their growing limbs. Society forces
this tenderness out of boys in the same way it punishes forthright-
ness in girls, rebranding them as ‘sissy’ and ‘bossy’ respectively.
As hooks says, patriarchy and its insidious messaging teaches
boys to kill off the emotional parts of themselves, but if we as
their protectors do nothing to stop this then we might as well be
handing them the knives.
Very few people seem to worry about boyhood, because it’s
far easier to frame the real concern as lying with their counter-
parts (who are always seen as the reflection of boys, rather than
individuals in their own right). Fathers of girls joke about erecting
force fields around them, sitting on porches with shotguns to
scare off any boys who come sniffing around. ‘She can date when
she’s thirty-five!’ they holler, because of course they know ‘what
boys are like’. When stories of sexual harassment or assault hit
the news or even arise in conversation, the same men who once
upon a time turned away as they saw it happening or perhaps
even participated in it themselves now respond with declaration:
‘As the father of daughters . . .’—because of course his ownership

11
 Boys will be boys

of a young girl has enabled him to see her as a human being

instead of a conquest.
Everyone’s afraid that their daughters might be hurt. No one
seems to be scared that their sons might be the ones to do it.
This book took me a year to write, but it is the culmination of
many years of writing about power, abuse, privilege, male entitle­
ment and rape culture. After all that, here’s what I’ve learned:
we shouldn’t just be scared. We should be fucking terrified.

12
 1

IT’S A BOY

Roughly halfway through my pregnancy, I turned up to a clinic in

Melbourne for my second trimester morphology ultrasound. It’s
a fairly standard procedure, the purpose of which is to determine
that the foetus is growing and developing as expected. Among
other things, your sonographer will examine the foetus’s head
and brain, heart, kidneys, bladder, stomach, spine and limbs,
including their hands and feet.
Oh yeah, and whether they have a ding or a dong.
As I very quickly discovered once my pregnancy became
obvious, one of the first questions asked of expectant parents is
whether or not they know the sex of their baby. While there’s
nothing consciously nefarious about this enquiry, the subtle motiv-
ations for it are worthy of critique. Forming an idea of something
or someone may well be a natural part of connection, but one of
the first ways we’re socially conditioned to imagine the outline
of a person is by assigning them a gender.

13
 Boys will be boys

As such, ‘gender reveal parties’ have been growing steadily more

popular alongside the rise of social media. Expectant parents can
now use Pinterest to source inspiration, Instagram and Snapchat
to upload photographs, Facebook to share the results with friends
and YouTube to try to land themselves some sweet advertising
coin and a spot on Ellen. Why do they do it? Well, it seems that
no matter how many conversations are being had around the
complexities of identity (not least of which is that no test can
determine gender, only biological sex characteristics—and even
that has some wiggle room), the rush to assign babies to a rigid
category of blue or pink persists. On arrival, guests may be asked
to cast a vote for either of those colours, because nothing says
welcome to the world like having a roomful of Saturday-drunk
strangers take a punt on your junk. After the bets have been cast,
typical reveals include things like cutting into a cake to discover
a pink or blue interior, smashing piñatas to be showered in pink
or blue bonbons or opening a box to release a bunch of balloons
in—you guessed it!—either pink or blue.
If the idea of gathering your closest friends and family to
cele­brate your child’s genitalia isn’t disconcerting enough, the
dominant themes of such parties should flip your nausea switch.
A  cursory search on Pinterest (the go-to site for DIY party
planning, interior decorating and basically anything else that
is guaranteed to look worse when mere mortals try to copy it)
highlights such grotesque hits as ‘Wheels or Heels’, ‘Touchdowns
or Tutus’, ‘’Staches or Lashes’ and, sickeningly, ‘Rifles or Ruffles’
(with ‘Guns or Glitter’ being a variation on that theme). Personally,
I cannot fathom what kind of strange vortex you’d need to live in
to think it was appropriate to enthusiastically connect an innocent
little baby with a fucking gun, but I’m wacky that way.

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Let’s just get something out of the way, because I’m aware
that critiquing cultural practices like this can sometimes feel like
a criticism of an individual and their worth. Some of you reading
this may have hosted your own version of these parties or may
be planning one for when the times comes. You might feel a little
defensive about the fact I’m deriding something you consider to
be just a bit of light-hearted fun. It’s okay. I’m not calling you
a terrible person or questioning your taste (I listen exclusively
to musical theatre and used the opportunity of turning thirty-
five to  freely embrace wearing socks with sandals, so I am in
no position to judge). What I’m suggesting is that your impulse
to assign meaning to something as arbitrary and functional as
genitalia is born out of a cultural imperative to affix labels where
none are necessary, and that individual participation in these
rituals enforces a larger pattern of collective gender stereotyping
that ultimately proves harmful for everyone. You are not a bad
person (probably), but you are doing a bad thing.
But why are gender reveal parties bad? you might be wondering.
Isn’t this just a case of feminism going too far (again!) and ruining
everything for everyone in the entire world?
First, let’s talk about the concept itself. Gender is neither
fixed nor tangible. It cannot be seen and categorised as easily
as genitalia, though the two are so often assumed to be one and
the same. The characteristics we associate with biological sex—a
chromosomic make up of XX or XY, for example—might be
indicators of certain hormonal probabilities within the body, but
they no more define gender than wearing pink skirts or blue ties
do. Assigning gender based on what we assume to be the visible
indicators of chromosomal sex characteristics (vaginas with XX
chromosomes = girl; penises with XY chromosomes = boy) is

