Inspired by some of the discussions about model train enthusiasts…what are your reflections on gender roles and cultural expectations today?
I’m of an age where many of my peers have toddlers. One thing I have observed is that the parents talk a lot about their desire for their daughters to grow up “not girly girly”. They invest quite a lot of effort in finding non-gender specific toys for their daughters and sometimes despair when their daughter shows a preference for traditionally girly stuff. A girl who enjoys dinosaurs and trains is celebrated. I see it on Twitter - “look at this gloriously gender-free girl we have created!” I haven’t seen this so much for parents of sons.
It seems to me like the message they are teaching their daughters is that it is better to be masculine than feminine. I’m sure that’s not their intention, but that’s how it comes across to me.
In a similar way, movies/books with female leads who act in a traditionally masculine way are praised for their lack of sexism or gender stereotyping. But what is actually so wrong about acting in a traditionally feminine way? Is a women who shoots first and asks questions later better than a woman who puts her gun down and says ‘let’s talk’?
It feels like a movie with a female lead who acts in a traditionally masculine way is praised. But a movie with a female lead who acts in a traditionally feminine way is seen as boring or dull.
Isn’t this the opposite of what feminism was designed to achieve? Shouldn’t we accept that there are masculine and feminine ways of behaving, each with their positives and negatives? And shouldn’t we accept that some women who prefer to act in a feminine way are just fine? As are men who prefer to act in a feminine way?
A friend of mine has said that she encouraged her daughter to be not “girly-girly” because the cultural push (read: marketing) for girls to like everything pink/purple, sparkly, and femme has become much, much worse since we were kids in the early 70s. Her kid has “girl” stuff, sure, but also likes dinosaurs and is fascinated by the natural world.
Also, a lot of girly-girly stuff seems to celebrate winning the genetic lottery instead of actual work and achievements.
Obviously, I’m speaking generally.
Edit: I was with you until you threw in Feminism, BTW. We still have far fewer girls going into STEM studies/jobs than boys, even though there are more girls than boys graduating from university.
I want my daughter to have the whole range of interests and styles available to her, for her to pick from as it suits her.
I don’t mind the “girly girl” stuff, but I am frustrated with just how heavily it is pushed and how overwhelming it can be. So I really try to offer other choices, as a sort of counterweight to all the princess stuff she is bombarded with basically everywhere else. Not because the princess stuff is bad, but because it’s just one of many things in this world.
For example, I never buy her pink clothes. Not because I hate pink clothes or don’t want her wearing them, but because she gets so many pink clothes from everyone else that if I didn’t focus on branching out, it’s basically be her only option. I want her to have a rainbow to choose from, of which pink is just one color.
I really don’t think the gender divide is as sharp as people think, or that there is a need to choose sides. I love technology, fashion, travel, international politics, cooking, and data visualization. I’m not a “tomboy” or “girly girl”, I’m just a regular person with a range of interests. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of the “gender” of my interests, and I’m kind of resentful that I’m expected to have some position on being a “girly girl”, or that I need to have to have some kind of philosophy behind whether or not I want to get a manicure.
I have a very young daughter (11 months). I’m determined not to burden her with my expectations. That said, however, I despise the princess stuff and won’t have it in my house.
Seems to me that the message of every princess movie I’ve seen (which admittedly isn’t many) is that a girl should be pretty and nice, and then a man will come along and take care of her and she’ll get to boss everyone around.
Definitely not in keeping with the way I’m trying to raise my daughter.
I don’t understand how playing with non gender specific toys or even masculine toys makes the child un-feminine. That’s the problem I have. If your son wants to play with dollhouses, dollhouses are human, and there shouldn’t be a problem. If your daughter wants to play with spaceships, spaceships are cool.
Why can’t a girl be feminine and still play with whatever she wants? The Princessification of little girls can be horrifying. Everything is pink, pink, pink, to a disgusting degree. At least nowadays the Princesses depicted go out and do stuff and don’t just sit home waiting for their Prince.
Interests are not gendered! And the things you mention in movies - all too often that’s not how it’s depicted. Women are depicted as:
rescuees
headstrong, emotional
mother bears
I just want a woman to be in the same role as a man and for no one to question it. I’ll mention a show that turned me off in the first five minutes of viewing: Lost.
