One of the arguments people often make about gender is “I had a kid, and I never treated him/her at all differently because of her/his sex, and yet look how little Brad loves playing with toy guns/little Janet loves wearing dresses!” This argument was even used by soon-to-be-former Harvard President Larry Summers in his famous (or infamous) 2005 speech:
So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something.
I’m sure that there are some little girls who are totally femme, and some little boys who are totally butch. But my bet is that most kids fall somewhere in between, and adults then pick out from a range of available traits to illustrate whatever gender storyline they’re already inclined to believe in.
Sydney’s Traits That Prove Girlhood is Innate
* Instinctive attraction to “my little ponies.”
* Adorably affectionate with baby sister – she strokes Maddox’s cheek, kisses her head, and so on.
* Likes mermaids and barbies (and mermaid barbies).
* Likes Dora.
* Physically very pretty.
* Like to cuddle.
* No interest in trucks at all.
* Likes having her nails painted.
Sydney’s Traits That Prove Boyhood is Innate
* Likes dinosaurs. Likes waving them in the air and saying “grrr!”
* Loves pirates. In Sydney’s view, pirates are the pinnacle of all culture. Yaar!
* Loves being roughhoused by Daddy.
* If there’s a high place or a dangerous perch, Sydney is there.
* Favorite movie: Monsters, Inc.
* Mad dashes for freedom and independence in supermarket.
* Pretends that a ruler is a weapon (a sword).
* Mostly indifferent to clothing, dresses, etc. But she does like shoes – especially bright-colored high-top sneakers.
At two and a half, Sydney is already a complex person, and she gets more so every day. If she had parents who were interested in gender-typing her (which she doesn’t), there’d be enough evidence points to support a “girls are just naturally girlish” argument. But if she were a boy, but otherwise exactly the same in personality, there’d also be plenty to support a “boys are just naturally boyish” argument.
I’m sure that there are girls who are all girl, and boys who are all boys. But I think most girls and boys – like most of humanity – lives somewhere in the enormous overlapping middle. A lot of the time, when adults look at little kids, they just see a mirror reflecting back their own gender beliefs.
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Right. And if she had parents who were interested in gender-typing her, they would be saying things like, “You don’t want to pretend to be a nasty, mean old pirate when you could be playing My Little Pony, right?” And pretty soon only the My Little Pony aspects of her personality would be front and center, while the pirate-loving side becomes increasingly invisible or disappears.
You haven’t seen “nervous, tittering laughter” until you’ve seen a bunch of ‘educated’ adults reacting to a little boy running around in a swirly skirt.
Stephanie thinks Sydney stole her dinosaurs. Haven’t had much luck persuading her that it’s possible for there to be two copies of a particular toy.
Is paranoid possessiveness a masculine or feminine trait?
My little almost 3 year old female critter loves dinosaurs, roughhousing, trucks of all sorts–especially backhoes, and animals of almost any sort. One of her favorite games is to declare herself or a parent to be a predator (lion, tiger, bat, allosaurus, etc) and the other person involved to be a prey animal (gazelle, moth, triceratops, etc…she always matches the prey to an appropriate predator, possibly demonstrating that we’ve let her watch way too many nature programs) and then have the predator chase the prey (who usually gets away by jumping onto the bed, but occasionally gets eaten which generally involves much tickling and giggling.) I’m a little weak on cultural stereotypes, but I’m pretty sure that these are “boy” behaviors. On the other hand, she’s been known to pretend to nurse her toy tyrannosaurus, which must be a girl thing. When my nephew was her age he liked to stick a pillow under his shirt and go around pretending to be pregnant. Bothered the heck out of my step-mother, but everyone else just took it as imitative play.
At risk of getting declared hopelessly geeky, the thing that bothered me most about the Larry Summers speech was not so much his conclusion as his reasoning (to put it charitably). He took one anecdote and drew a wide conclusion from it. No actual data, no logical chain of thought, not even any real attempt to prove his case with any kind of rigor. Just straight from his daughter talked about mommy and baby trucks to women can’t do science. Well, I think that the speech proved fairly definitively that one man–Larry Summers–can’t do science, anyway.