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 Boys will be boys

therefore not just a guess at best, it also perpetuates the trauma

experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people born
into a cis-normative world.
Then there are the multitude of biological possibilities that
contradict the idea of biological sex itself being the ultimate arbiter
of whether or not your child will be declared a ‘touchdown’ or
a ‘tutu’ and gifted either guns or glitter. An intersex child may
present with biological and anatomical sex characteristics tradi-
tionally considered both male and female, but still identify as a
single gender. Is their chosen gender any less authentic because
their biology is more colourful than it is straightforward?
That’s before we take into account the fact that even when
sex characteristics and genitalia present in a way considered
biologically common, there’s still little we can determine about
gender identity from either. If we can understand that biological
discrepancies may create circumstances that complicate how
society might traditionally assign sex, why is it so difficult to
understand that gender may equally be felt and understood as
something separate to the way our down-theres look?
So back to the concept of the gender reveal party. Aside from
being a manifestation of capitalist ideals and the showcasing of a
certain kind of individual affluence (seriously, how many parties
are people entitled to throw to celebrate something that basically
only impacts their own life?), the whole premise of a ‘gender
reveal’ is flawed, cis-normative and, if you consider how dodgy
it would be to sit around with our friends and discuss the junk
of born children, also kind of unethical. Parties like this should
really be called ‘genitalia reveals’, because they invite a community
to assign an entire identity to an unborn child on the extremely

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basic and arguably deceptive premise of what those children are

still in the process of growing between their legs!
Personally, I  like my friend Dev’s idea. Invite your friends
around for a big bash and have them place bets on the following
themes: ‘books or books’, ‘balloons or balloons’, ‘ice cream or
ice cream’, ‘shoes or socks’, ‘yellow or green’, ‘Angel or Spike’.
Bake a cake and dye the inside of it neon green. Make a piñata
in the shape of the renowned philosopher and gender theorist
Judith Butler and fill it with birdseed. Open a box to release a
flock of parrots all trained to squawk, ‘GENDER IS A SOCIAL
CONSTRUCT!’
You might be laughing, but I’m 100 percent serious. Especially
about the Judith Butler piñata.
These kinds of ceremonies might seem harmless to you, and
maybe on a superficial level they are. After all, the baby chilling
out in the human hot tub doesn’t know or care about the effort
being put into deciding what kind of clothes they’re going to be
gifted for the next three years. But that’s not really the point.
The unborn baby doesn’t have an opinion about these things
because they aren’t yet aware of social conditioning, nor have
they been exposed to it. It’s all the people around them who’ll be
responsible for policing that in their formative years, and gender
reveal parties are an open invitation to let them begin straight
away. It might seem like a cute joke to compare hair bows (a
girl!) to bows and arrows (a boy!), but line all those choices up
against each other and you’ll see just what kind of picture it
paints about how we collectively view girlhood and boyhood.
Girls are heels and lashes and bows and tutus. Boys are cars and
touchdowns and arrows and rifles and guns. Girls are expected to
be pretty and delicate, boys are supposed to dominate and destroy

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shit. This isn’t just a totally fucked-up way to define humans—it’s

also deeply unimaginative.
An unexamined view of gender that perpetuates stereotypes
such as these isn’t harmless, nor is it passive. Rather, it underpins
the very structure of gender inequality. It’s impossible to examine
the conditioning that leads boys and men to exhibit some of the
more harmful aspects of the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality later on
in life without critiquing the mindset and practice from which this
evolves. If we weren’t so invested collectively in policing a binary
vision of gender and the limited ways those who sit on either side
are encouraged (and in some cases forced) to express themselves,
we wouldn’t need to ostentatiously announce to anyone—let alone
an entire backyard full of people—what category of child we were
preparing to welcome into our lives.
If genitals and chromosomes and gender identity are essentially
non-reliant on each other (even if they still often work in tandem),
how in the heck can they be used as a blithe explanation when
boys behave badly? It isn’t the state of being a boy that prompts
aggressive or sometimes criminal behaviour, because there’s no
such thing as a universal boy. When people chuckle and dismiss
bullying or aggression as a simple case of ‘boys being boys’, they’re
not only maintaining a particularly one-dimensional idea  of
laddish masculinity, they’re also diminishing the authenticity
of boys who cannot or will not perform this version of boyhood.
After all, what happens to the boy who prefers glitter to guns?

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