When I was teaching pre-school, the other teacher and I would build outrageous “settings” out of cardboard boxes. Once it was castles and thatched huts. Once it was a pirate ship and a mermaid beach. Once it was a fairy forest and a trolls cave (complete with twinkling gems…). Last year we graduated to dry wall and made a row of three houses (one was the kitchen, one the dress up room and one the “babies” room.) On the other side was a gas station and an ice cream parlor.

These kids came from everywhere. South America, the Philippines, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Poland, Korea, China…

When they came into school each year, they were told they could play with anything that they wanted. 99% of the time, the boys would head straight for the “boy” side of the room and the “girls” to the girl side. Every once in a while you’d get a girl who preferred blocks and a boy who preferred cooking, but most of the time it was pretty clear that the sexes were different. We never made the boys who liked to play dress up feel bad, nor the girls who preferred trucks. We DID refer to the two sides as the girls side and the boys side for clean up. It was just common sense. It would have been chaos to put the dolls in the middle of the trucks.

My point is that I, as a true feminist, agree that girls are as good as boys and visa versa. I agree that I deserve all the same rights as men. But I recognize that we are “naturally” different. And I have NO desire to become a man, or even like one. And I would be truly saddened if men became like women. We are equal yes. But we are DIFFERENT! and I LOVE those differences. I love, and have always, loved men. Because they ARE men. I celibrate the fact that we are not the same. And if we truly wanted everyone to be the SAME, then I fear all of the authors of the trashy novels that I read, (yes, typical woman that I am, I love Iris Johannsen and Lina Howard), would be out of work because all of their romantic men are strong and protective and well, He-men. Notice the actors that are most loved. George Clooney, Ed Norton, Robert DeNiro, Sean Connery…It’s because they encompass the idea that men are men. If a man has a more feminine side, so be it. But you’ll notice that they are the ones that woman always tell “I like you, but lets just be friends…). We know the truth when we see it. Men like their “wives” to have intact candy bars, and women like their “husbands” strong. Equal, but DIFFERENT. Thank God.
MK

Lauren,

Do you maintain all your relationships like this? Like, if you go out shopping with a girlfriend, and she says “Oh, I love the color red; look as this nice, red sweater!” Do you jump down her throat and say “What, I don’t like red. What are you trying to say? I don’t have any taste?” A friend like this would make me very tired.

Every point someone makes here is not a personal insult to Lauren and is not about Lauren’s therapy.

The original point I made did not even come close to “girls should not play basketball and volley ball” and it certainly was not “Lauren is so boyish because she liked those things”

The original point was that the idea of girls doing girly things has become something of an insult in our culture. When I was in gym class, a common insult from the gym teachers would be “De Mauro, you’re running like a girl!” or “You hit that ball like a girl!” Well duh, I am a girl.

Heh. Quite so.

“The first worries are nutrition, health, shelter, food, education…not programming. My boys favorite pasttime is to go in the yard and find big sticks to carry around and use as spears’.”

Pansy,

Being a Chesterton fan, you may be familiar with his essay, “The Terror of a Toy”, which begins thusly:

It would be too high and hopeful a compliment to say that the world is becoming absolutely babyish. For its chief weak-mindedness is an inability to appreciate the intelligence of babies. On every side we hear whispers and warnings that would have appeared half-witted to the Wise Men of Gotham. Only this Christmas I was told in a toy-shop that not so many bows and arrows were being made for little goys; because they were considered dangerous. It might in some circumstances be dangerous to have a little bow. It is always dangerous to have a little boy. But no other society, claiming to be sane, would have dreamed of supposing that you could abolish all bows unless you could abolish all boys.

It also includes this:

Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing stones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach, for fear he should practise throwing them into the sea You do not even adopt so obvious and even pressing a social reform as forbidding roads to be made of anything but asphalt, or directing that all gardens shall be made on clay and none on gravel. You neglect all these great opportunities opening before you; you neglect all these inspiring vistas of social science and enlightenment. When you want to prevent a child from throwing stones, you fall back on the stalest and most sentimental and even most superstitious methods. You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your public relation with the stone. And what is true of the natural missile is just as true, of course, of the artificial missile; especially as it is a very much more ineffectual and therefore innocuous missile. A man could be really killed, like St. Stephen, with the stones in the road. I doubt if he could be really killed, like St. Sebastian, with the arrows in the toyshop. But anyhow the very plain principle is the same. If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him when to shoot an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have something to throw. If he can be persuaded not to smash the Archdeacon’s hat with a heavy flint, it will probably be possible to dissuade him from transfixing that head-dress with a toy arrow. If his training deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman, it will probably also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the policeman. But the notion that the child depends upon particular implements, labelled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment. The truth is that all sorts of faddism, both official and theoretical, have broken down the natural authority of the domestic institution, especially among the poor; and the faddists are now casting about desperately for a substitute for the thing they have themselves destroyed. The normal thing is for the parents to prevent a boy from doing more than a reasonable amount of damage with his bow and arrow; and for the rest, to leave him to a reasonable enjoyment of them. Officialism cannot thus follow the life of the individual boy, as can the individual guardian. You cannot appoint a particular policeman for each boy, to pursue him when he climbs trees or falls into ponds. So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribably mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves; which is as if it were to abolish ponds or abolish trees. Perhaps it will have a try at that before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.

