The mentoring post is interesting -- I've certainly felt the lack of one, but in my case it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism (prickly, socially awkward, etc.). I've had some very helpful peer relationships, but I've never had a partner who I felt was at all interested in helping me develop as a lawyer. But of course, law firms sort of suck at this globally.
Even in the law firm context, though, mentoring is a huge deal. For most of the younger partners I know at my firm, I can clearly identify the senior partner they 'belonged to' as an associate -- you don't seem to make partner without one strong primary relationship with a partner. Which is wildly depressing because of the two partners I work with most, one is a non-communicative sadist (a funny and charming guy in many ways, but gets his entertainment from watching people squirm), and the other is trying desperately to disassociate himself from the trainwreck of the case I'm handling for him. It's gotten to the point where he aviods me in the hallways.
Aw, you guys. But I do take a very long time to warm up around new people, and tend to hang back socially to the point that it looks hostile -- online, hanging back is invisible, so it doesn't come off badly.
I've found that it's been personally helpful to have, if not a mentor, a critical mass of women here at my department. Just as a role model, mostly along the 'yes, you can balance work & family'.
It's not as though the male professors respect the male graduate students more, it's just that they're likely to have more in common with them (the junior ones, at least) and hang out with them socially (some of the guys have a weightlifting group, plus drinking), which with philosophers always seems to involve discussions of metaphysics.
It's not sexism, exactly, at least not to the extent that they aren't interested in the work the female graduate students are writing, but they're developing closer non-work relationships with the men, and thus know their work better. And are in a position to suggest conferences or books, etc, to them.
it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism (prickly, socially awkward, etc.)
At first I attributed my lack of a mentor to that, too. None of the men who are equally prickly, etc. lacked a mentor, though. Hell, even the total fuckup I'm on the verge of firing has one. Again, I think that's a gender difference -- we're more willing to blame ourselves and think we don't deserve certain opportunities that men don't question.
but in my case it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism
Mmm. I read that post yesterday, and I thought there was a fair bit of merit to what Mrs. Becks (her mom) said, but I don't think its application is limited by gender or any of the other standard misery poker cards. It is really, really hard to understand the nuts and bolts of anything without someone who's slightly better than you explaining all of the little details that no one ever covers. Finding that person is not just a matter of finding someone up the food chain who's interested in mentoring; at a minimum they also have to (a) be good at what they do (by far the biggest bar), (b) have a style somewhat similar to yours (hard to be mentored in Arabic if you only speak English), and (c) see some advantage (companionship, being able to offload work, etc.) to helping you learn.
A life coach? Probably not a bad idea, but I wonder whether someone who needs a life coach (and to varying degrees, we all do) will be able to distinguish between those selling snake oil and those offering valuable advice.
Something interesting to note – about four years ago, one of the Senior VPs in my division (a woman) decided to hold a monthly event where people could network by getting together to knit blankets for charity. (That's actually where I learned to crochet.) After a couple of months, the event was shut down because the opposition from the men in the company was so fierce – they claimed that the women were getting unfair access to senior-level staff. (Note that she never said the even was limited to women only. It was open to anyone; the men just didn't want to knit.) The kicker was where the opposition group formed – at a corporate golf event meant for networking that was "open to anyone" but just happened to be almost entirely male.
A life coach? Probably not a bad idea, but I wonder whether someone who needs a life coach (and to varying degrees, we all do) will be able to distinguish between those selling snake oil and those offering valuable advice.
Are there really people who are not-too-fucked-up enough to be life coaches? Isn't it true that everyone is pretty much fucked up, and the best we can do is try to minimize our inborn fuckedupédness? I don't think I could take advice from someone who is even a little bit fucked up, much less someone one-tenth as fucked up as I am.
Heh. That's one of the problems with 'prissy', as condemnation -- harmless women's pastimes are deviant and exclusionary, because a man couldn't be expected to learn to crochet or his balls would shrivel. Men's pastimes, on the other hand, are open to all and women who don't want to participate are just hurting themselves.
Joe -- I am betting your browser is Internet Explorer, and that if you looked at it with a non-IE browser you would see code. To write good HTML, put a semicolon after é.
I'm totally on board with the value of mentors for everyone -- my wife has benefited from some very strong, successful female mentors in her field -- but the only "life coaches" I've ever been personally familiar with have been near-complete fuck-ups themselves and/or insufferably new-age-y.
