VIEWPOINTS

February 24th, 2010 | Occasional Contributors

Circle Circle, Dot Dot – Cooties, Gender, and Building Better Relationships
- Brad Perry

Think back to kindergarten. How did girls and boys relate? My own experience is that, overall, us boys got along pretty well with the girls in our classes. The only memorable rift between girls and boys at that age was the dreaded, omnipresent threat of “cooties” - a mythical condition transmitted across genders via touch, but easily cured by tracing two circles and two dots on the forearm of the infected individual (a “cootie-shot” for those of you not familiar with this epidemic). Cooties were basically a way to upgrade games of tag with a richer, zanier context of infectious disease. Cooties were also understood by both boys and girls to be a fantasy – something we created to make recess a bit more interesting.