Can I take a slight tangent here and complain about McDonalds? Often in their Happy Meals, they offer a choice of a “Boy’s Toy” or a “Girl’s Toy’. This always irrates me, even when I think it’s understandable. (There is a difference between something being understandable versus being excusable.) The typical example is their frequent Hot Wheels / Barbie choices. Because of gander conditioning elsewhere in the culture, boys will avoid a Barbie promaotion, and girls will be unenthused about a Hot Wheels promotion. So they are somewhat forced to offer both, in an example of the incidious systems of cultural memes: Even the perpetrators are forced into the system they are perpetrating. Admitidly, McDonalds and Matel are most responsible for and least at the mercy of these particular cultural memes than virtually any other actors, especially working together, but still, I can understand, although not excuse, the Hot Wheels / Barbie thing.
But their current boy/girl promaotion has me completely baffled. The “Boy Toy” is Spy Gear, and the “Girl Toy” is Trolls. Now there is a long history of girl spy novels, there are currently two or three animated TV shows aimed at girls featuring girls as spies, and I have seen at least two different lines of kid’s spy toys aimed specifically at girls. And Trolls are figures that are both ugly and cute that I remember both boys and girls playing with when I was young. So now, I can not even figure out how or why they are deviding their “boy” toys from their “girl” toys.
With the “Hot Wheels / Barbie” thing, I get mad that they are perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes. With this “Spy Gear / Trolls” promotion, I feel like they’re just making up gender stereotypes just because they think its cool to have gendered toys.
As every attentive parent should know, liking Dora and loving Pirates actually stem from the same root cause (i.e., those cute little pirate piggies on Dora.)
One wonders whether the next generation will view pirating as a female trait (and perhaps, animal rescuing as a male trait.)
Decnavda, yeah, I was wondering about that McDonald’s promotion, too. My daughter was totally miffed that my son got the cool spy gear while she got a troll whose whole purpose of being is to have her hair combed. She later incorporated the troll into the adventure game they were playing as “She Who Must Brush Her Hair While Waiting to Be Rescued”. At least she calls ’em as she sees ’em.
My cousin said this:
“Look how Lily eats her veggies! My son HATES vegetables! Must be a boy thing”.
I’ve noticed that parents who only have sons are quick to ascribe all sorts of behaviors to being male, and seem to have some crazy ideas about how girls behave. Passive, calm, uncurious- only someone who has never raised a girl could believe. Like a columnist in the Detroit Free Press a couple of years ago who called a no diving rule at a public pool “anti-boy”. And the mother of a little boy in my daughter’s class who compliments me on how “non-girly” my daughter is, because she likes to run around and play (!!).
Just straight from his daughter talked about mommy and baby trucks
Daddy and baby truck in this case. Odd how his daughter saw nurturing a child as something men do, isn’t it?
Everything that you’re discussing here is pretty superficial and pretty clearly comes down to culture. However, there is real reason to believe that there are differences between male and female brains. The clearest case is in language development, where girls “…speak their first words earlier, and continue on a more rapid course of verbal development thoughtout childhoos.” L. Eliot, What’s Going on in There? p. 434 (This book is a fabulous collection of our scientific understanding of the first five years of life). There have been studies that indicate that parents talk to girls as much as boys (p.381) and that there do appear to be differences in the ways males and females process language (p.382).
Of course, this disadvantage has not prevented men from becoming some of our greatest novelists, poets, etc.. Thus, these differences shouldn’t be used to exclude anyone from any field of endeavour on any level. However, if our goal is equality, this means that in certain cases we will sometimes need to take different approaches in educating boys and girls. In particular, we have to teach boys not to dominiate girls and we need to teach girls that they can rely on their own judgement and don’t need to find a man to lead them (I’m thinking of Dorothy in Middlemarch and my own early dating behaviour).
People who subscribe to the notion that boys naturally play with trucks and girls naturally play with Barbies seem to believe that there were trucks and fashionable clothing around when humans were evolving!
Daddy and baby truck in this case. Odd how his daughter saw nurturing a child as something men do, isn’t it?