An actual, non-annoying life coach sounds like something anyone would want. I kinda want one now.
In the newly-opened life-coaching and mentoring annex. Seems to me like Akbar and Jeff should work there but I'm not able to work this into a coherent bit.
Note that she never said the even was limited to women only. It was open to anyone; the men just didn't want to knit.) The kicker was where the opposition group formed – at a corporate golf event meant for networking that was "open to anyone" but just happened to be almost entirely male.
Classic.
I'm nymed enough that anyone with half a brain (that excludes most of the Bush administration, admittedly) could figure out my name from my handle and the URL of the (defunct) blog I link to.
I met some life coaches at a party. Painful. This is not to say there aren't good ones out there, but the ones I met went from being articulate and funny when talking about theater (the field they came from) to teeth-achingly insipid when they talked about life coaching, and it was really sad to watch. I think part of the problem is that they were all encouraged to brand themselves for the ruthless life-coaching market, and the process of branding required them to condense their thoughts into fortune cookies. The guy who had branded himself as Stop Stressing Now (or something like that) informed us all that his personal philosophy was that "stress is what happens when your life circumstances don't conform to your ideal."
I could have really used both a life coach and a good therapist for a long, long time.
Tia's comment is hilarious, though. There is this awful guy they show on PBS during pledge drives named Wayne Dwyer (sp?) whose entire philosophy is about "The Power of Intention."
My mother, who had worked for a number of year as a career consultant both in out-placement (which is a pretty absurd euphemism) specifically and in private practice, has moved into doing some coaching work. Since I have some idea what being a career consultant means, I take coaching to basically be that except that the client is allowed/encouraged to also go a little bit into things they would like to improve in their life which are not as explicitly related to work status. Is this the same thing everyone else is talking about, or is life coaching more thoroughgoing?
I definitely agree with Tia that there are some life coaches out there who deserve ridicule. The no credentials, low barrier to entry thing means there have to be a number of screwups out there, including a lot of weirdo, new-age types and people who've done nothing more than spend time watching Dr. Phil. My mother says that there are definitely reputable people doing it, though – a number of the psychologists she worked with are moving in that direction because they find it more satisfying to help people work towards short-term, concrete goals than listening to someone complain about their childhood for 5 years. Also, it pays better because there's no dealing with insurance companies.
Otherwise it is more, umm, how shall I say, a 'conventionally female' event. Unless the guy taking it was Rosie Greer I think he might be suspected of being a sissy or a wimp.
Read Becks' 16. The event got shut down because the men in the company wouldn't participate, but believed that their lack of participation gave the participating women an unfair professional advantage. That's the problem, or a problem, with treating femininity as contaminating; situations that historically/socially favor men are treated as neutral, and women are expected to cope. Situations that historically/socially favor women are intolerably oppressive to men.
(I was delayed posting this comment by looking for a Making Light post on the same topic -- linking to a kerfuffle in some slash pictures Usenet group, but I couldn't find it. Anyone else remember it?)
I'll drop this, because I've gotten to the point of boring myself, but one of the things about despising prissiness, even if you don't define prissiness as 'having girl cooties', is that there's a real population of men out there who still have a problem with the girl cooties. And they cause trouble, as in Becks' 16. And without some careful clarity about what it is you decent guys are despising, all those other twerps are going to think you're allies of theirs. There's a limit to what you should have to do to disassociate yourselves from the twerps, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind.
That's the problem, or a problem, with treating femininity as contaminating; situations that historically/socially favor men are treated as neutral, and women are expected to cope. Situations that historically/socially favor women are intolerably oppressive to men.
Some of this is simply generational, and will go away as time goes on. But (and I wildly guessing here) some of this is the difference in the nature the activities vis-a-vis the level of social skills needed to make them work as enjoyable activities. Golf? STFU and keep walking. Knitting circle? Do not be a social maladjust who will reveal himself with each and every word he utters.
They were clearly talking enough to organize the opposition to the knitting group. And golf has very high barriers to entry; if you haven't played a lot, you can't play a round with real players without annoying the crap out of them and looking like a fool. It's not softball.
Knitting or crochet, on the other hand, you can do badly after about ten minutes instruction, and no one else participating cares what level you're performing at.
