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Parents keep childs gender secret.
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25-05-2011 4:08pm#1http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/babies/article/995112--parents-keep-child-s-gender-secret
very interesting article about parents who are raising their child genderless.
I think gender roles begin being forced on children at very young ages, and is constantly being reinforced through their childhoods. here's an example:
it must be very difficult, but I applaud the parents and wish the very best for all their children.
what do you think?0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZn_lJoN6PIComments
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,217 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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Oh don't get me wrong L I think there is a huge load of railroading of gender roles in society from a very young age. The woman in the vid showed some good examples(though GI joe does have a female equivalent in her vidas for gender differences being innate because male and female brains are different, the thing is that those physical differences might have absolutely huge significance when it comes to body image etc. but might have no significance outside of that.
). It's both obvious and subtle. Even so, there does seem to be average diffs between the genders on a sliding scale of course. Social interaction for a start. The genders even as small toddlers are usually different in how they approach play in social groups.
I do think it's a good idea not to lead kids one way or the other though. Let them figure out where they may lie on that curve and support them in that. I'd add if you let them figure out where they lie on that curve and it turns out to be eye wateringly girly or macho, then support them in that too.Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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I never know how to respond to these threads, I don't think when I was growing up that I had any real sense of gender identity and I don't mean that I was unaware, I'm sure I was but it wasn't relevant to me and I'm guessing for most kids it isn't. I was "self aware" in the sense that I was first and foremost a human being and that was how I saw everybody else, gender was very much a secondary thing. I wasn't particularly girly in the sense that I was as comfortable playing rounders and soccer as I was hanging out with girls (actually probably more comfortable playing cowboys and indians) and I've always believed that's how childhood is until society and puberty demonstrate the differences. And there is no getting around that. I also have a daughter who is very much the same and we often talk now about how we think about gender and the term genderless is favourable in our home. I don't think I enforced my way of thinking on her because it's not a very conscious thing but I genuinely believe that all kids, until they are shown otherwise are not confined by gender models.
I would always let a child be who they are by their own rules though.0 -
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I'm alright, my parents pretty much conceded to my demands for ride on tractors, trailers, matchbox cars, transformers, He Man figures, cap guns and so on.
They did try, they did buy me a dress up nurse uniform, a baby doll, and a pram several Christmases in a row, but there was never any defined 'girls play with these, boys play with those' definitions.
All my friends were mixed, it was when I started primary school I was baffled at being treated differently, for PE the boys played football while the girls were sent to a corner of a field and told to throw a ball to each other
I was on a 5 a side team outside of school!
That's why its so baffling to me when it happens, or people tell me I should have a pink <item> because I am <gender>.
It was a total shock to go out in the real world and be occasionally treated like an alien.0 -
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http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html?c=y&page=2Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.
We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.
But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America, to be published later this year. Thus we see, for example, a pink headband encircling the bald head of an infant girl.
Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically? How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?
“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years. For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.
The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.
For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.
In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.
Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.
So the baby boomers were raised in gender-specific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers, girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and tomboy play clothes were acceptable.
When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, with its anti-feminine, anti-fashion message, the unisex look became the rage—but completely reversed from the time of young Franklin Roosevelt. Now young girls were dressing in masculine—or at least unfeminine—styles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing for two years.
“One of the ways [feminists] thought that girls were kind of lured into subservient roles as women is through clothing,” says Paoletti. “ ‘If we dress our girls more like boys and less like frilly little girls . . . they are going to have more options and feel freer to be active.’ ”
John Money, a sexual identity researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, argued that gender was primarily learned through social and environmental cues. “This was one of the drivers back in the ’70s of the argument that it’s ‘nurture not nature,’ ” Paoletti says.
Gender-neutral clothing remained popular until about 1985. Paoletti remembers that year distinctly because it was between the births of her children, a girl in ’82 and a boy in ’86. “All of a sudden it wasn’t just a blue overall; it was a blue overall with a teddy bear holding a football,” she says. Disposable diapers were manufactured in pink and blue.
Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change. Expectant parents learned the sex of their unborn baby and then went shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise. (“The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” Paoletti says.) The pink fad spread from sleepers and crib sheets to big-ticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys. Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when the next child was a boy.
Some young mothers who grew up in the 1980s deprived of pinks, lace, long hair and Barbies, Paoletti suggests, rejected the unisex look for their own daughters. “Even if they are still feminists, they are perceiving those things in a different light than the baby boomer feminists did,” she says. “They think even if they want their girl to be a surgeon, there’s nothing wrong if she is a very feminine surgeon.”
Another important factor has been the rise of consumerism among children in recent decades. According to child development experts, children are just becoming conscious of their gender between ages 3 and 4, and they do not realize it’s permanent until age 6 or 7. At the same time, however, they are the subjects of sophisticated and pervasive advertising that tends to reinforce social conventions. “So they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,’’ says Paoletti. “They are so interested—and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.”
