I don’t care, but I wouldn’t win that fight with the husband or the grandparents, and it’s not the hill I want to fight for.
Nah, I’m not really in to driving my equipment through tunnels all day.
For the record, I hate pastels, hate romance novels, anything princessy makes me barf and I have always been this way. I am almost always dirty, with bits of alfalfa in my hair. When I was a girl I did not play with dolls, I trained horses and dogs, read books, drew pictures, and my youth organizations were 4-H (horses and wildlife projects) and a local group which specialized in backpacking (long before this became mainstream) and wildlife biology. I despised girls who squealed in horror at spiders. I kept pet snakes and lizards and rats. But I did not think of myself as a tomboy because I loathed and was terrible at competitive sports.
So, not all that stereotypically girly, but I still can’t understand how machines could be interesting. They cannot respond to you of themselves, they are always ugly, the noises they make are also always ugly and abrasive, they leak nasty toxic liquids. No matter how complicated, they are pathetically one-dimensional compared to even an alga. They exist to save physical labor or extend our physical capacities, which is usually beneficial, but then they break and you have to fix them, a frustrating irritating process during which I always end up with small hand injuries.
Now tools can be very beautiful. I have a pretty deep relationship with my english garden spade and my secateurs, both with over 30 years of constant use on them. Also my fountain pens, all older than I am.
(My anti here is anti-technology, not anti-male. I can do anti-male if you like, but it’s probably a different thread. )
I have the opposite experience. I am a raving liberal, my family is as well, and we live in liberal Liberland. I thought raising a kid in a way not overly focused on gender would be easy. It’s not like I’ve banned pink or princesses or anything, but my plan was to keep a balance, and to have the “pink” be one option out of many.
I have been consistently bowled over by how strong and pervasive adults need to project gender on a baby. Strangers will scold me for not putting one of those stupid headbands on her so they can tell she’s a girl. Every retail establishment catering to kids looks like segregated facilities. 100% of the hand me downs I receive are pink. The random things people say to her about being a girl are almost unbelievable. It’s almost like a parody how much people are trying to shove this little baby into an identity she doesn’t even have a concept of yet.
Unless I made it my life’s work, I would not be able to counter this. Mothers are strong, but you can’t keep out the whole darn world.
But… what’s wrong with that? I think most people agree that gender stereotypes are at some level rooted in genetics. The parents gave the kids the ability to choose what they wanted to be, and like most kids, they chose to act as society expected them too. And trying to force kids not to act like their stereotypes isn’t any better than wanting kids to follow them.
I quite like model trains (and trains) in a general sort of way. I’ll admire a model train set, and I think they are neat. But I can’t imagine wanting to build one myself and spend all those hours doing fiddly things with track and tiny bushes.
My younger daughter was hugely into Thomas the Tank Engine when she was little. I think she still has the Thomas quilt I made her folded at the end of her bed–not a ‘real’ quilt at all–it was a couple of yards of Thomas fabric, bound and tied with yarn. We got her a train table and a bunch of track (used for cheap, woo) and lots of little train characters. She loved them, but to my surprise she did not spend hours putting together complex train track setups. I think she mostly had them act in stories. I think they were train-shaped people to her.
This same kid is now a Legomaniac who loves Minecraft, so she’s definitely something of an engineer type. It will be interesting to see what she does. Her career aspiration of the moment is to be a world-famous author, probably of dragon fantasy books.
I think so, certainly. My kid was completely confused when her cousin called her a tomboy because she likes Star Wars or something. It doesn’t seem to be a term people use here, but I guess it’s still current in lots of places. When she was small and working these things out, my kid would ask me if Star Wars/Lego/whatever was really for boys. I think the only sensible answer to that is that Star Wars is for people who like Star Wars, and Legos are for people who like Legos, and MLP is for people who like MLP.
My kid likes glittery purple, ninjas, My Little Pony, Legos, pretty dresses, and all things Marvel. There is nothing whatsoever weird about that, and I think it’s strange that we’ve divided the world up so much that people do think it’s odd. When I was a kid, I played cops and robbers and set up Matchbox cars and played Star Wars with my brothers and the neighbors, and that was normal. I also played horses and Barbies, which was normal too. My friends my age did the same. I don’t quite know when we changed so much, but it was before I had kids, and when I had a baby (in 2000) there was not yet any such thing as a pink popcorn popper or pink baby bottles.
Model train sets are usually built on a mountain like the Pennsylvania coal mines. Or they can be out west such as Colorado, or Idaho. These aren’t places women like to go (imo).
If there was a train that traversed Manhattan, past Bloomies and Saks Fifth Avenue where a woman could shop there might be more interest.
Same for Paris. A train to Hermès? “Oh yes, please!” she would say.
How old are the males posting in this thread? Most of you sound like you’re posting from the 1940s.
Would girls like trains more if they were painted pink? Oh my GOD, that’s just precious!
I used to do the landscaping around my ex’s train set. It had the same appeal as building and decorating the dollhouse as a project. While I like the trains themselves visually, I’m not really interested in all of the minute detail of each engine.
Oh what a load of crap. Do you really imagine that’s what most women are like? We’re putting your train set in the basement, go play there.
:smack: Do I have to be the one to say it?
Cooties!
Girls have cooties. That’s why they don’t play with train sets.
I don’t think it captures their imaginations. The wheels moving and staying on track and keeping it going and how if you put a toy on the tracks it would get run over all play to a certain part of the male mind that sees useful information that will be important later in their careers as males.