One of the feminists who responded to this–was it Pollitt?–argued that you could read this as the little girl exhibiting quantitative thinking using a size ratio with which she was already familiar.
I would take the tattoo thing off the “boy” list… As a woman covered in tattoos, and since I was a girl that wanted tattoos, I think they are not gender-specific. Plus, tattoos are another way of decorating the body like makeup, so it could actually be inherently female.
:)
//Right. And if she had parents who were interested in gender-typing her, they would be saying things like, “You don’t want to pretend to be a nasty, mean old pirate when you could be playing My Little Pony, right?” And pretty soon only the My Little Pony aspects of her personality would be front and center, while the pirate-loving side becomes increasingly invisible or disappears. //
TOTALLY agree with this.
Apparently it’s more profitable for toy retailers to sell specifically gendered ‘boy toys’ and ‘girl toys’ than to just sell toys and let parents and kids decide which they want. I’m not sure why. I blogged about this around christmas-time – I don’t have kids but still get annoyed by all the toys ads I see around that time.
It’s always nice to hear about some parents who are sensible about this sort of thing. I also like that Sydney and Maddox have gender-neutral names. Not that there’s anything wrong with girl-names, I have one myself!
On my Granddaughters second Christmas day she was wearing a tutu, carrying a magic wand, in one hand sitting on her backhoe, wearing cowboy boots and a hard hat.
I’m not sure why.
Same reason as for most category labels – consumers prefer to give their business to companies or brands that minimize the consumer’s sorting cost. You don’t HAVE to be told that it’s a woman’s coat, size 13, blue, etc. But it cuts down on the mental energy you expend finding it if the women’s coats are in one section, ordered and labeled by size and color, and so on.
Not labeling it increases the costs to consumers (picture the harried dad loping through the aisles with instructions to “get a toy for Brendan and another one for Brianna”). He isn’t going to stop at the unlabeled toys and figure out for himself what Brianna wants; he’s going to buy the box with a princess on it.
And I always wondered about the intelligence of a child who cuddled metal trucks and tried to drive their dolls. If I were a parent of such a child I wouldn’t be thinking gender typinig, I would be wondering about how their general knowledge of the world.
None of my children confused trucks or dolls. All of them would, at some point, (even the quietest one) a stick or some such item and pretend it was a weapon. When my oldest was quite young she and her friends would gather on the porch, take our blocks and our barbie dolls (I hated them, but I’m not controllinig when it comes to toys) and use to play with them. These were boys and girls, a nice mixed group. All had fun. I think some of the parents missed their games.
Oh, and btw, most children who play with the Barbies don’t dress them up; how many dressed barbies do you see? Naked most of the time. I think it has more to do with manipulating an adult figure than anything else.
I just think that parents should let their kids play, and leave them alone except for making sure they aren’t engaged in something hazardous.
I get the feeling that people nowadays have more expectation that kids will naturally fit gender stereotypes than parents did in the past. Maybe parents in the past had fewer compunctions about enforcing the stereotypes, whether they thought they were “natural” or not. Whereas now, since that enforcement is more frowned upon, it’s a feeling of relief when your child conforms “naturally”.
Also, there seems to be more segregation of toys by gender than even ~25 years ago, when I was small. It’s weird…
But I’m happy to say that my daughter is delightfully androgynous. She likes trucks, legos, pretend cooking, dinosaur bone puzzles, clothes/shoes (I couldn’t care less about them!), trains, drawing & crafts, and has only recently started liking dolls (Before ~4 yo, she mostly just banged their heads on hard surfaces, and most people would say “oh what a typical boy”… if she’d been a boy!)
School seems to have started having an influence. She acts much more “girlish” around her friends than around us. I feel a constant sense of wanting to preserve her “true self”… but that’s probably a difficult endeavor.
Segregation of toys? How about segregation of colors? Yellow is supposed to be a girl’s color? And here I thought it was just a sensible color for an organism that hasn’t as yet learned to control its pee.
