Why should boys get to take it to the max while girls are left with pink play sets?

Stheno · 18-11-2012 12:41AM

emo72 wrote: »

i dont differentiate between driving a bus or driving an artic. i get what you are saying about 40 passengers versus carrying goods. however if you lose control of a 40 foot artic you could wipe a bus out. equal responsibility there really.

i have a daughter and i really try to not pigeonhole her either. so i understand the basis of this thread. but there is a thread to be started about the jobs women wont do. it should be interesting. men are getting a hard time .

To be honest I think both genders get a hard time. As someone with no kids I could start a thread about how parents have it easier as they can just claim their kid is sick so they need to go home early/they can't travel for work as they've kids, and on and on and on and on.

Why do you think men get a hard time? Wage statistics still show a disparity between what men and women are paid, and a lot of part time/low paid jobs are done by women?

Stheno · 18-11-2012 12:45AM

emo72 wrote: »

female plumber or electrician? i have never came across one. have you got any info for percentages ? i would say less than 5% for either profession. lets be generous, say 10%. have you any statistics? im sure some exist, but its hardly EQUAL!

No I've no statistics, but I've certainly come across quite a few, probably one in 20 so around five percent? That's just my experience though. I never mentioned equality, I mentioned that previously male professions, and potentially unpleasant ones are now becoming ones which women enter. The equality flips both ways if you think e.g. of nurses

I work in IT and am the only woman on my team of seven. That's not uncommon in my experience, I think it's about 20-25% of people who work in IT are female.

emo72 · 18-11-2012 12:51AM

so you have no info about women plumbers or electricians? im just saying i never heard of one. they are great professions to have but i never heard of one, thats all. i certainly never heard of one female working in the sewers for dublin city council or south dublin co. co.

i have never come across one woman doing refuse collecting. ever! do you have any info? im sure google may throw something up, somewhere. hardly equal though.

the glass ceiling may be hard to break. but seriously they arent too concerned about the glass floor. in the meantime, us regular guys are happy to take up the slack!

Solair · 18-11-2012 12:54AM

I didn't really have many 'gender specific' toys growing up.

Loads of lego, art and craft stuff and I used to dismantle everything mechanical I could get my hands on. Everything in the house was opened and taken apart. I even took the motor out of my mom's hairdryer coz I needed to make a windmill....

I've a few female friends who did the same though.

We used to have to make a lot of our own toys in the 80s! You'd have to make up some mad game involving stuff you found in the garden / street combined with bikes, footballs and possibly trying to get the cat to take part...

I just remember hours out playing mad games with friends all based around utterly made up stuff. Lots of imagination involved. Weird games, treasure hunts, I even remember we ran a whole series of plays (and charged our parents proper fees to see them!)

We had cable tv and a computer but I can't really remember watching all that much tv... It was more the backdrop to doing other stuff.

I just remember as a kid spending a hell of a lot of time up trees etc etc
(the girls did too)

I think kids these days seem a bit over dependent on off the shelf entertainment and are perhaps a bit sedentary and wrapped in cotton wool.

There was a lot to be said for the 80s. I'd a fairly idyllic childhood come to think of it and all without gender specific toys lol

Stheno · 18-11-2012 12:56AM

emo72 wrote: »

so you have no info about women plumbers or electricians? im just saying i never heard of one. they are great professions to have but i never heard of one, thats all. i certainly never heard of one female working in the sewers for dublin city council or south dublin co. co.

i have never come across one woman doing refuse collecting. ever! do you have any info? im sure google may throw something up, somewhere. hardly equal though.

the glass ceiling may be hard to break. but seriously they arent too concerned about the glass floor. in the meantime, us regular guys are happy to take up the slack!

Seriously dude, I think you need to chill. I know three female electricians, and one female plumber all based in Dublin

Your obsession with sewers and rubbish collecting is blinding you to the fact that both genders can be pidgeonholed as being the primary gender for pretty horrible jobs. Jobs that are unpleasant are neither a male or female dominated area, both genders do lots of nasty jobs.