I’m probably not qualified to answer this question since as a young girl I spent a lot of time playing with my father’s model train set. And there’s nothing as magical as a model train set that goes around the base of the Christmas tree. That’s maximum holiday cheer right there.
Right now I have about 25 other hobbies I’m engaged in to various degrees and I’m sure if I could disengage my halfhearted interest in say, Lego, I could spare an eye for model trains. I certainly stop and stare long enough in the hobby store. Then realize that it’s another money pit and I should really stick to maybe 3 hobbies and leave it at that…
My mother is obsessed with trains, but she does have a degree in mechanical engineering. I actually know a lot of women in STEM fields so I tend to associate these things with women more than men, oddly enough.
I happen to really like pink (not that nasty pastel pink, but most shades of pink) and even I agree it’s getting out of hand.
I do think we are setting up a lot of kids for a false dichotomy. I was never shoved into a gender box as a little girl, was pretty much free to play how I wanted, and it’s interesting to see how that shook out.
I played in the woods a lot, and one of my favorite activities was (and still is) kicking over rotting logs to see what lived under them. I once found a salamander, that was particularly memorable. To this day I am a major fan of snakes, spiders, lizards, bugs, and weird organisms in general.
I played with Barbies a lot, mostly to create epic fictional narratives that involved just as much violence as romance. Once I could write fiction, I stopped playing with Barbies.
I had a set of matchbox cars, and would act out death-defying action scenes with them, but all of my cars had individual identities, and the girl cars would marry the boy cars (the red sports car and the police car were both men.)
I had dinosaurs, some of which were ferocious deadly carnivores, and they got married too.
I also used to pretend that my bike was a motorcycle and I was a cop. I was usually packing a squirt gun, or, in a pinch, a baton.
Overall I think it was a pretty balanced way to grow up. I knew I had some interests that were considered boy things, and got some measure of ribbing for it, but it didn’t really bother me. OTOH I’ve always been mildly insecure about the girl things, because of the societal attitude we have that these things are silly and/or frivolous. I was allowed to play however I wanted to play but there was still an underlying message of, ‘‘some things girls like are stupid.’’ And I bought into that for a long time.
Pink trains: Lionel used to make one, back in the fifties IIRC. Didn’t sell. Seems the women/girls that were train oriented didn’t like them and the ones that weren’t train oriented never noticed.
Grumpy Old Men: Still a problem, always a problem for men as well as women. They’ve turned more people off to the hobby than any other factor. Any hobby, not just trains.
No room for a big “layout” (train display/setup): There is a whole world devoted to small layouts, mostly in Europe and Japan, but also in the States. Many of them feature switching or “shunting” puzzles as a way of operating them. The sorting of freight cars according to randomized lists offers a relaxing game similar to solitaire. Google “Shunting Puzzles” to find Adrian Wymans excellent site.
Women/girls who aren’t shoehorned into predefined gender roles are often pleased by their enjoyment of “male” hobbies. I’ve often mentioned to my wife that a sewing machine is just a machine tool for the fabrication of cloth items. No real difference between a sewing machine and any other machine tool really. Just one’s attitude.
mind the gap
I built model trains with my dad growing up. We used to stop and count train cars as trains went by. We went all over the country and rode old steam trains. I’m still fairly batty for trains. Both my kids (one boy, one girl) love trains, including model trains.
In general, what I notice is that model trains themselves are not very popular these days. It’s hard to find models to build. The stores we used to frequent have all closed. It’s hard to order online.
As far as a pink train car, I’d only like it if that’s what the car itself was supposed to be. I can’t remember any off hand, but there must have been something pink at some time. Other than that, you can color me vaguely insulted. 
This is like asking why girls play with dolls and boys play with toy trucks and airplanes.
I cannot speak for their daily experience, but some of them live in Asheville, NC which makes Haight Ashbury look like Wallstreet. They have lamented that despite trying to avoid funneling them into stereotypes, they choose them themselves.
My impression is that they were hoping for a more balanced result. I also think that such a result would have been very supportive for their personal philosophies regarding gender roles. I don’t have much of a child in this fight, though I was a bit disappointed when one of the girls lost interest in all of the sciencey things we would do in favor of princess time.
That’s a much bigger and more pervasive message than most of us realize, this standardization of male interests and "other"ing of female interests. It shows up here all the bleeding time. We get a lot of threads about “Why do girls like ponies?” or “What’s up with women and shoes?” or “Why are so few women into cars?” or “Why don’t females* like model trains?” and vanishing few where those questions are reversed. The underlying message is that “guy” things are inherently cool and interesting and desirable so a woman’s unaccountable lack of interest has to be explained, and “girl” things are so inherently uncool and uninteresting and undesirable that their appeal is unimaginable and must be explained.
For me personally, a working model of anything is interesting for a few minutes, but only for a few minutes unless it’s a working model of something I have some interest in the larger object. If someone showed me a working scale model of a spinning wheel, I’d be fascinated for hours. But a train? Five minutes, tops. As for trains as toys…well, they seem kind of limiting to me. Trains run on tracks, and only on tracks. They can’t climb mountains or explore riverbanks and jungles or perform death-defying leaps across ravines, and all of those things figured heavily into my play with cars and trucks (most of which I had to pilfer from my brother’s room, because nobody ever bought me stuff like that).
*Females? Seriously? When did we start letting Ferengi post here?
In a way, this post answers the OP’s question. :rolleyes: