Gender, Part I: "be girly or else"

Let me just get this out of the way: men and women (and also boys and girls) are biologically different from each other. There are certainly physical differences, as well as observable psychological differences, that can't be denied. I will never argue that men and women are the same. My concerns are not about the biological differences, but with the pressures of our society that magnify, ritualize, and eroticize those differences to the detriment of both sexes.

Here's an example: men have larger bodies than women. Their shoulders are broader, their muscles larger. They are on average taller than women. What have we done with this difference? We have magnified it by expecting boys/men to get larger muscles and expecting girls/women to be skinnier and diminutive. We have ritualized these expectations by making body size awareness a part of coming of age (which is happening earlier and earlier these days, btw. More on that in Part II). And we have eroticized it by holding up bulky men as the sexy ones, and skinny, frail women as beautiful.

I know women (who are we kidding? I dare you to find a woman for whom this is NOT true!) who hang their own sexiness almost 100% on how skinny they are. There are dire consequences to this exaggeration of difference, most easily seen in the tragedy of eating disorders in girls or the abuse of steroids amongst boys. Is highlighting, magnifying, and eroticizing the slight difference in body size worth the price our children are paying? If your answer is, “No!” then we need to be careful about the images we allow our children to see (advertisements) and the language we use with them (“oh, what a big, strong boy you are” vs. “oh, what an adorable cute little girl you are”).

Here's another dare: find me a difference between men and women--a measurable, biological difference, that our society hasn't tried to magnify and eroticize.

Another way that male and female "traits" get pushed on our kids is the toys we direct them to. We buy our 6 month old girls little dolls (even though all they are learning to do is grab, stack, and open things) and we buy our baby boys Tonka trucks. When we see a baby while on a walk with our daughters, we ooh and aah over the cute little baby, but it is the construction site down the block that we marvel over with our sons. And then when our five year old daughters are playing tea party with their dolls and our five year old sons are working on the race car track, we smile and say, "Isn't it amazing how boys and girls are drawn to different things?!" This kills me. If you want your daughter to be girly (or whatever you think feminine is), go ahead and push her towards that. But don’t look up five years later and say that she is super girly by nature.

Hello?! Am I the only one who doesn't want to actively push Grace and Natalie towards typical feminine pursuits, while ignoring all the other diverse toys that are out there? It's not that I don't want them to be the girls that they are or the women that they will become. I do not want to raise genderless children. Grace totally has a tea set. And loves it. What I want is for Grace to show me what she is interested in, and I will encourage that. Same for Natalie. Grace actually loves caring for babies. Baby dolls and puzzles are probably her favorite toys. I love that she wants to take care of them. I am especially proud when she asks for the sling or tries to nurse them. But I will not continually buy her all the doll accessories and forget that she also loves trains and that her favorite jammies have a construction scene on them with diggers. If Grace or Natalie grows up to be the most feminine girl of all time, it will be because that was her nature and we were following her interests, not because I decided to surround her with girl things to make sure she ended up being feminine.

And this brings me to my last point for this “Part I” post on gender. We have set our society up around these perceived gender differences to the extent that anything or anyone that threatens them, threatens us. Why is being called a "girl," (or try fag, pussy, etc.) such the ultimate insult for boys? We are so threatened by people who don’t fulfill their duty by being appropriately feminine or masculine, that we ridicule and alienate them for being different.

As a parent, I want to see my children grow up being valued for who they are. I don’t hold typical masculine traits as better than feminine ones, and I am not trying to strip my daughters of their natural femininity. I simply want to open them to the broad spectrum of life’s choices, instead of limiting them by shoving society’s gender expectations down their throats.

Grace plays tea party, but it is almost exclusively with Daddy, Grandpa C., Grammy, and Mike. It is critical that in our effort to open our daughters to life’s possibilities, we don’t undermine the beauty and/or importance of typical girl behaviors by having men dismiss them. I love that three of the four tea party guests are men.

In Part II:
-Finally, an answer to the all-important question, “What is wrong with Disney princesses?”
-A discussion ot “adorn them with enough accessories, and they will become mannequins.”
-Why daddy (and/or other male figures) are so important to a girl’s future sexual health

Vote for my next blog topic

I'm mulling over a few new blog post ideas. Vote for your favorite:

1. Peak oil and disaster preparedness

some clips and blogs about it: http://aftermathblog.wordpress.com/multimedia/peak-oil/
doomsday-type view of the problem: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/


2. Why I care about gender issues and about framing gender language for my children (what's wrong with Disney princesses, anyway?)


