"Ma Vie En Rose" and Cheryl Chases's Genital Mutilation Article

While viewing the movie "Ma Vie En Rose," I couldn't help but recollect my thoughts about my childhood. My father, due to his job, barely spent time during the day with me. Instead, I spent most of my time with my older sister and my mom. Up until around the age of 5, I often would play with my mom's clip-on earrings and wear them around the house. My older sister would often paint my fingernails with nail polish and I even once remember refusing to let her remove it even though I had to go to pre-school that day. I even wore a dress once at a family gathering (akin to Ludo doing so in the opening scenes of the movie). All of these things sound very much like things that Ludo did. It is interesting to reflect on my childhood and think about at that age how naive I was. I never thought twice about imitating the things my sisters and my mother were doing. Unlike Ludo though, I did not want to become a girl. Since I was not in school yet, my only friends were basically my older sister and my mother. I looked up to them, so it is easy to see why it did not feel strange to me that I was copying the things that they were doing. This could actually be seen as the case for Ludo as well, since as was brought up in class, he initially seems the most close to his grandmother and mother.

Interestingly, all of this stopped once I started going to school. To me, it seems clear that once I began interacting with other boys my age, indirectly I was beginning to emulate them and all the societal constraints of the behaviors that constituted being a "male." I no longer wanted to paint my nails with my older sister or wear my mother's earrings. I instead wanted to play basketball with my friends or video games. These new activities were activities that society has unfortunately, for many years, viewed as male-oriented.

The movie made me realize the impact of societal constraints on my life and how early they began to influence me. Before pre-school I was accepting of the idea of doing "girly" things with my sister and mother. As a naive child with not very much life experience, I felt there was nothing wrong with a boy doing "girly" things. That was no longer the case after I started pre-school and became older. Clearly, the prevailing societal viewpoints regarding the dichotomy of male and female were becoming engrained within me.

In addition, the movie helped raise several issues not only dealing with identity of a certain individual, but also the social consequences for being "different" and the affects it has on other individuals around the person struggling with society to accept them. These issues were already addressed in class, but it made me wonder what my parents thought about my "girly" tendencies and if they ever felt it was an issue that they needed to address.

With regards to Cheryl Chase's article, I just found it extremely interesting how a clear double standard exists with the issue of intersex genital surgeries. It is ironic that in response to stories about African genital mutilation, Congress passed the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act and excluded exempting surgeries done for intersex individuals. Chase quotes the act as saying that surgeries to " 'correct' " intersexed individuals were excluded. This double standard is quite obvious since the only reasons clitoridectomies are done for intersex individuals are due to purely cosmetic reasons, pressured by societal values, much like the African genital mutilations. In addition, male circumcision, a practice that is commonly done, is tolerated as well because it is done for religious and societal values. There really is not much difference, in my mind, between the clitoridectomies in Africa or ones done in the United States for intersexed individuals or the practice of male circumcision for that matter. If one of those is not tolerated than all of them should not be tolerated since the underlying reasons and motivations are the same in all of the above practices. Chase does a good job at revealing this double standard within our culture and society with regards to these "surgeries."