The plane crashes, and it’s chaos. We see several characters in rapid succession. The men? Are running around, helping people out of the fire, especially the white male, doing shit. The women? Screaming and crying hysterically and uselessly, even when yelled at by the white male to do something.
That is how women are depicted, all too often, even nowadays.
It’s the basic question of whether inherently negative traits have become labeled as feminine, or if inherently feminine traits have been labeled as negative. The answer, of course, is “Yes”, and the problem is sorting out which is which.
I mean, my son got 7 (itty-bitty) stitches yesterday and was clearly terrified but brave as hell through the whole thing. Is that something to be proud of him for, because even at three he has some sort of emotional regulation, or is that an appalling example of how even at three he’s internalized the worse of macho ideas of emotional repression?
Gender preferences, like statistics, shouldn’t be assumed to be true of any individual… though they are unquestionably true for the applicable population as a whole. I think that’s the mental stumbling block.
My approach is that I will not assume that my daughter wants to play with princess dolls until she tells me she does. Once she tells me she wants them, she’s welcome to them.
Since she never saw a commercial until she was three and a half, and had been asking for princess dolls and little ponies for at least a year and a half before that, I guess they are just what she likes.
She also likes Duplo blocks, and builds really neat stuff with them.
But I think most people would agree that both extremes of the gender spectrum are disliked by most people. Machismo isn’t encouraged either, because society has recognized that extreme masculinity has its downsides. Maybe a long time ago, people weren’t bothered by little boys who can’t sit still and like to rough-house and shoot people with imaginary guns. But nowadays, these behaviors are strongly discouraged. Nowadays, even little boys are expected to be in touch with their feelings. Everyone is expected to be sensitive, empathic, and socially aware. It used to be that little boys who acted up in class were given a pass because “boys will be boys”. But now we haul them off to the doctor’s office to treat their natural impulsiveness and rambuctiousness.
So certainly there are downsides of feminimity. I’m not a fan of people hating on “girly girl” stuff just for the hell of it, but if I can sympathize with a parents who wants to raise a gentle and sensitive male child, I can sympathize with a parent who wants their daughter to be adventuresome and intellectual. I’m guessing that people who are neither extremely masculine or feminine are able to navigate the world with more ease than walking stereotypes. I remember reading once that androgyny is correlated with intelligence.
In my experience having both a boy and a girl, girls seem to be taught now from an early age that they’re supposed to be super girly - from the clothes available to girls, even the Lego sets that are now pink and purple. This is reinforced by most of our relatives and my daughter’s friends, so someone’s got to tell her it’s ok not to always wear pink. As her parent, that’s my job.
I’m the same way about my son, though I think that gender stereotypes for boys to be masculine are less noticeable, not because they’re not there, but because that preference for masculine things is more assumed. You rarely see parents going out of their way to give their little boys Barbie dolls, but you often see parents going out of their way to give little girls gender neutral toys.
Regardless, I never, ever want either of my kids to stop tearing around the playground at full tilt or to stop playing sports because they’re not supposed to based on their gender. I want both my kids to be active and kinetic and healthy and not worry about what boys or girls are supposed to do but what they’re interested in.
Reaching way back into the mists of time to my vaguely recalled college psychology of sex roles class…
Is it that we are handing girls “gender neutral” toys that are not in fact neutral but are instead “boy-y” because Boy is considered the default case and Girl is “other”?
If I had been raised in the 2010s instead of the 1970s I suspect my mom would have believed she was giving me “gender neutral” toys when she gave me trucks, when she was actually giving me “boy” toys.
I was thinking the same thing about boys being “default.” It sometimes feels as though historically boys have been the norm and girls the anomaly.
I will say it is a pain in the butt to find gender neutral toys for kids older than 2 or 3. And the toys that you do find are really traditional and usually fall under the “craft” category. It took me months to find just standard legos that weren’t part of a set and/or pink and purple and that didn’t cost $60+ (found them on eBay). They’re just the standard solid color legos.
So I have a 3rd grade girl and a 5th grade boy. When my son was little, I tried to supply him with a wide range of toys to play with: dolls, cars, trucks, pattern sorters, trains, play kitchen items, etc. Most of those same toys were still around when my daughter was little. As they got older they gravitated towards certain toys and ignored others, and I just went along with it, regardless of whether it was a “girl toy” or a “boy toy”. By now I have a pretty good idea of where their interests lie, so I buy them stuff geared towards what they are interested in. I don’t really care which gender (if any) it is geared towards.