I've pretty much lost any interest in continuing this conversation, given the very one sided approach you are taking to it.

emo72 · 18-11-2012 12:57AM

Stheno wrote: »

No I've no statistics, but I've certainly come across quite a few, probably one in 20 so around five percent? That's just my experience though. I never mentioned equality, I mentioned that previously male professions, and potentially unpleasant ones are now becoming ones which women enter. The equality flips both ways if you think e.g. of nurses

I work in IT and am the only woman on my team of seven. That's not uncommon in my experience, I think it's about 20-25% of people who work in IT are female.

are we even arguing? ! you seem so reasonable.

admiralofthefleet · 18-11-2012 12:57AM

any other parent notice how 90% of the floor space in a clothes shop childrens section is taken up by girls clothes? boys dont get a look in at all

Stheno · 18-11-2012 12:59AM

emo72 wrote: »

are we even arguing? ! you seem so reasonable.

No but you are very much obsessing on one area, and seem to have a "Men have it worse than women and get a hard time" focus which means you are not giving much weight to anything said that contradicts that.

emo72 · 18-11-2012 12:59AM

Stheno wrote: »

Seriously dude, I think you need to chill. I know three female electricians, and one female plumber all based in Dublin

.

wow. i was obviously wrong. cant argue with those statistics.

Solair · 18-11-2012 01:00AM

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

any other parent notice how 90% of the floor space in a clothes shop childrens section is taken up by girls clothes? boys dont get a look in at all

That's the same in all stores for adults too.
I think Irish retail buyers assume men just wear potato sacks or something.

I actually prefer to shop on the continent for menswear. The Irish & Brits don't really bother much with it.

Stheno · 18-11-2012 01:01AM

emo72 wrote: »

wow. i was obviously wrong. cant argue with those statistics.

Hey I never said they were statistics, if you want statistics for a breakdown of women in employment see

http://ec.europa.eu/ireland/ireland_in_the_eu/impact_of_eu_on_irish_women/index_en.htm#3

emo72 · 18-11-2012 01:03AM

Stheno wrote: »

Hey I never said they were statistics, if you want statistics for a breakdown of women in employment see

http://ec.europa.eu/ireland/ireland_in_the_eu/impact_of_eu_on_irish_women/index_en.htm#3

im seriously gonna chill. its after hours after all. nothing too serious here.

have the craic stheno!

Solair · 18-11-2012 01:08AM

I think though sending girls and boys to separate schools is totally nuts.
It can turn out some very maladjusted adults with no ability to relate to the opposite sex.

It's all grand if you've friends of the opposite sex outside of school, but if you don't, you can end up a bit weird!

I know a few lads who'd literally never had a proper conversation or worked with a woman until they arrived in university!!!

I went to an all male school and actually hated it. Totally weird, unnatural environment! You need a bit of balance in life!

The toys thing is minor in comparison to that issue.

Stheno · 18-11-2012 01:12AM

Solair wrote: »

I think though sending girls and boys to separate schools is totally nuts.
It can turn out some very maladjusted adults with no ability to relate to the opposite sex.

It's all grand if you've friends of the opposite sex outside of school, but if you don't, you can end up a bit weird!

I know a few lads who'd literally never had a proper conversation or worked with a woman until they arrived in university!!!

I went to an all male school and actually hated it. Totally weird, unnatural environment! You need a bit of balance in life!

The toys thing is minor in comparison to that issue.

We'd a weird approach to it when I was in school.
To maximise subject choice across three schools, the VEC, the Convent and the Christian Brothers shared classes.

So girls wanting to do physics and honours maths went to the boys school for those, boys wanting to do accounting and chemistry went to the girls school for those, and the VEC took overflows of honours English classes.

I spent every day traipsing between all three schools, they were all within five minutes of each other, but sometimes you'd have two e.g. maths classes at different times of the day.

My worst day was Friday, Math in the CBS, back to the convent for two classes, up to the VEC for English, back to the convent for some other class, and ending with another Math class.

Did mean we got interaction with "smelly boys" though

Hobbies and sport can be a help with that too?

Some research and it's very mixed suggests better results for single sex schools

TeaAndCake · 18-11-2012 01:42AM

It's another poorly written piece of trash from the stain on Irish media that is Jennifer O'Connell. She is a smug, egotistical, hand-wringing "feminist" who has grandiose ideas about her own intellectual capacities and indeed trumped up ideas about that of her child. She is just another vocal idiot in a minority who have taken the feminism movement and driven its credibility into the ground as they fight to find any shred of what they perceive to be inequality, merely for the sake of doing so.