There was an article in teh Globe about this. One of the law firms organized a women's pampering night at a salon to which a bunch of potential clients were also invited, e.g., the person who handles all IP matters for Harvard. It didn't hurt that the spa was also a client of the law firm's.
Previously the big client/lawyer networking events had been softball games.
Well, yes, that was the point, and that was why I said I was dropping it. I just wanted to pound humorlessly on the sub-point that however pure your own state of mind, there's a real value in making it clear to all the other less enlighted folks out there how you feel.
41: I wasn't arguing that golf was a more inclusive activity. I simply meant that for some men, particularly those a generation above us, chit chat is strangely difficult. I could enjoy the competition of a round of golf (if I enjoyed golf) even if there were only 30 words exchanged the whole time. If I went to a knitting circle, and there wasn't any chit chat, I wouldn't come back - too boring. Assuming chit chat, I'd prefer the knitting circle.
Jeremy 22, the new law obviously excludes the possibility of anonymous pwnage. Even the very claim of anonymous pwnage is annoying and thus actionable. As far as I can tale, the nymous few have achieved a transcendant power over the dispossessed and dehumanized anons.
Joe and Jeremy, how about we do a blog rerun of the Milgram experiment, and use the coercive power of the State to harass and abuse the rest of the Unfogged community?
We'd have to find out what jurisdiction Unfogged is in. To do this we might have to out Ogged with a discovery procedure, after which time, of course, the now-nymous Ogged would have the right to be as annoying as he wished. He could still be prosecuted for past annoying behavior, however.
There was a translator and teacher at my alma mater who took the Portuguese pseudonym "Lobo-filho". Her actual name was "Wolfson". She obviously was no feminist, or she would have been "Loba-filha".
But I do take a very long time to warm up around new people, and tend to hang back socially to the point that it looks hostile
I'm pretty much like this too and from what I can tell a lot of people make their connections very early on - within the first, or first couple of, meetings. So if you don't join in various activities early, by the time you warm up it's likely to be assumed that you simply have no interest in being included even when that's not true.
There are some gender differences vis a vis 'talking versus doing' preferences during socialization. I suppose acknowledging and accepting the differences is the best way to go.
Personally I've worked with the same group long enough to finally convince them to socialize my way - LAZERTAG baybee.
So shall we just call this new law the Luap Nangied Protection Act?
(Incidentally, I was looking at the text of the law on Thomas.loc.gov, and I couldn't find the 'annoy' language. But the site is pretty damned non-transparent.)
Now it seems to me as though the 'annoy' language was in the old stalking laws and the new laws added e-mail and web sites to the venues for cyberstalking. My prediction: Luap Nangied-type trivial suit based on this law, followed by judicial trainwreck. Unless "annoy" has already been defined in case law to exclude this sort of thing.
I can see subtle arguments about intent arising. If I, using my own name, pretend to be a lawyer, for example, and some anonymous slump starts telling lawyer jokes, can I call the law on him even if I am not a lawyer and am not actually annoyed? It seems that I could.
It would seem that if I posted all the things that I find annoying as soon as I join a thread, that would have the effect of making intent-to-annoy easier to establish later in the thread.
As I read the law, it is not directed against annoying behavior per se, but against anonymity, and actually privileges nymous annoyance.
Hrm -- you talk all big now, but I remember being distinctly peeved by one Zizka. What's the statute of limitations on this sucker? (Concerns about the constitutionality of ex post facto laws are so last milennium.)
I agree with lizardbreath in 38 and in other places. Male disdain for prissiness is a problem because it is rooted in anti-female beliefs.
My current problem is that I have a four-year boy who tends toward acting feminine. I plan on doing my best to reproduce the patriachy. Or, at least reproduce the patriarchy enough to prevent him from him getting bullied.
My current plan:
1. Buy him clothes that his peers respect. Immediately replace clothes that his peers disdain.
2. Buy him lots of toys that his peers respect.
3. Send him to schools that aren't very macho. Don't switch schools so that he will be the new kid. Make sure that he isn't isolated in the school community.
4. Encourage sports participation.
5. If he is bullied, tell him to fight.
I think in general that it is like the joke about running away from the bear. He doesn't have to be the most masculine boy in the class, just not the least masculine boy in the class. And, if he turns out to be gay, it isn't like he won't have to lift weights anyway.
Joe O -- Tell the kid that it's OK to fight, and show him a few tricks, but if he's not a fighter let it drop.