We obviously warped our younger boy by putting him in a hot-pink snowsuit when he was but an infant, no doubt leading to his current fascination with purple (he has stolen from my husband a purple T-shirt, which he uses as sleepwear. The first time he put it on he trotted over to me and started to run a comb through my hair, a sequence of events which no doubt would have caused my sister-in-law’s head to explode had she seen it) and his obsession with dishwashing. And his love of dinosaurs. Or something like that, anyway. I don’t know if books are currently masculine or feminine, but I expect someone will tell me.
Robert, how dim is dad if he doesn’t know a) what his own children might like, or b) how to call up a parent and find out what their kid might like? I’ve never sent a present to a birthday party, for instance, without asking the parent about their kid’s tastes. This obsessive gender-stereotyping of toys is just laziness on the part of marketers who’d rather color a box pink than think.
Robert, how dim is dad if he doesn’t know a) what his own children might like, or b) how to call up a parent and find out what their kid might like?
Pretty dim, I imagine.
Are you under the impression that there aren’t substantial numbers of dim people out there?
Besides, I said “harried”, not “stupid”. Yeah, we could all do a remarkable job of finding the right products if we had infinite time and energy. Do you have infinite time and energy?
I don’t.
The amount of time and energy I have for buying presents for friends of my children, for example, is pretty darn low. They’d be lucky it was a toy, rather than the first thing I found under $10 at Sears. (“Oh…a towel. How, um, nice. Thanks.”)
This obsessive gender-stereotyping of toys is just laziness on the part of marketers who’d rather color a box pink than think.
Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a dogged pursuit of the last possible dollar.
“Lazy” would be putting everything in blank white packages with acres of descriptive text, and asking the consumers to do all the sorting work.
Successful marketers are many things, but lazy isn’t one of them.
that show has 2 female characters and 3 male characters, and Syd’s favorite character is Tyrone. She loves Tyrone. One more for the “boy’s” side.
My girls are big Pablo fans, themselves. Besides being gender balanced, I believe there is only one Anglo (Austin), although sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what “race” a hippo or a penguin is. On the other hand, I’m not sure whether — if I were a black woman — I would be offended by the non-speciated “Uniqua,” which seems like a made up silly black-sounding name.
My son, until pretty recently (he’s 7 now), loved to have his mother put makeup on him. He stopped not because of anything we did or said–we always played along with whatever fantasy he was working with when the makeup was on–but because his interests went elsewhere. Most recently, he got his mother to buy him this way cool pink NY Yankees cap. (Pink is his favorite color these days; he’s been through black and one or two others that I can’t remember.) And he is especially proud of a couple of pink shirts that his aunt bought him. When I joked to my wife, though, after she told me about the hat, that all he needed was a pink pair of pants–I had a pair when I was a teenager that I just loved–and he would be “the boy in pink,” she told me not to say anything to him. Her fear was that he would start agitating for the pants and then he would go to school all in pink and, I am paraphrasing her, “The reality is that he’s a boy and he will be made fun of and we need to protect him from that.” We had a big argument over this, and it made me sad.
The annex of Finnegan’s accross from the library has pirate bandaids! Among other things I want.
I think kids should all wear osh-kosh and tshirts and docs till age … er, possibly 25. Saw a Nova years ago showing how parents and teachers treat kids differntly and weren’t even aware of it. Rewarding boys for making trouble, punishing girls for the same.
And the pirating isn’t gendered, it’s a religion! (The Gospel is out!)
My in-laws are very much the gender-stereotype pushing sort. They have three girls and recently had their last child, a boy. I recall all the “now we can have blue/now we can do sports/etc… comments when they found out he was coming. And, damn, are those girls HUGE on “girl things” or “boy things” to the point of being completely irritating.
I have three boys and a girl. All of them play with a variety of toys indiscriminate of what is a “boy toy” or “girl toy”.
Pirates are awesome, Syd has great taste. When she gets a bit older, if she still likes priates, you should get her this game. As the description says: “who doesn’t like to see a pirate get shot out of a barrel?”
Point well taken. I edited the post, and replaced “tattoos” with using a ruler as a weapon.
Decnavda I can think I can shed some light on the troll being a girl toy at McDonalds.
