I read a lot. It's part of my beliefs. Unfortunately, 95% of what I encounter is unreadable. As in, unreadable in its stupidity, meaninglessness and pointlessness. I attribute this directly to the fact that there is no place in this world for the woman with 105 IQ.
Because I complain a lot about what I have to read for this blog, and because I can never do enough for The Madame, I have been charged with writing a post about the stupidest thing I read in the last seven days. The hardest part will be picking only one winner every week.
Hi, I'm Baroness von Jeer, and this is the column my evil overlord of an editrix makes me write every week. This time, I have taken on the agonizing task of discussing this article about a couple who finally revealed the gender of their child, Sasha, at age five.* I have to be honest. I almost didn't make it through this one. The absurdity almost did me in. Ended me. Kaput. I'll spare you the details and the suspense: Sasha is a boy. A boy who wears a girl's blouse and boy's pants as his school uniform because his mother makes him. (And probably because he doesn't know enough to know that he should have picked the girl's skirt and the boy's shirt. It is a much more fashion forward and comfortable combination (poor lamb!).)
His parents support their decision to raise him in this fashion (ironic puns!), i.e., keeping him "gender neutral" for the first years of his life (and blogging about it, no less) with bold and profound reasoning like "stereotypes are stupid". While this may be an accurate description of their line of thinking, such statements do not leave me with a clear understanding of why they experimented on their own child in such a cruel manner. Instead, I feel I gained an insight into their grasp of "stereotypes" and "stupidity" as concepts. (Of course, there's irony involved.)
His parents claim to have let Sasha make his own decisions when it came to clothing and toys, but not without parameters. He was prohibited from such hyper-masculine clothes as cargo pants and skull prints (is this 1950?), and Barbie was banned because, in the words of Sasha's mother "she's horrible" (again with the deep thoughts). I might say the same thing about you, Sasha's mother. Sasha's upbringing was as stifling and manufactured as that of a girl who could only wear pink dresses and was not allowed to play in the dirt.
Unsurprisingly, Sasha's mother has blogged about his upbringing since his birth, never revealing his true sex until he turned five. (I'm sure all six of the people who read the blog were waiting with baited breath until the big announcement.) Through the blog, she would pose questions like, "If someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?". As far as rhetorical questions go, I suppose it's effective, but I would argue that the ensuing discussion would be tainted by the fact that she had already posted a picture of him in a pink swimming costume online.
And then, as if it all weren't enough, Sasha's mom says that (in the context of Sasha's future sexual preference) nothing matters so long as Sasha has "good relationships and good friends." Seems to me that she may have hindered his ability to have such good relationships and good friends. All she really did was ensure that Sasha will be taunted early and often in school.
It would have been better had she doused him in patchouli, put him on a vegan diet and sang him Grateful Dead songs as lullabies. What I am saying is, I would rather she raised him a hippie. That's where I'm at.
-Baroness von Jeer
*I would like to note for the record that this couple lives in the UK, and not the United States of America as one would expect. I rarely get the opportunity, so I am going to enjoy writing this a lot: score one for the Americans. I am sure there are crazies out there trying to do the same thing in like Boulder or Oregon or somewhere, but since I haven't read about them yet, I stand by my statement. I consider it a rare victory in our time.
