People have a tendency to assume an inevitability about these things and conveniently discount widespread changes over a short time period in what women and men are ‘just more interested in’. I’m sure forty or fifty years ago women would be assumed to be incompetent and uninterested in becoming doctors; now they make up over half of med students in the UK.
One of my secret passions that dates back to high school is designing womens clothing and womens fashion. I am a very straight very manly man who is about as rough and tumble as guys get. I would be embarrassed to get invloved in womens fashion just because of the stereo typical image that goes with it. Labels need to go!
Since you picked one of my ideas …
I don’t have kids of any age, nor do I have much dealings with them now. So I’m ill-equipped to offer much commentary on current toys, childrearing fashion, or the changes over the 50+ years since pre-Women’s Lib. Also note I’m not making a value statement about what *ought *to be, merely talking about what is, and what I believe are the forces that drive it.
IMO, strict gender roles are an unnatural aberration. 100% everybody-is-identical-except-for-innie-vs-outie is also an aberration. Although IMO the truth is a lot closer to the latter than are the aggressively color-coded childhoods I think I see around me.
Again I’m ill-equipped to answer the challenge you appear to have thrust at me.
It’s not uncommon that social progress is a matter of two steps forward and one back. And during the time of one back, particularly vicious side effects and rear-guard battles are seen. Is this an example of that? Good question, but I wouldn’t vehemently disagree with you if you said “Yes”.
Absolutely! I was also thinking of my last BF – definitely hetero, definitely a neat freak, and totally into art.
[sigh] I forgot the perfunctory disclaimer about how I’m not a sexist pig and that the example may not apply to every single person in the known universe and… blah, blah, blah.
and then
Right back at ya. If this isn’t a generalization, what would you call it?
I’m a woman who has dated more than a few guys who care about interior decorating.
double post
One of my co-workers fondest memories of me (straight, white, middle-age, middle-class) is when we toured a rehabbed building looking for offices and I blurted out “We can do SO much with this space!” – and then proceeded to come up with numerous suggestions.
I’ll start by saying it doesn’t matter to me. What I do with my body is my business, and what other people do with their bodies isn’t.
After that, I don’t know, I can certainly see hormones affecting the operations of the mind, but clearly there’s no one ‘man mind’ or ‘woman mind’ mode of operating. There is certainly a physical difference between men and women so I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that there will tend to be behavioral differences as well. However, it is extremely difficult to figure which of those differences are related to genetics, hormones, and/or social expectations.
I should point out that if you are selecting the member of my household more likely to have a strong opinion about interior design and express such at the top of their very healthy lungs, that person most definitely a man. Granted, before we bought a house, my husband did not really give two shits about interior design. Now that we own a house? He quite possibly watches more HGTV than I do.
To respond to LSLGuy though, the thing that drives me crazy that I see often - in particular with gaming, comic books, and the like - is less a matter of playing to the core audience and more a matter of playing to your core audience in a manner that actively turns all other audiences off. As a lady who is an active gamer and interested in a good number of other equally dorky passtimes (I play Magic the Gathering competitively, really like superhero movies and actively follow some sports (why, yes, my husband is very lucky)), I fully and totally grasp that the majority of other people who are interested in those subjects are men. There’s no good reason why a marketing strategy can’t be developed to appeal to both the majority demographic and us outliers, though. Too freaking many marketing strategies in this realm go past focusing on the majority into “exclusion of all other demographics” territory, though.
It gets a little tiresome having to ignore or work around sexism or outright misogyny that gets built directly into far too many products. I mean, I do it routinely, but I do a lot of rolling my eyes - and it often makes me wonder if part of the reason the core demographic is so heavily skewed is because of it. I have a hard time coming up with a reason why it doesn’t make more financial sense to broaden your potential customer base, instead of limiting it.
One of the most flagrant commercial examples of this I can think of were those ridiculously stupid soda ads for Dr. Pepper 10 from a couple years back - clearly, clearly designed to appeal to the male demographic - but actively exclusive to (and really sort of offensive to) women. Why the hell?
I agree I see the kinds of things you report. And I shake my head too.
In Presidential politics we see the effect of “pandering to the base” during the primaries even though the election will be won or lost in the center. I suspect a similar line of thought in gamer-land.
Or it really may be as simple as “only frat boy / geek jerks get to positions of power and so their prejudices become their reality which they foist on the rest of us.”
Humanity is a mystery; a particularly stupid and stubborn mystery.
I can’t stand romance novels and have no idea what Candy Crush is.
I love the classic black and white gangsters movies , I watch super hero movies
war movies . I watch the news everyday , but I don’t know a thing a sports .
I find it very hard to talk to my 2 sisters about the stories I see on the news b/c my sisters never watch the news and would not know if a deadly storm was heading right their way.
Nope, I have a much better design eye than my wife and she’s okay with that. I’m responsible for the majority of the decor in our home. I handled the design of our new kitchen. If it was left to my wife we’d still be using her college futon as our sofa.
I’ll (wo)man up and say it. I can’t STAND baseball stats. My husband and two sons were obsessed with them and my sons, to this day, can spout off accurate baseball stats from the 1990s.
Any time I’ve ever been in a group of males and females and baseball stats came up in the conversation, I’ve yet to see a female eagerly join in the conversation. I’m sure there are some who do, but I’ve yet to meet them.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore sports and am an avid fan. I was a serious athlete through college. But the appeal of memorizing endless lists of stats just eludes me.
I do think that’s mostly a guy thing.
I have fantasy PBR bull riding teams during the season - does that count? I’ve actually won a fair amount of cash on them too.
Forgive me, but how is it generalizing? See, my old boss is a lesbian, and she plays golf really well, and she has a whole circle of lesbian friends, and they play really well.
Ah. You mean the “better than any man” part. Fair enough, I concede the point, and will change my statement to “better than many men”.
This is what I was really trying to say. I played Mass Effect and I never felt like there wasn’t enough options to be feminine and tough. Yet I stopped buying into any of the Assassin’s Creed because apparently it’s too much trouble to make a female.
When you make the only female options overly sexualized with huge breasts and the armor skimpy and men’s armor is cool and covering, it is clear which demographic you are pandering to. But gamers not only have lots of women now, they are also trending older! Yet we still apparently pander to teenage boys.
I mean, movie studios literally think that an all-woman audience cannot carry a movie. Of course that has a lot to do with the messed-up way that Hollywood calculates the value of a movie, but who do you think the majority of Supernatural fans are? Mainly women, and that show is ten seasons. Do you really think a Supernatural movie, provided it was well-done, would not bring in droves of female fans?
I can’t say I’ve met ALL the women, but I have yet to see one who was interested in my collection of polished turds.
Even the gilded ones.
Women hate Wicked Tuna!
My gf likes guns, fishing, comics, video games and the Dallas Cowboys. We have spent half a day watching Netflix together, but turn on Wicked Tuna and she is done. Can’t stand it. Other female friends react in the same way. They all talk over it, get distracted and start asking if they have to watch any more of it.
I would be interested to know if there are any women out there who would willingly sit through two episodes in a row of Wicked Tuna.
How you doin’? 
HA! That couldn’t be more brilliant. You win all the Internets.