Gender stereotypes still fuel assumptions

‘IT’S beyond a joke now, I’m going to have to get a T-shirt printed up.” The Girlchild is 17-and-a-half — an age when girls can look anything between 15 and 25. Her father looks great for his age but evidently still looks a lot older than her. They have always been close — they share a special bond of winding each other up, pushing each other into things, pouring water over each other: the sort of things that are hilarious to them, head-wrecking to be around.

They have just taken that special bond on holidays, where the thing that happens here sometimes, happened all the time, and now he wants a T-shirt.

The issue is that people assume they’re a couple. She thinks this is disgusting, he finds it concerning: “Men my age look at me with a mixture of admiration and envy, women my age look at me with disgust.” If the people happen to hear her calling him ‘Dad’, everything changes, the men’s faces relax, the women’s turn benign, but it is either way an interesting dynamic they observe.

The Boychild is 22. He and I have had only one experience of that, at a supermarket checkout where the young wan clearly could not work out what we were to each other, and her head nearly fell off gawping from one to the other. But though the age gap between Boy and I is moderately smaller than between Girl and Father, and the Boychild could never be confused for a teenager, rarely do people think we are a couple, almost always do people assume they are. I never have to clarify that he is my son, the Ex almost always has to clarify that Girlette is his daughter, and if she is with her friends he has to clarify that it is not a harem. Assumptions it seems, have not yet gone gender neutral.