Crush lessons

What we learn from the first people we "like-like"

Note: This is my first paywalled post - paywalled because it contains personal details of someone else’s life. The kind of sensitive material that, as I wrote in my debut post, warrants a more intimate audience.

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Back when I was working on The Sex Myth, I came across two journal articles that shaped the way I thought about kids and crushes.

The first, by sociologists Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak, looked at the ways that heterosexuality and romantic love showed up in the Disney movies of the 1990s. How even in G-rated films like The Lion King and Aladdin, sexual and romantic relationships are depicted as being of greater importance and significance than all others, through the use of dramatic signifiers like fireworks, soaring music, and spinning pan shots where the characters stare deeply into each other’s eyes.

The second, by Kristin Meyers and Laura Raymond, looked at the peer-bonding role that “crushes” play amongst pre-adolescent girls. How for elementary school aged girls, “liking” a boy - whether it was Zac Efron in High School Musical or a boy in your class - had less to do with the boy himself, than the feelings of giddiness, secrecy, and connection the crush allowed the girls to access. Crushes weren’t just about the feeling of the crush. They were a way of performing gender.

As someone who was deep into thinking about how our feelings and beliefs about sexuality are shaped at the time, these papers were illuminating to me: illustrating how our culture teaches us (and perhaps significantly, given these papers both appear in the femininity chapter of my book, teaches girls in particular) that sexual and romantic relationships are the most significant and exciting relationships, where those feelings of excitement and desire should be directed (towards the opposite sex) - as well as how children begin to play out these ideas long before they actually become “sexual.”

Simba and Nala in The Lion King.

Along with Emma Renold’s landmark 2013 report Boys and Girls Speak Out, they reaffirmed by belief that “sexualization” wasn’t something that happened via Lady Gaga and Rihanna videos but rather via our collective insistence on interpreting every interaction between boys and girls through the lens of (hetero)sexuality.

And then, somebody got a crush on my kid, and I started to think about crushes a little differently.