Disclaimer: I only know this because my 3 year old twin granddaughters visited me for a fun filled week and brought a troll dvd with them.
“They” have re-made the troll doll of our past into a new cartoon series that is definatly aimed at girls.
The dvd I saw was hidious with sterotypical teen girl giggling activity. Their hair is a big part of their fussing and primping. They hangout at and meet at the Mall in every episode, chase boys, and shop a lot. They wear belly button jewels that have magic power, and they practice spells.
I rated the dvd G because it made me gag.
I work in a store with a section for balloons. Parents call in and ask for birthday balloons, mixed colors. More than half specify “no pink”, it’s for a little boy. The mylar balloons are on a big rack. Parents come in and often tell the kids to pick out which ever one they want. We have lots of kid balloons. A number of them are sparkley pink things with winged unicorns and rainbows, kittens, princesses, and such. Others are sports motifs, race cars, trucks, and the like. Every single little boy I have ever seen pick out a sparkley pink balloon, and a great many of them do, has it snatched away from them with a variation of “you don’t want that, that’s for girls”. The balloon is put back and the parents make the kid pick out one the “boy” styles. The kid looks disappointed, some of them cry. One cute little boy who cried because he couldn’t get a unicorn balloon and was forced to get one with trucks was told by his father to “stop your sniveling. Quit acting like a girl.”. Oddly enough, no one ever says they don’t want blue, it’s for a girl. And most little girls who pick out race cars or sports styles don’t get them taken away. They just get asked if they are really sure they want ‘that’ one. I always feel so sorry for the little boys.
mousehounde – oh hell yes, I see this happen all the time too.
It is often slightly more benign, like mothers giggling about what the father would say if they saw their toddler son walk around with a princess book, but sometimes it’s much more forceful and I always want to go up to the parents and shake some sense into them. But then, I generally want to give only sarcastic replies to people coming in asking for “boy” or “girl” books for infants too.
One of the things that strikes me about the “I never treated my children any differently, yadda yadda yadda” thing is the implicit assumption that these children are not regularly exposed to other adults who do fit traditional gender roles. Society is filled with them. Do these children never see a TV program? Do they never play with other children at the houses of those children? Of course children will be heavily influenced by their parents; but the implication that the broader society has no/minimal influence is, IMO, odd.
Yes, I’ve had this stupid conversation myself. My argument, which I did not think was controversial, is that much of the boy/girl dichotomy is cultural. Otherwise sensible people told me that because (for example) their son asked why that man had long hair that lots of behavior must be innate. “I never told him that stuff” was their evidence that it was innate. Like kids never hear things from anyone but mom & dad, eh? How long, I asked, had men been keeping their hair short? It seemed never to have occurred to them that this was a *recent* development.
You can overlook a lot of facts if you really want to, I guess.
Maybe baby boys and baby girls like books that taste different.
Daddy and baby truck in this case. Odd how his daughter saw nurturing a child as something men do, isn’t it?
One of the feminists who responded to this”“was it Pollitt?”“argued that you could read this as the little girl exhibiting quantitative thinking using a size ratio with which she was already familiar.
Yup. Pretty much any act can be read as either “masculine” or “feminine.”
A man yells at someone? He’s being AGGRESSIVE and is acting the way cavemen act when someone steals their prey.
A woman yells at someone? She’s being EMOTIONAL, not aggressive.
Uhh Uniqua is a LADY BUG – DUH! ;) Sydney caught it first, clever girl.
Nonsense. What do the creators of the show know? I’m sure Sydney is correct.
And I always wondered about the intelligence of a child who cuddled metal trucks and tried to drive their dolls. If I were a parent of such a child I wouldn’t be thinking gender typinig, I would be wondering about how their general knowledge of the world.
This is clear discrimination against people who liked to play Darth Vader Mixing Potions as a child.
Apparently it’s more profitable for toy retailers to sell specifically gendered ‘boy toys’ and ‘girl toys’ than to just sell toys and let parents and kids decide which they want. I’m not sure why.
I can think of one reason – if parents have kids of different genders and believe that they need all different toys for the boys and the girls, it automatically doubles the toy company’s profits, since otherwise the little sibling would just play with the big sibling’s toys.
