I know what it takes to be a man...

...and I'm only four.

(That title, by the way, is from a Tesla song. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Tesla. Anyway..)

Liv’s preschool class does “special days.” Each kid is given one day to do or bring in his/her favorite things. The boy whose dad is a firefighter had a firetruck in the playground for outside time. Another boy had everyone come to school in pajamas and made English muffin pizzas for snack. Kids have brought relatives, pets, favorite storybooks, toys, etc.

Yesterday was Liv’s special day. She’s big into dancing and listening to music these days (a favorite CD occupies her more fully and for longer than any DVD or OnDemand video she weasels out of me) so she decided she wanted to start her special day with a little dance party.

First, though, she wanted to show off the ballet routine she’ll be performing in a couple weeks for her first real recital, galloping, sashaying and plie-ing in front of the class to “Small World.”

(Quick aside to anyone that complains about the lingering of this song after a trip to Disneyworld. You don’t understand torture by “Small World” until your child practices a dance routine to it. For two months. Several times a day. Every day. Now I can’t even go to Disneyworld for fear of a psychotic episode.)

Then it was time for everyone to dance. Liv chose a rockin’ little number called “Go Wild!” by Milkshake, one of several CD suggestions I stole from Alternadad’s book. It starts slow, and then, predictably, gets wild. And Liv was working the room, saying “wait for it, it’s gonna get crazy.” And when it did, the wild, exuberant dancing you’d expect from a room full of 3- and 4-year-olds erupted.

Every girl was dancing. And not a single boy.

One boy, the fireman’s kid, was all excited to dance when Liv was prancing to “Small World,” and jumped up when “Go Wild” started, then ran and hid in his cubbie when he saw all the other boys sitting, looking uncomfortable. Another, the crazy, long-blonde-tressed son of our crunchiest, hippiest parent recognized the potential freedom of going wild, and jumped around a little, but gave up when he couldn’t convince the other boys to join in. Parents tried to get the recalcitrant boys up and moving to no avail.

I looked around, dancing myself, and thought “Holy shit, does it really start this early?”

And these are the children of progressive parents in a highly liberal city, composters, raw milk drinkers, the kind of people that argue during parents meetings about the number of field trips when people are dying for oil and whether time-outs are too harsh a disciplinary action.

I laugh when my brother-in-law gets freaked out by his son, a few months younger than Liv, trying on a princess costume, and I was disappointed when a friend told me she and her husband told their son he shouldn’t try on those costumes at preschool or the gym’s daycare because he’ll be ridiculed, so maybe I’m naïve. The truth is, I’m less concerned about her occasional exposure to high fructose corn syrup than I am restrictive gender roles.

So, this display of “typical” behavior at so young an age bummed me out.

And it brought into sharper focus a couple of items I cam across last week. The first came courtesy Adrants, which linked to the 2007 nominations for the Image in Advertising Awards from the Commercial Closet Association, an organization dedicated to promoting positive gay, lesbian, transgender images in advertising. The award list includes a category called “Clean-Up-Your-Act Notice,” and among the nominees was the Milwaukee’s Best Light campaign with the tagline “Men should act like men, and light beer should taste like beer.”

CCA criticized this campaign for it’s mockery of men who don’t fit the macho gender ideal. They did themselves no favors in turning my “get-over-yourselves-its-friggin’-Milwaukee’s-Beast” reaction around when they ended each description of the ads offense with some deadpan reference to advocating that girly-men “should be squashed by giant beer cans.” (And Green Giant advocates all farming be done by the giant and tiny mutant offspring of a man and an asparagus.)

I wasn’t through being snarky and smirking about this when I found mention in Salon’s Broadsheet of a study on sexual harassment that tied harassment to adherence to (or divergence from) gender ideals. The article and the study focused on the behavior of women, but it was this line that jumped into my brain:

"She [lead researcher Jennifer Berdahl, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto] calls this phenomenon 'gender harassment' and defines it as 'a form of hostile environmental harassment that appears to be motivated by hostility toward individuals who violate gender ideals rather than by desire for those who meet them.'"

I’ve never really met gender ideals. I was raised by my Sicilian-Irish stepfather, a former wrestler, football player and drummer, and my fear of snakes, lack of coordination and tendency to cry never measured up. We moved around a lot, too, so I rarely if ever had a group of boys to run with, grow with. Around groups of men, I’ve always been a slightly alien presence, a bit too Other, the emotional spaz in the midst of their stolid objectivism.

And, the truth is, sometimes it felt like they’d just as soon see me squashed by a giant beer can.

I can’t really blame the boys in Liv’s class for picking up on this already. Seems the last 15 years are crowded with more attempts to differentiate the genders, from books speculating on their celestial origins to Oxygen, Lifetime, SpikeTV and The Man Show. I'll spare you a rant about "divide and more effectively market to" strategies.

I have distinct memories of dancing like a fool with a friend to a song called “Roly Poly Polar Bear” when I was five or six. Granted, that was the seventies, when disco and a constant supply of sex crafted a different, or at least varied, male ideal. Still, it seemed like it was all about the joy of motion, and it feels like it was before any awareness of what my gender role “should” be.

I wish I believed that space, that time “before,” could be stretched a little further for my kid and her classmates, but I don’t.

I’ll keep trying, keep modeling different ideals and striving for balance. I’m already trying to let go of the fact my girl is going girly-girl and will only wear skirts and dresses and wants to change several times every day, while subtly tempering it with Mariners and Seahawks games, and giving it some Grrrrl edge by playing her (carefully selected) 7 Year Bitch.

But it is an uphill battle when the boys of hippy parents are too macho for dancing before their fourth birthdays.

And, hey, why does it matter? What's so bad about rigid gender ideals anyway?

Oh, wait that's right, the continuum from social anxiety and personal drama to bulimia and date rape.