Faulty fingernails

There's something very wrong with people when a five-year-old Massa-chusetts boy who likes wearing nail polish is so viciously attacked by his fellow pupils that he goes home demoralised and in tears.

Sam Gouveia's father said "Sam was ridiculed for being a boy with nail polish. They called him names and told him to take it off. This lasted the entire day. He was devastated at how other kids turned on him, even his friends."

It seems that by the age of five, most boys have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into the idea of masculine and feminine clothing that something as trivial as wearing nail polish is jumped on as if some major crime has been committed.

If a five-year-old boy wants to wear nail polish, what's the problem? It's not harming anybody, it's not threatening anybody, it's not disrupting lessons. If other boys find it threatening, because it challenges their macho fixations, that's their problem and not his.

There has been similar bullying of boys who want to wear skirts or dresses or long hair or any kind of "female" clothing. The bullying is often supported by teachers quoting the official school dress code.

Surely boys who misbehave, disrupt lessons, and abuse teachers are the real problem, not boys who like to have shocking pink fingernails or floaty skirts? Surely the quality of the teaching is more important than what a boy puts on his fingers?

The idea of gender fluidity may be popular in certain fashionable quarters, but clearly it hasn't caught on with the general population, who still rigorously enforce masculine and feminine boundaries.

Think twice before you dress. The gender police are watching you!

Pic: Sam Gouveia

Pretend boys

In Afghanistan, I learn, it's common practice for girls to be disguised as boys - because boys are more prestigious.

Some girls spend their entire childhood pretending to be boys. Families without sons are often taunted and looked down on, regarded as failures. So desperate parents resort to trickery rather than admitting they only have daughters.

They justify their decision by saying they're just following the centuries-old tradition of Bacha Posh - disguising girls as boys - and avoiding being treated as social pariahs.

They also say that as "boys", their daughters will get experiences and opportunities that girls wouldn't get, thus giving them a better start in life.

But the fact is that they're colluding in a deeply sexist culture that sees boys as superior and girls as second-class citizens denied the same privileges. The collusion stifles any debate on increased freedom for girls and the ending of gender roles.

Criticis of Bacha Posh also point to the damaging effect on girls who feel they've missed essential childhood memories as well as losing their identity. After years denying who they really are, reverting to their true self can seem odd and unnatural.

Social traditions like these can be very powerful forces, maintained so insistently by so many people that they're almost impossible to resist. But someone has to be courageous enough to stand up and say that the deliberate repression of female identity is inhuman and barbaric.

Girls are not merely non-boys. Nor are they pretend-boys. They're fine just as they are - girls.

Pic: Mehrnoush the girl has become Mehran the boy

Boys only

My schooling was entirely single-sex, including five years at boarding school where my contact with girls was non-existent. Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing I've never quite decided.

It meant I was able to focus on my studies without the distraction of miniskirted females checking me out in the corridors and classrooms. It meant there was no feverish competition with the other boys to impress the girls.

But it also meant I had little experience of the opposite sex and how they differed from boys. It meant there was no encouragement to be emotionally sensitive or to be aware of things that boys traditionally reject as effeminate.

So was I deprived or didn't it really matter? Did I grow up unable to communicate properly with women, unable to understand them, permanently burdened with an arrogant, thick-skinned masculinity?

I must say when I started my first job on a local newspaper, I was very bemused by all the women, who were like some exotic species I'd never met before. It took me quite a while to get used to them and work out how they expected me to behave. It also took me a while to get up the self-confidence to acquire my first girlfriend.

Later I moved to London and was engulfed by the tsunami that was the Women's Liberation Movement. I was confronted in every direction by 57 varieties of feminist thinking and demands, and in a few months I learnt more about women than I'd discovered in my first 18 years. Relationships with women suddenly became much more straightforward and comprehensible and from then on I was always acutely aware of the female perspective in every situation.

So no, I don't think my single-sex schooling did me any lasting harm. I guess what really counts is not whether a school is mixed-sex but how intensely you're exposed to the opposite sex and their take on life once you've left school. And how willing you are to embrace it and benefit from it.
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Ah yes, where was I? Jenny and I were on holiday in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. Not quite as scenic or cultural as we were expecting, but we had fun exploring a part of Scotland we'd never seen before.