God bless your boys, Pansy. And may they never cease running around your yard in search of sticks to use as spears.

Lauren,
“I personally loved gym class-in grade school-anyways. ”

Ah! I think I know what you mean…

Acted like girls? How exactly do you act like a girl? I personally loved gym class-in grade school-anyways. I got to run, jump, play basketball and volleyball. I’m sorry is that too boyish of me?

I remember in gym class, the gym teachers would put the girls down who, well, acted like girls. We always had to play things like flag football, baseball and ultimate frisbee, and those of us who weren’t so good at boys-type sports were teased. I think this is why I hated gym class so much. It’s not that I was not physically active either-I was a cheerleader, took dance and later became a personal trainer and aerobics instructor.

There has been something wrong with treating little boys like boys and little girls like girls in our culture. A family who wants to raise a girl to become a mother is behind the times, likewise a family who raises a boy to be a strong family man is considered barbaric.

Oddly, there is a fallacy that boys acting like boys and girls acting like girls is “programming”. Most busy families I know have very little time to simply spend on programming gender into kids. The first worries are nutrition, health, shelter, food, education…not programming. My boys favorite pasttime is to go in the yard and find big sticks to carry around and use as “spears”. Not because I ever said to them “now that is many man play”-it’s just what they do.

That’s ridiculous. There are just as many boys that like to play with dolls as they do gi-joes. Any parent that tries to make their children play with certain toys in order to reinforce gender stereotypes are screwed up. I’ll let my kids choose their toys. If my boys want to play dress up and play house, I could care less. If my girls want to play cops and robbers, so be it. If the girls want to put on make up and pretend to be Cindy Crawford and the boys want to climb trees I could care less.

I had girlfriends growing up that their parents wouldn’t let them have waterbaloon fights with the boys in the neighborhood because they were the “fairer” sex. Screw that. I also had male friends that were forbidden to play house with their sisters because god forbid a doll might make the boy like penis instead of vagina in later life. Ridiculous.

In the morning I watched the Little Mermaid and played airplane with my sister (she the customer and me the pilotess/stewardess) yes you dont want to be on my plane. At night we scraped our knees as we played ghost in the graveyard. I understand your hesitation at becoming too pc by not allowing girls to play with dolls, but really this is a much smaller problem than the opposite. The opposite is a greater danger, if it’s only politically correct for girls to do feminine things. I thankfully grew up with a strong mother who definitely was a feminist and enabled me and my sister to do anything we want.

Mary Kay, role models for girls are fewer and farther between than you are thinking. I have yet to read a story published for elementary kids as part of their materials that shows a difference between boys and girls. A story that stars a little boy will show him doing the type of things boys do. A story that stars a little girl will be the same, except it will go out of the way to say that she is just as good (or better) than other boys–older brothers, neighborhood kids, etc. Girls play basketball and hunt rabbits and chop wood… if anyone tries to think that girls should do different chores or can’t play sports as well, then either they are a bad guy or their mind will get changed.

I can’t help but think that there are little girls out there who like to play with dolls and dress up as princesses for tea parties, and they think there’s something wrong with them. Because there isn’t any of that in kids’ stories anymore.

Updated August 14, 2006

just put fetal stem cell in your search engine. I’d put up the links but it will get moderated…

The above thing is state laws on fetal and embryonic stem cell research…

MK

WHo refers to it as fetal stem cell reserach? that’s the first time i’ve heard it.

Then why do they refer to it as fetal stem cell research?

I also feel badly for Mr. Fox. Being against killing babies does not mean being for parkinsons disease. My heart breaks for him. Which is why I would like to see the money go toward adult stem cell research which has proven good results as opposed to being wasted on fetal stem cell reasearch which has no good results and often catastrophic ones. What could would it do to cure his parkinsons but give him cancer?

MK

I feel so bad for Michael J Fox. Thank god some intelligence is back in government

And I’m sure Jewel is financially devastated.
MK

This is amazing to me…highly educated, powerful, grown men and women are sitting around discussing whether or not if they change the law so that the child can be delivered to the navel or the head…it would be safer for the mother. What if they dialated her more? How about if they kill the child before they deliver it? They actually discussed the difference between a D&E and a D&X by describing pulling out a leg, twisting it out of the way so they could cut off the other one…

It was like reading a horror novel.

If they let five year olds decide, all they’d have to do is show them the diagram of a partial birth abortionand there would be no more discussion and no more abortion. But no, better that adults sit around and discuss it, then break for lunch and still have no answers.

It boggles the mind.
And breaks the heart.
I wish they could see themselves the way I see them.
They would hang their heads in shame.
MK

Hmm let me think…you know what? The films I can think of which involve SAHMs are either bored or put up with philandering husbands (or themselves committed infidelity), got divorced, or died early from some disease. There’s Stepmom, One True Thing, Unfaithful (yuck), … oh wait! What about “Shall We Dance?” Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Jennifer Lopez. I think Susan’s character there is a SAHM. And the film teaches pretty sound principles about marriage.

There’s also “Cheaper by the Dozen” but somehow it seems to ridicule big families in some subtle way. The mother there writes on the side, I think, and in one part she even went on a book tour, to the detriment of the family.

Can’t think of any other movie but I’m sure there are more. Now you got me thinking! I’ll check back again later ’cause right now I’ve got to get some things from the grocery.