As a little sibling myself, I can assure you that the little sib wants to play with the big sib’s toys regardless of what the parents buy…Eh, who am I kidding? The big sib and the little sib both really just want to play with the packing material. Boxes are great: you can crawl through them, build a fort (or house or mountain range) out of them, draw on them, toss them around, etc. And that pink stuff that came inside it? Might get to it some day, after the box disentegrates.
The clearest case is in language development, where girls “…speak their first words earlier, and continue on a more rapid course of verbal development thoughtout childhoos.”
I don’t know that this is obviously a non-cultured difference — looking at how people I know treat their girls and boys, girls get more cuddling and verbal interaction, while boys are encouraged to charge around breaking stuff. We gave my little boy insane amounts of cuddly, snuggly play, with a lot of talk, when he was a baby, and he’s weirdly verbal (weird for anyone, particularly weird for a little boy.) It’s one data point, of course, not research.
And mom and dad are always aware of what they’re saying and doing in front of their kids and the effect it might be having, right? I remember reading once a study in which researchers took a number of boy infants (around 6 months old) and videotaped adults playing with them for a while. They then dressed the same infants in dresses and again asked the adults to spend some time playing with the “little girls”. Guess what? They behaved differently. They tended to encourage the “boys” to crawl more and talked to them about how strong and smart they were. On the other hand, they spent most of the time cuddling the “girls” and telling them how pretty they were. So people treat boys and girls differently from birth. Given that background, how can one even make a guess as to what’s innate and what’s learned?
I once saw a TV show with some videotape of a study like the one Dianne mentions. As she reports, adults played actively with baby “boys” regardless of whether they actually were boys, and they cuddled and talked to baby “girls” regardless of whether they actually were girls. The researchers also dressed some babies in green, introduced them to the adults as “Lee” or “Kelly” or some other gender neutral name, and either claimed not to know the gender, or just left before the adult could ask. In those cases the adults tended to be uncomforable with the babies, and niether played actively nor cuddled them very much. This result disturbed me the most, because it makes it more difficult to combet the gender conditioning.
I agree with Barbara. The toy stores have been getting increasingly sex-segregated. I have been buying toys for my niece and nephews for the past several years, and the gender-neutral island in the stores has been getting progressively smaller. Last year, I found it very difficult to find gender-neutral toys for my niece (who is 7 years old now, and frequently proclaims that she hates dolls and hates pink. I finally bought her books). Also, I saw several girls being dragged around by their parents, crying and generally looking very frustrated. I looked around at the aisles and aisles of pink dolls going shopping and could understand perfectly their frustration. At that age I would be crying too if those were my only choices.
When I told my brother about this, he defensively said that the marketers would not be doing what they are doing if it was not profitable, and the toy choices must therefore reflect the actual preferences of kids. I think this is simplistic thinking. Are the marketers catering more to kids preferences or more to unthinking adults who don’t want to spend time or effort buying gifts for kids? The color-coding is definitely designed with the time-pressed adult shopper in mind. Kids are not looking to save time at the toy store, so the color coded separation of aisles doesn’t help them.
I also agree with the person who said that the marketers and manufacturers are lazy. Not that they don’t want the profits, but that they want to do so while minimizing the effort and time required for offering a wider range of choices.
Oh, botulism. I think I must have forgotten to end blockquote or something. Can anyone fix this eternal quote?
[Fixed! –Amp]
The big concern I have with gender stereotypes is studies like this one which shows that boys are slower readers than girls, and girls are slower at math. Not including the word “most” infront of “boys/girls”in that sentences makes it appear that ALL boys/girls are slower in that specific area. Then, as a result, a head-start or catch-up program is put in place that targets the sex with the shortcomings. The problem with this is that there are many boys who need math help, and girls who need reading help, but they get lost in the shuffle because their abilities don’t match their gender. Why don’t they test each child in each classroom, then target the children with the specific problem??
