About five years ago, I asked my sister what my nephew might like as a present for his second birthday. ?Anything with wheels on it,? she said with resignation. ?He?s obsessed with cars and trucks.? I had seen (and, let?s be honest, pitied) stroller-pushing mothers standing at the edge of construction sites, their young sons excitedly tossing up their dimpled hands at the sight of a bulldozer, summoning the awe of an Egyptologist first beholding the Pyramids of Giza. But I dismissed this boys-like-cars trope as outdated, unfeminist cliché. If boys love trucks, I assumed, it?s a learned behaviour, a general?and worse, a generalizing?social construct and bias. I concluded smugly (and, in retrospect, naively): if boys love trucks, it?s because they are taught or encouraged to love them. So I rejected my sister?s gift suggestion and bought my nephew a lovely tiny toy mouse from a Danish company?the mouse, petite and refined, came in a box (serving as his tiny bed) and slept on a pillow the size of a cotton ball. My nephew, I later heard, did love the mouse. But the love affair was (as they often are) brief. This one lasted about 45 seconds, at which point he tossed the mouse aside to play with his toy fire truck. Still, I persisted, with the superiority of the childless: surely my own offspring, regardless of sex, would favour a lovely Scandinavian toy over a Tonka.
And then I had a son.
What has struck me is not that the clichés have proven true, but how true, how stark the ...