Instead of fighting for equality, what this woman and her cretinous ilk seek is that women or girls get every good thing that men apparently get, such as more spaces on a f-ing board game, while completely ignoring areas of gross inequality towards men. Is she out fighting for more women on the bin lorries? She sure isn't. Is she fighting the abhorrent imbalance in father:mother rights with regards to children in this country? She sure isn't.

She's the the type of woman to proclaim in the office "Men and women are completely equal, in each and every way" and then follow it up with "I'm not lifting that box, there's men here to do that".

The woman had the reasoning behind the 5-size groupings in Guess Who spelled out to her a number of times on her "blog" by people far smarter than she, yet in terms that even she should be able to understand, and yet she still protested "but WHY aren't there an equal number of men to women? Are you saying women aren't as important as men?!"

The fact that she is the "editor" of the cringeworthy, shambolic excuse for journalism that is "TheJournal.ie", probably the most biased and badly proofread "news" site on the Irish internet, should say more than enough about this woman but apparently it doesn't, as for some reason her unbearable whining is published occasionally in what are actually credible news sources. One can only assume that they're using it to troll the readers and drive page views. She receives more hatred than any other "author" I've come across and with good reason. Her pulling her article from Broadsheet.ie yesterday is proof that not only does she write inane nonsense that makes everyone with half a brain cringe, but that she can't even take criticism of her own stupidity.

The feminist movement has lost all credibility as it has moved from a cry of "equality" to "misandry" thanks to women such as O'Connell, yet the media reward them by giving what amounts to attention whores the attention they so desperately crave. I have no doubt, absolutely none, that if these people are continued to be given a platform to voice their anti-male agenda they will not only slow the equality movement to a stop, but will enact a move towards social regression.

Anyway, the article posted is nonsense. Boys and girls, men and women are very different. It's differences and variety that make life interesting, yet there are a small yet vocal minority in society who want to ignore the differences merely for the sake of doing so. You'd be wise to not give this woman and her tripe any more attention though.

ladypip · 18-11-2012 10:59AM

emo72 wrote: »

so you have no info about women plumbers or electricians? im just saying i never heard of one. they are great professions to have but i never heard of one, thats all. i certainly never heard of one female working in the sewers for dublin city council or south dublin co. co.

i have never come across one woman doing refuse collecting. ever! do you have any info? im sure google may throw something up, somewhere. hardly equal though.

the glass ceiling may be hard to break. but seriously they arent too concerned about the glass floor. in the meantime, us regular guys are happy to take up the slack!

I also know a female electrician & a female cobbler who was the first in Ireland in the 70's women have been breaking the glass floor for a long time.

GalwayGuy2 · 18-11-2012 11:43AM

any other parent notice how 90% of the floor space in a clothes shop childrens section is taken up by girls clothes? boys dont get a look in at all

Eh, it's not just in children's clothes. Men have an absolutely minimal amount of clothes in clothes Shop:P It's like an explosion of beautiful female clothes, and the men clothes just kind of shoved into a corner. I want shexy skinny jeans too:O

Shenshen · 18-11-2012 12:06PM

GalwayGuy2 wrote: »

Eh, it's not just in children's clothes. Men have an absolutely minimal amount of clothes in clothes Shop:P It's like an explosion of beautiful female clothes, and the men clothes just kind of shoved into a corner. I want shexy skinny jeans too:O

That's one of the reasons my husband shops mostly online for clothes.
No, not the skinny jeans, he's had his fair share of those in the early 80s, but for simple choice really.
Men's clothes sections in most Irish shops are abyssmal to say the least.

squod · 18-11-2012 12:06PM

GalwayGuy2 wrote: »

Eh, it's not just in children's clothes. Men have an absolutely minimal amount of clothes in clothes Shop:P It's like an explosion of beautiful female clothes, and the men clothes just kind of shoved into a corner. I want shexy skinny jeans too:O

I have to lol at all the trendy shops asking me to walk up stairs to look at their crap. Mad yokes.