I’d like to think that I am teaching my kids that it is OK to like whatever they like, whether it goes along with gender stereotypes or not.
I would say that although things are substantially better now than when I was growing up, the cluster of traits and tastes and characteristics and priorities dubbed “feminine” are still dismissed as, well, more dismissable, trivial, etc, than those dubbed “masculine”, only some of which is for good reason. There is still not much of an awareness that there are males who are proud of exhibiting these characteristics because they value them as admirable characteristics, and not because of some “signal” they wish to send regarding their sexual orientation or whatever.
And yeesh, it’s easy to make a huge pile of conventionally “masculine” behaviors, traits, etc that are at least as problematic as the worst “feminine” ones you can think of.
Heh, reminds me of my brother’s girls. He and his wife were determined that they should not have “girly” things, or princesses, or pink everything. Guess what the kids demanded as soon as they were able to articulate preferences? Girly things, princesses, and pink everything.
To save other people the trouble of it, here is my favorite starter Lego set. 650 plain, brightly-colored blocks, just ripe for young imaginations to dig into. I believe this set is available at Target, too.
I’d like you all to pause for a moment and reflect on how this must’ve began: not with a rational person calmly raising a concern; that’s no way to start a moral panic; but with some early-stage supervillian saying to themselves “You know, parenting just isn’t stressful enough”.
Sociology: it can’t be a mad science if it’s not a real science.
Back on topic, I’m reminded of that popular video a few years back with the little girl talking about Legos (you heard me), ending with “some girls like superheroes; some girls like princesses; some boys like superheroes; some boys like princesses”. What’s the big deal?
What we forget as adults is that, by and large, childhood is a prolonged ordeal of confusion and terror, presided over by adults who endlessly babble nonsense and frequently fill your life with pain for no apparent reason; yet who insist that your time of life is idyllic and then have the audacity to get angry when you punch them. Letting your child play with toys of a given subtype may encourage (not cause, but encourage) them to grow up holding to certain ideas, but these ideas will, as will all ideas your child holds, be questioned and challenged by events and people your child encounters throughout their life.
Ultimately, the ides that your child adopts may be ones you find objectionable. But I can practically guarantee that the ones that come from playing “laser dinosaur princess battle” will bother you a lot less than the ones that come from sex drugs, and a rock n’ roll. Let the children play.
The OP makes a lot of good points. I do believe parents feel empowered to counter feminine pigeon-holing of their daughters, but they are not as sensitive to masculine pigeon-holing of their sons.
A girl playing with a truck? That is seen as a good, positive thing among most progressives nowadays. And let her wear blue, for Pete’s sake. And yay, she’s climbing a tree and getting dirty! But a boy playing quietly with a doll is still steering into taboo country. So is a boy who likes pink and doesn’t like to play sports. I’m not saying these hangups aren’t changing, but it’s harmful to pretend like masculinity isn’t valued in a way that femininity isn’t.
I believe this imbalance in socialization is why we see so many woman achieving in previously male-dominated workplaces, but responsibilities at home still keep them from attaining the heights their male counterparts do. Men largely define themselves the same way their fathers and grandfathers did: as moneymakers whose main priority is making money so their wife can take care of the kids. And why wouldn’t they? Aren’t their parents still giving them toys that are often occupationally-oriented (trucks, trains, planes, etc), instead of toys associated with childrearing and domesticity? Yes.
As long as boys are trained to see themselves in terms of what they do for a living, while girls are programmed to see themselves as workers and mothers, then we will see economic gender disparities in adulthood. So let’s give the boys more dollhouses.
Maybe she didn’t see a commercial until she was three and a half, but she still learned about princesses somewhere. She wasn’t born knowing who princesses are and that princess dolls would be fun to play with. It might have been from books she was read, or cartoons she watched, or maybe other girls showing off their princess dolls and asking where her’s was, or adults asking her if she’s a princess. Without you realizing it, she’s probably received signals from culture and other people that little girls should like princesses.
I’m not saying that’s good or bad, there’s nothing wrong with girls liking princesses, or ponies, or pink things, or any number of other girly things. It’s just that you (the general you, not just you in particular Sattua) can’t raise your child without them being influenced by gender and gender roles unless you raise them in a cabin in the woods cut off from all society. Even then, you’ll probably unconsciously pass down some ideas about gender roles to them.