smb (04/04/83)
Two different conversations last week got me wondering about this topic again. Both were with mothers who are trying their best to rear their children in a non-sexist fashion. One told me of a trip to a toy store with her 3-year-old daughter. They were looking at toy cars or some such, whereupon the daughter said, "now let's go look at the girls' toys." My friend is confident *she* never said anything to give Angela such ideas. (They live in Chapel Hill, a fairly liberal community.) The other woman involved regularly wears makeup, and her 2-year-old daughter likes to imitate her. Trouble is, her 5-year-old son wants to also. Comments, anyone? --Steve
mat (04/04/83)
The boys/girls toys ideas probably come from media/mass marketing, but I suspect that there is also some small amount of bias in children's culture -- peers, and role models in peer groups. (Nice big words) I admit to my own share of hangups and stereotypes. I can understand a woman having a thing about sports cars, but I cannot reconcile that image of a specific woman with an image of the same woman in a frilly dress. We men are having our share of problems with this liberation thing too. As to the makeup, I have no answer. I have a diagnosis, though. Society, AND most women, even liberated ones, have different ideas about dress, self-decoration (makeup) and so forth, for women than for men. I sure would be glad to see women chuck high heeled shoes; I shudder to thik what a lifetime of wearing those things will do to calf muscles and leg/hip muscle structures And besides, if I am talking to a woman on the way to a meeting, there is NO WAY even a tall woman, wearing those things, is going to be able to keep up with my natural stride and still be able to maintain a conversation. Oops, we were talking about makeup. This is one of the things that makes me glad I'm NOT a woman (no flames, I think that there are some real problems here) -- The amount of time that I would lose to the self-preening and decoration would excced by about a factor of ten the time that I have left in my cluttered day. Besides my own hangups about self--decoration, I have grave doubts about getting all men to treat women decently as a general rule until we stop having women decorate themselves to make themselves (sexually) attractive without having men do the same thing. No, I am NOT going to start, I have too many hangups about this as it is and I suspect a lot of other men do to, like, say, 90% of the men in our society. But why do men whistle at women, or make obscene comments, or ... ? Sorry, but I believe that the message that we give men is that women are there as decorated objects, and that men are there to observe and enjoy. I don't support the unilateral nature of the thing, but I am fairly convinced that these messages ARE broadcast, and that we are brainwashed into a whole bunch of asymetric attitudes by society's conventions. If anyone has real solutions to this, please publish them, and then we can let her go to work on solving world hunger, Latin American dictatorships, and the like. -!hou5e!mat Mark Terribile Duke of deNet PS. Is it too soon to teach the boy about shaving cream, and aftershave. I realize that these are matters of personal hygeine, and not decoration, but it seems to be a ritual that could be substituted. Or she could tell the boy to go outside and play with his toy cars ??? ???
gnu (04/05/83)
Why doesn't she let her 5-year-old son wear makeup? He'll probably quit if his friends end up laughing at him, or if he finds it too much bother for not much result (which is probably true at his level of skill; then again, he might not be too judgemental). Perhaps he'll drop the idea and later move to a place or exist in a society where it's permitted -- say, San Francisco -- then can pick it up again if he chooses. If every time a little "problem" like this comes up we run screaming to give the kid a toy car, we'll never find out what real liberation is like. Let the kid figure it out himself, he's the one who'll have to live with what he chooses... John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems
janetr (04/05/83)
I have an almost-6-year-old, and have spend the last 5+ years being amazed at how stereotypically sexist little kids are, regardless of their parents' non-sexism--esp the 3-6 year olds. Examples: a militantly feminist friend whose daughter wants to be a cheerleader or airline stewardess, a boy whose pediatrician is a woman but who insists nonetheless that she's a nurse and that only men can be doctors. My friend Mo's daughter wanted Mo to get a job so she (Mo) could wear *dresses* like I do--that seemed to be the only thing about my job that made an impression on the kid! The best explanation of this that I've read is that kids learn the rules before they learn the exceptions, and in the rule- learning period, they're typically very rigid in denying evidence that doesn't fit the rule. In the 3-6 period, they're learning sex-roles, and they certainly have plenty of evidence from the world beyond their parents to show them what the rules are. Then they spend older childhood, adolescence and adulthood letting in all the subtleties and variations, and moderating the rules they learned in the pre-7 period. As for the two kids wanting to do makeup, even tho it's a thing that only women do, it's also so similar to finger-painting and halloween makeup that I suppose those aspects outweigh the women-only side of it. As an aside, I read recently about a study in which adults were shown a neutrally dressed young baby, told the baby was a certain sex, and then allowed to play with the baby. Observers (who didn't know the sex of the baby or what the parents had been told) were usually able to figure out what the parents had been told because the adults played very differently with boy and girl babies. So I despair of our ever resolving the nature/nurture question.
filed01 (04/05/83)
Most of the comments in the follow-up to the article on non-sexist child rearing are sexist. True, in the last 200 years in western culture women have dresses more colorfully and with more adornment than men. Prior to that, it was not true.In many non-western cultures, native american for example, make-up was used by men (vide: war paint.)The 5-year old boy's desire for play with make-up is a problem precisely because of the sexist attitudes in our society. Dress is stereotyped and elicits these attitudes.How to handle the situation? If the boy's identificion as a male is secure, there may be no problem in letting him play. The boy could also be told that men and wom dress differently, without attaching positive or negative values to this difference (i.e. not: it's silly for a boy to put on make-up.)
prgclb (04/07/83)
Our local public television station recently re-ran the Nova show entitled "The Pinks and the Blues," examining this sex-role nature/nurture question. It was really surprising how many women said they wanted boy babies (of course, it was assumed that the only kind of babies men want are boy babies). Some of the women said "I want a boy for my husband," or "I want a boy for my first baby, and a girl for my second." My wife and I must be unusual -- we both wanted a girl baby the first time around. I found myself reluctant to admit this to friends and colleagues, because "real men" want only boy babies. And the few times I did admit it, people seemed perplexed. Incidentally, we did get a boy. If these attitudes persist, even among us young parents who championed equality of the sexes throughout the 1970s, I too doubt that we'll ever achieve equality, let alone resolve the nature/nurture question. Carl Blesch Bell Labs - Naperville, Ill. IH 2A-159, (312) 979-3360 ihuxm!prgclb
leichter (04/10/83)
On the "wanting a boy" vs. "wanting a girl" question: The main thing the
survey you cite shows is the narrow information produced by surveys. A
big study was done - by something like the Center for Population Studies
at Princeton - on the population effects of technology that would allow
people to choose the sex of their children. They predicted, as best I
can recall, a short-term increase in male births, but this gets cancelled
out fairly quickly and the total population returns to, and remains, at
about 50-50. Apparently these attitudes, will present, are very shallowly
based.
-- Jerry ("My parents wanted a girl")
decvax!yale-comix!leichter
leichter@yalewm (04/19/83)
I remember reading something about how in China, they developed a reasonably cheap and accurate method of determining the sex of a relatively undeveloped fetus. That, accompanied by the ready availability and low social stigma of abortions, made it reasonable to "choose" the sex of your children by eliminating the ones you didn't want. As I recall from the article I read, the number of females so aborted was far greater than chance would expect. Can anyone remember the reference for this? I can't seem to find it. This would seem to contradict the Princeton study. Oh, and about the Princeton study, how in the world did they make their predictions? Sounds like guessing to me. Wm Leler - UNC Chapel Hill