Gendering

[tilly_stratford]

*At school, I was about six years old. Some of my classmates (boys) were running around in the forest playing soldiers at war. I asked if I could join their game. The hesitated, but eventually said I could join, but because I was a girl I had to pretend to be their cook. I wanted to play with them, so I accepted and had to spend the entire game sitting on a fallen tree trunk watching them running back and forth in the woods.

*At the McDonald's drive through with my parents and Tiny, I was about eight. My sister and I wanted Happy Meals. The McDonald speaker guy asked if the Happy Meals were for boys or girls. To avoid getting the same toy, we said one of each. The girl toy was a plastic doll, the boy toy was a matchbox car.

*During my tenure at the book shop, a few years ago. Each summer we had to set up a so-called "man table" and "lady table". The man table would display crime fiction, biographies and history books. The lady table displayed Sophie Kinsella novels and dieting/self-improvement books.

*A couple of months ago, at the toy shop. I noticed the carnival costumes were separated into a boy aisle and a girl aisle. The boy aisle had a doctor costume. The girl aisle had a 1940s nurse costume with a short skirt. Ages 5 and up.

*A couple of months ago, a friend of the family was out buying baby clothes for my youngest niece. She wanted to buy a bodysuit with a printed train motif (my father works for the railroad). The cashier objected, because "trains are for boys".

*A few days ago. I was reading an essay on the website of one of Norway's biggest newspapers. The author disliked the proposed attempt at selling more football game tickets by introducing scantily clad cheerleaders as mid-game entertainment. The author suggested it would alienate many fans. The majority of the online commentators suggested the frigid feminazi bitch who wrote this essay needed a good dicking. The author was actually a man.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

Yeah, it's definitely a problematical situation, and seems to be getting worse than just a few years ago. (For example, I've heard complaints about there having been gender-neutral baby clothing items available a few years back, but now all of them are strongly gendered. Though I don't know how much of that is societal backlash against feminism and how much comes down to it now being the usual thing for parents to know the sex of the baby months before birth -- no need for shower gifts that could be suitable for either gender, or so goes the marketing thinking.)

Some weeks ago I reblogged apocalypsos' Tumblr post about how she gets children's meals in fast food drive-throughs because she's small and doesn't eat that much, and how she almost always claims to be buying them for a boy because the boy's toys are just so much more interesting than the girl's toys being offered. And I've definitely noticed that the last few times I was in a toy store -- even in the crafts-and-exploration aisle, the interesting experiments and messy stuff and educational toys are marketed for boys, while girls are meant to be satisfied with dress-up and jewelry-making and cookery (and all of it packaged in pink and lavender).

[tilly-stratford.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I definitely agree that the problem seems to be getting worse. It's very evident when I'm out looking for baby clothes, where it's all blue or all pink. I'm very thankful that my sister doesn't mind occasionally dressing her daughter in blue - though there's no end of people who think it's wrong, somehow.

[harbek.livejournal.com]

*beats head against desk*

Yep.

Fun fact: it used to be opposite, blue for girls and pink for boys, like, a century ago. It's all social programming, and it's really annoying, because it restricts what both genders can do and enjoy without being frowned upon or thought of us 'less' than their gender. Sigh.

[tilly-stratford.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't believe how many people try to tell me "it's biological" and "neanderthal women needed to be extra focused on the colour pink because they were the ones who picked berries" and whatever. Ugh. And I try to explain that blue used to be the "feminine colour" - the Virgin Mary's usually depicted in blue clothes, for instance.

[harbek.livejournal.com]

Pff, using berries as an excuse? What about blueberries, then? And the whole thing is silly anyway, cause colour recognition also depends on language and what we're taught to recognise. There's this great video where they tested it on an African or South-American tribe that had a completely different system of colour, and they could instantly tell the difference between two colours that we could barely distinguish, but if you put red and blue next to each other they needed a long time because they fell under the same word. (It's on youtube somewhere but I can't find it now.) So yeah, that argument is ridiculous anyway.

Which only goes to show that SO MUCH is social teaching in how we interact and see the world in general, because it shapes our brains. So. In this modern world where we don't need to fight to survive or squeeze out tons of babies, gender roles are total constructs, and should be disregard. (Though I admit it can be difficult to remember this in day-to-day life.)