Manly-Pedi: The Argument Over the Boy With Painted Toenails

I got in a big fight with my mother when she signed me up for little league baseball. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to play — she just came home from work one afternoon with a collection of paper forms that made the choice irrevocable. I was furious. I liked sports but hated baseball and was mistrustful of all the book-eyed yuppies in my school who would gather together to talk about stats, scores, and read Beckett’s to chart the value of their Billy Ripken “fuck face” cards. As a 4th grader I felt this was a betrayal of the highest social order, a disturbing piece of evidence demonstrating that my parents maybe weren’t as trustworthy as I’d thought in my potty training years.

I spent my only season in little league under extreme protest. I told my coaches–patient and gravel-voiced 40 year-olds who always seemed to have a box of donut holes in their cars–to “fuck off” during practice. I made a point of walking instead of running during practice, quietly delighting in every “Hustle up, Thomsen!” that I heard on my way to the dugout. After letting me play in one game, during which I let fly balls drop all around, hit a single and decided to keep running to second base because I wanted to make sure the first base coach knew I wasn’t taking his instructions, it was decided that I’d be better kept in the dugout. I liked this compromise and was happy when the coach started sending my to the concession stand to buy him soda and sunflower seeds.

I’d forgotten about this experience until I read Keith Ablow’s criticism of a J. Crew advertisement in which designer Jenna Lyons painted a Crew-branded pink nail polish on her son’s toenails. “This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity—homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such ‘psychological sterilization’ is not known,” Ablow wrote. His arguments are reactionary and easily refuted. Declining one particular habit of Western gender differentiation can’t be taken as a total abandonment, nor can men and women be homogenized simply by rejecting the cultural mandate of pedicures as the exclusive domain of women.

When I was 25 a close friend of mine came to visit for a week and brought me a few bottles of nail polish. We spent an afternoon painting my toenails pink, purple, and sparkly brown. Not for nothing, but I liked it. I have never liked feet and, as is the case for most strong physical aversions, my own feet are the chief offenders of this sensibility. I have long toes, narrow soles, knotty veins, and my feet are unusually prone to sweating. It was unexpectedly pleasant to see these gnarled informers against my desirability all dolled up in pink an purple.

Reader, I confess, I have subsequently become an adherent of toenail painting. For the last 8 years I’ve regularly ornamented the least attractive part of my body with color. There’s no arguing this behavior has been a historically feminine habit, but the reasons for it have never been clear. Decorating one’s body for the sake of being momentarily happy or feeling–dare I type it–beautiful shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of women. Men are conditioned to be as physically inexpressive as they are emotionally stoic. Color is an outward marker of vulnerability and there is no condition less manly than vulnerability.

A survey of men’s fashion is a disappointing reaffirmation of this tepid homogeneity. Go shopping for a shirt and see how many dull varieties of blue, gray, and black you must run through before you arrive at a bright color. Stand on any street corner and take in the costumes of every man you see. You’ll find most men dressed in colors and patterns designed to blend in, to avoid personal expression or attention-drawing.

The cut of most men’s clothes are boxy tents designed to wipe out bodily detail instead of revealing them. Men dress out of a fear that they will stand out. Not reacting critically when someone breaks this norm risks making blandness the unusual behavior rather than expressivity. Thus, wearing baggy jeans and loose-fitting button downs from, ironically, J. Crew might suddenly feel more awkward than wearing pink shirts, flaunting ear rings, and wearing toenail polish without apology.

More disturbingly, Ablow suggests that there might be psychological damage caused by de-emphasizing gender distinctions. This might be true. I don’t imagine it would be easy for a boy to pass through his little league years with painted toenails in most American suburbs. But it seems clear that the people who might inflict real emotional damage, hazing and teasing a kid for decorating his body would be the cause of damage more than the kid with pink toenails. The people who feel entitled to punish an individual for deviating from a consensus that has never actually proven itself reserve the right to castigate and to complain about the conditions that provoke them into behaving like intolerant mammals. This is self-pity of the over-entitled.

And beneath the dopey rhetoric, there is still an unanswered question about what real differences there are between our sexes. We form from the same clumps of cells, even our sex organs show their interrelation at the earliest stages. The uterus and prostate both form from the same cluster in utero, so too the clitoris and penis head. Men and women have a slightly different balance of hormones, but our bodies produce the same essential ones. There isn’t enough kahki in the world to cover for the fact that men have estrogen coursing through their blood vessels. Likewise, women produce testosterone without any help from macho competitiveness.

And for all the seriousness of our own particular gender norms, we’re surrounded by exceptions to the rule. When I lived in Madagascar I was surprised to discover that men paint their fingernails and toenails black and red without any concern. Before that, I spent a year in China where I was happy to discover men held hands with each other with no fear of being considered effeminate. There was no risk of losing one’s credibility in the gender superstructure for being physically affectionate on the way to the soccer field.

Children haven’t yet bought into the same superstructures of imagined meaning that we have, and so they have a dangerous freedom to wear dresses and paint their toenails, not as political statements but as simple experiments. These inevitably revealthat a dress is just a piece of clothing, exactly like every other piece of clothing. There’s no reason that men should always have a seam between their legs save superstition. Imposing adult superstitions on children is the great tradition of the parent. Those who let their children play in the common space between factions risk making fools of all of us for having believed in the distinctions in the first place.

*Images via Termin8er

**J Crew Pants the Seeds for Gender Identity (via Fox News)