The researchers also dressed some babies in green, introduced them to the adults as “Lee” or “Kelly” or some other gender neutral name, and either claimed not to know the gender, or just left before the adult could ask. In those cases the adults tended to be uncomforable with the babies, and niether played actively nor cuddled them very much. This result disturbed me the most, because it makes it more difficult to combet the gender conditioning.
I’d either forgotten or hadn’t seen this part before. It’s interesting in a train wreck sort of way: It seems to imply that people need to know gender before they know how to react to someone and can’t function properly without knowing it. Perhaps this is why some people don’t like the internet, where gender clues are lacking unless given by the writer?
This speaks to a point I also wanted to make (although without the research to support it) that many many people are extremely uncomfortable interacting with a person if they don’t kow that person’s gender–including babies. One of the most instructive questions I’ve heard W/R/T this is, “What do most people ask upon meeting someone with a baby?” The answer, of course, is “Is it a boy or a girl?”
To some extent, it seems possible that this is a language thing–we need pronouns. There’s hardly any getting around them without using certain trans creations (“ze” and “hir” come to mind) and it makes communicating difficult. But language both shapes and is shaped by culture and attitudes.
Within my extremely progressive social/religious community (many people in it are queer) I always call my opposite-sex partner just that–“my partner.” I have tried repeatedly to use this word with other people, including some colleagues at work (only ones I feel fairly comfortable with and not threatened by), who know that my partner is a woman, and it is just so hard to make it fly. I can’t wait till it’s not just gay people that use this, partially since I support some measure of gender confusion.
“Oh, botulism,” is definitely my newest oath/swear/whatever. Dianne, if I were wearing a hat, it’d be off to you.
Although I was once in the habit of saying “Curses!” when ought unfavorable transpired.
She’s so pretty. My younger son is nearly four. He recently stopped dressing up in whatever his big sister found for him to wear. Now he has to be sure it’s “boy clothes” and he’s very picky about those even. My daughter only wore pink, lavender or white between the ages of 1 and probably 8 or so. She’s ten now, “all girl” and often marvels how I, who avoids most everything you could call girly, got her as a daughter.
This is interesting. I’m having a baby soon, and everyone is hung up on the gender. (I don’t know it yet, although I am planning to find out, just for my own curiosity.)
I have had to tell everyone from my husband to my mother that I *do not want* ‘gendered’ clothing for my child. No pink, no blue. That’s pretty much impossible for people to wrap their brains around. Maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone the gender when we find out. Let them come to terms with their baby gift choices on their own.
One bone to pick, plucky. When you find out about your baby, that will tell its sex, not its gender.
Alright, alright. I gotcha. I’m a prude I guess.
That’s pretty much impossible for people to wrap their brains around.
And surprisingly difficult to find — baby clothes are almost all either clearly boy or clearly girl clothes.
And surprisingly difficult to find … baby clothes are almost all either clearly boy or clearly girl clothes.
Yeah, and if they’re not pink or blue they’re pastel yellow or green. It’s strange to me that this should be so, because babies at first have a hard time distinguishing between any colors that aren’t really bright and contrast-y, so essentially we’re surrounding them with grey when we turn to the soft baby colors.
Thank jebus for fabric dye.
This is so true. Truely “boy or girl?” is THE question people need answered before they will even look at let alone interact with a new baby they meet. I used to sometimes say “Who cares?”, which was always met with embarrassed discomfort. Sometimes I’d lie. People’s whole tone is different depending on what sex baby they think they’re talking to.
I also didn’t find out the sex of my babies before they were born, leading to people telling me straight out that they couldn’t buy me a baby gift if they didn’t know the sex. WTF?!
