Real Boys Play with Dolls

By Joel Troxell
Issue 151-November/December 2008

It began when our son was a few months old. We were at the shore for a summer vacation and had found some artsy shops not far from the beach. In one store, my wife, Amanda, approached me, grinning, with a little cotton doll.

"Don't you think this would be great for Nathan?"

"Uh . . . it's a doll."

"Yes, I know. The doll's face doesn't have any expression, to allow the child to use his imagination when playing."

At that, my expression left nothing to the imagination. But because my mother was with us, hell-bent on buying as much as possible for her first grandson, I knew that if my wife wanted it, I was fighting a losing battle. The doll was no more than four inches long, expressionless, apparently genderless, and wearing a sewn-on nightcap that matched his, or her, nightgown.

"I think I'll call him Ollie," my wife said. "Why?" "You know, he's a cute little dolly, and it rhymes: Ollie the dolly. Cute, right?" She seemed pleased at the find, someone else was going to foot the bill, and, after all, we were on vacation.

"Yeah. Cute." I tried to look as expressionless as the limp Ollie in my hand. Nathan was not yet a year old. In the next few years there would be plenty of time to undo this affront to his masculinity. It would mean I would just have to buy him his first BB gun sooner than I'd expected, or start giving him baseball cards and sporting equipment at every religious holiday—even holidays I'd never heard of before.

As the weeks went on, I began a propaganda campaign against Ollie. At every opportunity, I told Nathan that Ollie wasn't a dolly, he—he—was an highly trained, undercover agent of the US military. Ollie was expressionless because he'd been trained to be impervious to all feelings of discomfort. Even in his night-shirt and floppy cap, he was a lethal weapon. Once, when Amanda caught me reeducating Nathan about the dolly—I mean, operative—she said nothing more than, "Aww, is Daddy playing with Ollie the dolly, too?" My attempts to teach my son—who at first did little more than chew on Ollie—about the doll's true nature and mission were failures.

Over time, Nathan took Ollie with him everywhere. My wife taught Nathan to give him hugs. Hugs! I figured hugging was something a boy stopped doing when he went to kindergarten. I'd stopped willingly hugging my own dad before my first day of school, and didn't resume any such overly emotional father-son displays until after I was married. I assumed that being a guy was all about being tough and strong. Women were supposed to be sensitive nurturers who bandaged cuts and kissed boo-boos; men were supposed to say it was "just a scratch" and rub some dirt on it. Right?

I grew up in the rural south, steeped in traditional gender roles: Girls played with dolls and wore girl clothes, boys played with trucks and wore blue jeans. I wasn't exposed to anything different until I went to college, where my freshman-composition professor made the class read essays about such things as "," and then respond by writing an opinion piece. When that first semester was over, my roommate and I still left a seat vacant between us at the movies: Real men respect each other's space. Even the chairman of the psychology department, who used his "Introduction to Ethics" class to drive home his views about vegetarianism, nonviolence, and nontraditional gender roles, had to admit to feeling concern at seeing his son playing with a Barbie doll. Despite being an enlightened and educated man, he, too, drew the line at boys playing with dolls.

So I was not a little pleased when Nathan began leaving Ollie on the car's floorboards or under the table. I knew that having a doll was a fad, something he'd later regret—like a spring-break tattoo. But just when I thought I could go back to daydreaming of our son winning college football's Heisman Trophy, Amanda approached me with an idea for a Christmas present for him.

"Honey, I like these catalogs full of natural toys. Do you see anything in here that Nathan might like for Christmas?" She handed me some catalogs that advertised things like play silks, dress-up outfits, wooden kitchen items for "dramatic play," and... dolls. But this time, the dolls were bigger. There were even photos of the dolls being carried around by boys. My daydreams of Nathan going first round in the NFL draft were replaced by disturbing images of him walking across the stage at graduation, sucking his thumb and carrying his dolly.

"I like the wooden toys, but I am not going to get him another doll. I absolutely refuse."