Double standards in speech impediments

In Go Carolina by David Sedaris, he gets sent to speech therapy because of a lisp, and in this process, he realizes that the only ones who were sent to speech therapy were boys who had a lisp, and not girls, or any other kind of speech impediment. It was interesting for me to read it because I was put in speech therapy for not being able to say the letter ‘r’ (I was pronouncing it as an ‘l’ or a ‘w’). My cousin (a boy) also had the same speech impediment and is only a year older than me, but wasn’t sent to speech therapy and was never even recomended for it by his teachers as I was. Thinking back to it now, I wonder if it was because he didn’t have a lisp to make him ‘sound gay’ as that was the reason that boys were put in speech therapy in the Go Carolina story.

I don’t know for certain if I was placed in speech therapy for that issue because it was thought that the ‘r’ mispronunciation was characteristic of being a lesbian or not, but it is interesting how I was forced into it even though my cousin (with the exact same problem) was not. I think it could also have something to do with how he was more inclined to ‘masculine’ activities (in that he played sports and didn’t engage in traditionally feminine activities)  and David was not when he was sent to speech therapy.

At this point in my life I have no memories of being in speech therapy, so I cannot attest to any trend in who was there and who wasn’t (I was in preschool when I was put in it), but I’ve always found it interesting how my cousin managed to avoid it and I didn’t, even though based on Go Carolina, I wouldn’t have been placed in speech therapy if I had been attending the same school at the same time. To this day, my cousin still speaks with that impediment, and even though the men in our family started to comment on it when he got into highschool, I can see how that only affected him a little bit, as he still has the speech impediment, it’s just much less pronounced than it was when we were younger.

Go Cooking!

From a young age men and women are told they are supposed to act a certain way. They can’t do certain things even if it’s something they enjoy. David Sedaris enjoyed doing things that were typically seen as feminine. In order to blend in to society’s norms he had to pretend he enjoyed the typical “masculine” activities. In Go Carolina from Me Talk Pretty One Day he wrote, “Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous.” He was forced to live a double life so he could be a “normal” guy.

            Due to his mention of baking I’ve thought about how society views cooking in different ways. They think of baking as feminine while grilling is masculine. It’s not as if there’s some special skilled involved that makes one gender more suitable than the other. Women can learn grilling just as easily as men and vice versa.

            Contrary to popular belief, not all women know how to cook or bake. For example, people think I would be good in the kitchen and then I prove them completely wrong. It’s as if everyone thinks there’s some sort of intuition of baking that every girl was born with. In the South this idea is pushed even further. A stereotypical “Southern” woman knows how to make a casserole or has some famous dish she makes. All the guys know how to grill or make barbecue for cookouts (and love football; Sedaris didn’t but had to pretend he cared).

            I know that in my family these stereotypes do not exactly ring true. In my house my dad is the chef. He grew up watching his mom homemake almost all their meals and helped, too. Because of that, baking bread or a cake isn’t a hard task. He’s the one with the “famous” recipes.

            My mom, on the other hand, can hardly cooked when compared to my dad. We often joke about it, and I’m probably not giving her enough credit. She can cook a few things. However, my dad taught her almost everything she knows. His cooking was actually a part of what won her over.

            They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but it works the other way around, too. If a guy enjoys baking or something else that’s typically “feminine” I say he should do it or if a girl would do something “masculine” nothing should hold her back. Don’t live a double life like David for fear of ridicule.