In researching and writing her book, Paoletti says, she kept thinking about the parents of children who don’t conform to gender roles: Should they dress their children to conform, or allow them to express themselves in their dress? “One thing I can say now is that I’m not real keen on the gender binary—the idea that you have very masculine and very feminine things. The loss of neutral clothing is something that people should think more about. And there is a growing demand for neutral clothing for babies and toddlers now, too.”
“There is a whole community out there of parents and kids who are struggling with ‘My son really doesn’t want to wear boy clothes, prefers to wear girl clothes.’ ” She hopes one audience for her book will be people who study gender clinically. The fashion world may have divided children into pink and blue, but in the world of real individuals, not all is black and white.0 -
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You know, the more I think about it, the more things like this I'm remembering. Like in second class in primary school, the girls were taught how to knit and the boys were taught how to do this really bizarre "string art", winding string through nails on a board to make a picture. I asked if I could try the string thing and was flatly refused because that was "for the boys". It's shocking when you think about it.Silverfish wrote: »All my friends were mixed, it was when I started primary school I was baffled at being treated differently, for PE the boys played football while the girls were sent to a corner of a field and told to throw a ball to each other
I was on a 5 a side team outside of school!0 -
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Thank god i had such laid back parents when it came to this stuff, little things like my parents letting me get black and blue flashy runners from the boys section instead of making me get pink ones and not really caring what toys, even though i did have girly stuff, i played with made me a happy little child
I think having older brothers helped, i always wanted to play with their stuff and when they would have no one to play with theyd always ask me and i loved it, imagine a parent turning around saying no you cant play soldiers with your brother its for boys!
Anyways just reading posts about the colours...a couple of years ago i went into a phone shop to buy a phone, saw a nice one and said yeah i'll have that one, the guy took out the pink version of the phone, em thats not the one i want, oh i just thought you'd want this one, eh no i'll have the black one. I was 21 a the time ffs!
Oh and that picture a few posts above, the laid back childhood made all the difference i'm now a female engineer 0 -
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Or we could look at it that as you said "Girl" is an insult. Still after the femimist movement "Girl" is less valued than "Man" as a gender concept. So when a man acts like a woman it demeans him in societies eyes. When a girl acts like a boy it elevates her(not always of course, confident women can be seen as harpies). Women have more freedom in your roles, because you have more access to and choice between both gender values, but still there is the element of "aping your betters" going on under the surface of society. That for all the talk those qualities associated with "Man" are for the most part the highest ones society values, with the notable exception of motherhood.
Basically my point, yes
Just was looking at it from the male point of view rather than making the argument about how it affects girls. The 'don't be such a girl' thing is said to guys a lot (hell, it's even said to girls), and I think it's seriously limiting and causes a lot of problems for boys who may be 'effeminate' in their tastes (whatever that really means :pac:). 0 -
Girls don't get criticized nearly as heavily for being boyish as boys do for being girlish. 'Girl' is an insult (you're such a girl! don't be a girl!). 'Man' is a compliment (man up! be a man!). We can wear pants, but if they wear skirts they'll probably get beat up.
I posted this before during a similar discussion but again I'm reminded of this quote from "The Cement Garden":Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.Everything's reinforcing it from all angles in men, but after the feminism movement, we have a lot more freedom from our roles which could explain why there's so many tomboys but so few of the opposite.
And there'll only be a few as long as this bullshít happens.Hot pink-toenailed boy in J. Crew ad sparks controversy
When J. Crew sent out its latest catalog, we doubt that the classic clothing company expected it would be blasted by social conservatives as "transgendered child propaganda." But alas, it has.
The images in question fall under pages titled "Saturday with Jenna" -- featuring products personally favored by J. Crew president and creative director Jenna Lyons and her family. This particular Saturday for Jenna includes painting her five-year-old son Beckett's toenails pink. The caption reads, "Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon."
Cue the outrage from America's culture warriors.
"Yeah, well, it may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who'll be affected by your 'innocent' pleasure," Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a Fox News op-ed. "If you have no problem with the J. Crew ad, how about one in which a little boy models a sundress? What could possibly be the problem with that?"
I]yeah, it's all about her pleasure, clearly the kid in the picture is having no fun whatsoever[/I
Erin Brown of the Media Research Center took the criticism a step further -- after being sure to remind readers that J. Crew is a fashion favorite of First Lady Michelle Obama -- accusing the company of exploiting young Beckett to advance the cause of "liberal, transgendered identity politics."
The ABC News report on the kerfuffle, below, includes a reaction from Sarah Manley, who set off a similar firestorm last Halloween after posting photos of her young son dressed up as his unconventional idol: Daphne from "Scooby Doo." Manley said today of the J.Crew ad, "If the roles had been reversed and the photo...had been of a little girl playing in the mud with trucks, nobody would have batted an eye."
I thought the ad was just lovely.
I'm starting to feel that guys will end up more "trapped" by these gender assignments than girls.0 -
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