Lyaiera · 18-11-2012 12:30PM

TeaAndCake wrote: »

Anyway, the article posted is nonsense. Boys and girls, men and women are very different. It's differences and variety that make life interesting, yet there are a small yet vocal minority in society who want to ignore the differences merely for the sake of doing so.

That sounds wonderful, men are men and women are women (except when they aren't.) What are the practicalities of it though. People are defined by actions, what should mean be doing and what should women be doing?

Solair · 18-11-2012 01:00PM

I think we do have to accept that in this society (and many others) there were seriously ridiculous stereotypes of who did what.

My grandad told me he was openly mocked and told he was a 'sissy' for wheeling his kids in a buggy in Dublin in the 60s. It's now quite normal to see guys with buggies, and even with babies in slings or whatever you call those things.

Guys in the past (more so) but still get a hard time for showing a creative streak or showing they have any emotions at all. Seems a lot of it came from Victorian notions of having a stiff upper lip and putting up with all sorts of ****e while remaining absolutely stoic of you were male (especially if working class)

Meanwhile women were literally banned from doing a lot of things, including going to university until almost the 20th century.

They still faced open discrimination until the late 70s at work too without equal pay etc etc.

We still have a long long to go to fully shake off off Victorian craziness!

Anyway, I'm off to do some manly coal mining or something.

18-11-2012 01:45PM

Awh man. I thought it was this Max.

Idjit · 18-11-2012 02:08PM

When I was little my teacher got cross with me for ignoring the 'girls' corner, where all the girls had those Baby Born toys. I had been bought one too but was apparently uninterested and spent the day playing with dinosaurs and remote control cars with the boys. My parents copped on and bought toys that leaned more towards what I was into.
To this day I am not maternal with children or into fashion or anything, and the same girls who played with Baby Born dolls in school are very 'girly' and mammyish. We all made a choice, I chose to ignore what I was given. If a kid doesn't like a toy, they'll use their imagination with a cardboard box or anything else that holds interest to them. Kids don't force themselves to like the toys they are bought.
It just goes to show that some girls are just born wanting to play with dolls and are maternal and some prefer more 'boyish' toys. It's not the toys themselves that make us who we are.

Fizzlesque · 18-11-2012 02:33PM

Solair wrote: »

I think we do have to accept that in this society (and many others) there were seriously ridiculous stereotypes of who did what.

My grandad told me he was openly mocked and told he was a 'sissy' for wheeling his kids in a buggy in Dublin in the 60s. It's now quite normal to see guys with buggies, and even with babies in slings or whatever you call those things.

Guys in the past (more so) but still get a hard time for showing a creative streak or showing they have any emotions at all. Seems a lot of it came from Victorian notions of having a stiff upper lip and putting up with all sorts of ****e while remaining absolutely stoic of you were male (especially if working class)

Meanwhile women were literally banned from doing a lot of things, including going to university until almost the 20th century.

They still faced open discrimination until the late 70s at work too without equal pay etc etc.

We still have a long long to go to fully shake off off Victorian craziness!

Anyway, I'm off to do some manly coal mining or something.

I agree, a lot of stereotyping ideas can still linger even if they're no longer mainstream. Years ago (many many years ago) I lived in a squat in Holland and to keep warm used burn wood, that I'd find, in a home-made wood burner (fashioned from an old veg oil tin and connected up to a flue from the previous room-squatter's proper wood burning stove) which involved using the shared axe in the back of the houses (it was a row of derelict houses) to chop the planks of wood into smaller pieces. I used go use the axe very early in the morning because I didn't want any of the men either offering to do it for me or criticising the way I was doing it.

One morning my neighbour passed while I was chopping and I immediately felt self conscious, but carried on regardless. A few evenings later he cooked dinner for me in his room and when I arrived he was still in the middle of cooking. As the evening progressed, I mentioned the morning I'd been chopping wood and how I'd felt, mostly I was commenting on how silly it was of me. He told me he completely understood because he'd grown up in a very traditional home and when I'd arrived and he was still cooking he'd felt a twinge of embarrassment - a man cooking!

Even though we both knew it was silly for me, a woman, to feel intimidated by men being present while I chopped wood, for fear they'd laugh at my efforts - and silly for him to feel embarrassed at a woman seeing him cooking, but some subliminal messages from our childhoods had found itself a home in the corners of our minds and jumped out to surprise us much later in life.