3. Moving towards a simpler existence that involves living closer to the earth in as many ways as possible, including buying nothing new and growing my own food:

Compact: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/13/BAGH3H7DH71.DTL

A simple living blog I read (the author is also a compacter): http://simplereduce.blogspot.com/

"I cried during 50 First Dates," and other confessions

It's true. Yes, I know it was a B comedy with predictable jokes and some borderline offensive portrayals of Hawaiian culture. While I have been known to love me a good Adam Sandler flick, (Happy Gilmore, anyone?) I usually gravitate towards the more arty side of Hollywood (Supersize Me, The Motorcycle Diaries, In America). But something about the ending to 50 First Dates really got to me. And I am not talking about a tear in my eye kind of thing. I was sobbing. If you haven't seen it, and you want to, please stop reading. This is not a great movie, but it does have a thoughtful and somewhat unexpected ending, and spoilers are spoilers. You can come back and read this after you run to Blockbuster or move it up on your Netflix cue and watch it.

It wasn't the love story part that brought forth an epic amount of tears. It was the idea that Drew Barrymore's character, Lucy, can go through life and all of it's extreme joys and sorrows and frustrations, and not remember it. At the start of the movie, her family has things set up so that she never actually experiences any drama of life. Each day is the same day over and over again for this woman with no short term memory (the result of a car crash). We all have those boring or mildly amusing days that are unmemorable. But we also have the Big Days, when we go on a vacation, or get a job offer, or see an old friend, or make incredible love, or have a baby, or hike half dome. Lucy doesn't get to experience any of those Big Days until Adam Sandler's character, Henry, falls in love with her and demands that she live a full life, even though she won't remember it the next day.

Okay, this is the part you really shouldn't read if you haven't seen the movie. Last warning!!!


Really!!



Okay here goes. The fact that Lucy does experience all of these Big Day things: a wedding, sex, pregnancy, the baby's first kick, the birth of a child, her baby's first steps, and on and on but still can't remember is so tragic to me. The movie argues that this is better than a life unlived and I agree. But it is horrifying for me to imagine not remembering the experiences that are dearest to me: my daughter climbing a ladder for the first time, my husband holding me as I pushed her out of my body, my toddler saying her sister's name and laughing, the girls hugging their grandparents goodbye.

For the record, the same impuilse made me cry while watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, another movie that plays with memory and loss. Good God I cried hard with that one. At least that movie is a respectable arty film. Remember this post? And Mike's song that goes with it? I think the reason these films and Mike's song* make me so emotional is that I fear that I do live in a state of memory loss. I remember the Big Days, but how many little moments have escaped me?

The pictures I included have Natalie as she was for something like 14 months of her life: with two fingers in her mouth. Always those same two. Other moms would stop me in the supermarket, almost in tears, saying, "Oh, my son used to suck those two fingers!! That really brings me back!" I would smile knowingly, as though I understood what is is like to have your child grow up and miss these years. The truth is, I don't truly understand that yet. Yes, I love being a mom of little ones, but when people tell me to enjoy it because it flies by, I want to politely suggest that they are on crack. But we can expound on that another day. To continue with my anecdote, there I was, not a month ago, at an Angels game, when I saw another baby with her fingers in her mouth, just like Natalie had done when it hit me that Natalie hadn't done that in, I don't know, at least a week or two. Heck, when did she stop sucking those fingers? I really hadn't noticed that she had stopped doing something so elemental to her nature until I saw it in another kid. See what I mean about daily amnesia?

So I hope, like Lucy, that I get to experience both the Big Days and the daily ups and downs of life. And unlike Lucy, I pray I can remember them all and allow these memories to evoke the experiences that I hold so dear right now in my life.



*which isn't going to be on his album and for that I can not forgive him. But still check him out here (webpage) and here (MySpace).

And I thought I was some sort of camping stud.

My sister and Laura went "kayak camping" over the holiday weekend with their neighbors who have two young children. They drove to a spot near Olympic National Forest where they rented a kayak and a canoe, loaded them with a few essentials, and then paddled five miles to a remote island only reachable by boat. There, they pitched their tents and gathered firewood to camp for three days, at the end of which they kayaked back the five miles and drove home.

They made our drive-up, roadside camping experience where we had enough room to bring bags of kiddie books and wine, and were close enough to drive to the San Clemente WalMart to get a new french press, look like child's play. Humph.

On the other hand, as was the case when we were growing up and Katie was amazing at many things, I enjoy being in awe of her. Kayak camping? Who knew there was such a thing, and that you could do it on a whim with a four year old and a seven year old?