I think Amp’s basic point about the range of behavior is so true. My kids are a huge mishmash of behaviors. My son has some strong physical traits that sometimes lead to people commenting that he’s “such a boy” or “all boy”. I always reply, “You mean because he is so very emotional and cries easily?” Yeah, right.
plucky punk: wanna really cheese ’em off, check out hot topic’s baby gear :) cutsie little nightmare before christmas dresses and skull & crossbones shirts. also “thecradlerocks.com” has a ramones t i’m dying to buy for my 4yo girl who’s proud to announce “hey, ho, let’s go!” every time we leave the house. problem is no way can i afford $24 for a tshirt. heck i don’t pay that much for grownup clothes. but i’ll probably spend some of her birthday money (she’s not really 4 until apr 21st) from relatives on that shirt anyway.
when 4yo was still in preemie clothes, i dyed a onesie black & drew up a copy of our RHPS cast logo shrunk down, printed it on some iron-on printer stuff & made her very own cast shirt for her RHPS debut at about 8 wks old :) my mom had a cow the first time i put her in black leggings, even though it was with a pink shirt. “you can’t dress a baby in black! it’s bad luck!”
4yo is very adventurous and androgynous in her play. her favorite toys are shrek & toy story. her favorite shows are diego & wonder pets (i would so pay serious money to get “this is sewieus” out of my head!) 2yo is more girly so far. her favorite toys are dolls & dora.
Over on the thread regarding the horrific crime, Ginger makes an astute comment concerning the roles modeled for boys in violent video games, and how this crime appears similar to a course of action encouraged within the game. It seems to me that these alleged rapists chose the wrong gender role to play in life. Ginger’s comment about the video game is appropriate: that “player” role is one that is held up to boys as a legitimate aspiration.
We’ve had conversations/arguments here before on the question of whether gender roles are good, bad, or mixed. Many people believe that all gender roles are outright bad, and should be abolished. That case is made with force and eloquence. But it seems material to me that these boys aren’t kids who rejected gender roles and then made their own decisions to rape and rob; they’re boys who rejected positive male roles (or perhaps were never exposed to them in the first place) and instead settled on a profoundly negative role, one with awful consequences to the women involved.
I wonder whether it is possible to meaningfully evangelize for a no-roles approach when negative roles are so easy to emulate and so immediately rewarding and powerful. Look, we get to act as we wish; look, these women are scared of us; look, our lawyers will get us off the hook and we can continue to do what we want. Let’s hope that last one doesn’t come true, but dollars to donuts, those boys think it will. Maybe it would have been better if these kids had had a little “Leave It To Beaver” rolemodeling pounded into their young heads.
I doubt that they did.
Proud to Swim Home: I’ve checked out many of the numerous punk baby clothing sites and found them all pretty expensive. So far I’ve done pretty much the same as what you did with your 8 week old, bought a pack of gerber onesies for 9 bucks and gone all diy on them. So far I have an ankh onesie, a mod symbol onesie, and a star wars onesie (poor kid, a geek before they even had a chance.)
Hey –
Kids are kids are kids, right? They have to grow up in a world full of strange people with even stranger attitudes – its sad but true. BUT if you’ve ever met someone with gender dysphoria you’ll probably have noticed that gender and how we relate to the world are absolutely crucial to concepts of self esteem and socialisation and everything else. Which doesn’t mean that all girls like to play with barbies (I thought they were boring) or that all boys like trucks (my brother preferred bicycles). I don’t think it means that all of the people in the world are necesarily as intolerant as some of the responses here seem to suggest, either! My rather large extended family used to think that a particular little boy cousin (who did, in fact, turn out to be gay – go figure) was absolutely THE cutest thing with his magic wand, fairy wings and pink gumboots. And he was, too.
And, of course, there was that poor boy in the US who had his penis cut off during a botched circumcision. His parents were advised to rename him “Brenda” and raise him as a girl. What do you know? He was desperately unhappy, hated wearing dresses and playing with dolls and attempted suicide. As soon as he was able to make the choice for himself he decided he was actually a boy.
Whoops.
BUT does that have anything to do with whether women can do science??? Well, no more than it means that Westerners can’t do maths or Asian people can’t be creative.
” my 4yo girl who’s proud to announce ‘hey, ho, let’s go!’ every time we leave the house”
This is the best thing I’ve heard in ages.
Ursula LeGuin’s novel “The Left Hand of Darkness” is a good fictional treatment of sex and gender issues. She even says in there at one point, “What’s the first thing we ask about a newborn baby?” Or something like that.
“Why don’t they test each child in each classroom, then target the children with the specific problem??”
But Sage, that would actually be sensible.