Took me years to undo a lot of the childhood stuff I'd learned about what women 'can' and 'can't' do. Stuff I doubted about myself 20 years ago makes me shake my head in amazement today. And it's not only women who can be affected by silly 'rules' about what each gender can and can't do. As my friend from all those years ago showed me.

GalwayGuy2 · 18-11-2012 02:44PM

Took me years to undo a lot of the childhood stuff I'd learned about what women 'can' and 'can't' do. Stuff I doubted about myself 20 years ago makes me shake my head in amazement today. And it's not only women who can be affected by silly 'rules' about what each gender can and can't do. As my friend from all those years ago showed me.

Very intresting story. I want to learn some form of sowing so that if I buy a nice pair of pants and I can fix them if they rip, but whenever I tell my mother that she sighs and rolls her eyes (I leave out the pants part and just say I should learn to sow) and the derision hurled on men (by an equal amount of men and women) for being vain or "Homoerotic" on nights out. Hell, they aren't hurting anybody so why should anybody insult them.

And a young woman (18-20ish) babysitting to make some money is welcomed, while a man is either not hired or under suspect (there are exceptions).
I'm just mentioning the perceptions on men as I know them first hand (besides the babysitting example)

Fizzlesque · 18-11-2012 03:31PM

GalwayGuy2 wrote: »

Very intresting story. I want to learn some form of sowing so that if I buy a nice pair of pants and I can fix them if they rip, but whenever I tell my mother that she sighs and rolls her eyes (I leave out the pants part and just say I should learn to sow)....QUOTE]

I grew up with four brothers and my dad and there was no way I was taking on the role of 'little mother' despite my grandmother's best bullying ways. I can still remember her horror when she came to visit one day and my brother was sewing some garment for himself. She really believed I should be the one doing it as I was the only female in the house.

No reason at all why you shouldn't learn how to sew if that's what you want - personally, I hate sewing (WonderWeb is my hero - for adjusting the length of trousers) but can do it if I really have to. One time I was told to sew the hem of curtains in one of the rooms of our house and I used a stapler instead. Did the trick, the curtain hem was no longer hanging and that was the objective. Of course, my grandmother was horrified, once again, she really despaired of me ever learning 'how to be a proper woman'. All my life choices horrified her (and secretly I loved annoying her).

Lyaiera · 18-11-2012 06:09PM

I've spent the past few weeks reading up on sewing and knitting. I think it's generally quite rare for any young people to sew or knit, especially beyond taking up a hem and sewing on buttons. What I think is great is that a huge amount of young women are "returning" to it, not because anyone was forced into it because it was a gender appropriate thing, but because it's something they want to do. That's real freedom. And if a guy wants to sew then go for it. It's practical and you might enjoy it. I saw two guys obviously buying fabric for themselves in a fabric shop the other day. That women can go to it freely has to mean that men going to it freely is could be come just as socially acceptable (but bollox to a lot of social acceptability.)

And as for sewing being a girly thing, I have computer parts arriving tomorrow. I'll spend tomorrow building a HTPC from scratch (although choosing the parts was the real start) then I'll install an OS (still haven't decided between Linux and Windows) and get it setup with the TV. And I had a blast repairing my mother's old sewing machine, and getting it going again. Sewing clothes: I'll try that, greasing gears and oiling mechanisms: I'll have a go at that too.

TheBegotten · 18-11-2012 06:25PM

I have to admit, the whole 'toys for boys/girls' thing have been taken a bit too far in recent years. Even an ad I saw for a toy electric guitar was dominated by 9 year-old Depeche Mode imitators, whereas a 1/2-sized acoustic (it was even pink!) was represented explicitly by girls. Not even music is safe now...

TheBegotten · 18-11-2012 06:26PM

I have to admit, the whole 'toys for boys/girls' thing have been taken a bit too far in recent years. Even an ad I saw for a toy electric guitar was dominated by 9 year-old Depeche Mode imitators, whereas a 1/2-sized acoustic (it was even pink!) was represented explicitly by girls. Not even music is safe now...

Why should boys get to take it to the max while girls are left with pink play sets?

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