When my son was about 13 I read a newspaper piece about how a sharp blow to the nose disorients people, and I told him about it. He tried it out on one of the bullies in school, and it worked.
I would say that also key in 75 is do nothing that the kid is going to perceive as punitive or negative about his feminine tendencies unless it's necessary to cut down on crap he's getting from peers. And at 4 I doubt (could be wrong, but I doubt) that he is getting significant crap from peers about being girly.
Go ahead and buy him GI Joe with Exploding Massive Cock Action, if you like, but I wouldn't take away his Barbies.
I in general think your quest for a non-sexist word to insult male jazzersizers and quilters is doomed to failure. Either the word is a non-sexist equivalent of lame in which case it can't be applied to male, but not female, jazzersizers and quilters. Or the word is just used to make fun of feminine men. I was using prissy using its second inevitable meaning.
Re 79
The hit to the nose is a good idea. The other thing they tell kids to do is to step toward a bully when he talks to you. I think it would be easier just to get into a fight and get over it.
People will say, "That guy looks like a skinny, Iranian Chris Noth...who got his face rearranged by a pissed off feminist. Or maybe a couple. Damn, what did get to him?"
LB, I have a 3 yr old daughter. She is terrified of being accused of being a boy at Kindergarten. The sudden and extreme interest in all things pink and barbie like was breathtaking. She used to play with the Brio trainset; now it is "for boys"...
What kind of parents do this to their kids, so that the kids then terrorise each other with role-stereotypes?
Joe O -- not flinching or moving away, and not being tentative help, up to the point that a fight actually happens. Moving forward is good, unless the guy actually is itching to punch you. I learned all the fight-avoidance psyche, but I never learned much of the actual fighting stuff. (One girly trick that works -- convince the guy that you'll go for his face. It's not macho, but most guys don't want to lose their good looks.)
Lion trainers have a whole system -- get close enough to the lion to make them uneasy, but not close enough to frighten them. In the first case they back off, but in the second they attack.
...it's a good thing he was able to beat them off with his massive manly dong, or they might have gotten 'ideas'."
...what a pity his dong isn't so massive anymore as a result of the confrontation. Oh well, he has other assets. We'll still let him into the Mineshaft.
Some 4 year old did make fun of him for having a "poofy" jacket. We pulled the jacket.
I think this kind of thing happens even for real young kids. It isn't out of hand, but I just want to do what I can now to avoid bigger problems in grade and middle school.
..what a pity his dong isn't so massive anymore as a result of the confrontation. Oh well, he has other assets. We'll still let him into the Mineshaft.
...where he'll be "feted" by one hundred smooth young men, who will caress the martyred stump that saved the kingdom."
In anecdotal support of Joe O, not only I, but basically all the other girls, were aware of our (potential) sexuality in kindergarten (or maybe first grade--I can't swear which year these memories come from). I can remember being accused of trying to act sexy because my shoulder strap was down on my shirt. Also somewhere around six or seven, my thinner friend pointed out that she was prettier than I because she was more dainty and more of a girl, and should get to play the princess roles in make believe. Also, I complained to my teachers at age 5 or 6 that my thighs were fat. I have seen girls just that young do the same. I got it from the other direction (6 or7) when I got to excited about how beautiful a stream was and wanted to twirl around, and my female friend said, mockingly, that I was too girly, and I should be more of a tomboy, like her.
What kind of parents do this to their kids, so that the kids then terrorise each other with role-stereotypes?
I think you don't have to do much -- kids are very, very quick to pick up on what is regarded as appropriate gender behavior. I am, as I've said, less than successful at being stereotypically feminine, but Sally is totally into the pink and sparkly. (Something that I find hilarious is that she shares my lack of fashion aptitude, and at six, her best friend will occasionally inform her that she is not allowed to leave the house like that -- wear this instead. From a purely esthetic point of view, the friend is always right.)
Newt is less consistently gender appropriate, but that's because he spends a lot of time playing with Sally and her friends; I expect that he'll butch up more when he gets to Kindergarten.
I think this kind of thing happens even for real young kids. It isn't out of hand, but I just want to do what I can now to avoid bigger problems in grade and middle school.
Totally get this. Pick a sport (basketball!). Make him reasonably good at it. And make him funny.
My parents (psychologists both) dressed me in unisex clothes all through my childhood, gave me a unisex haircut, and still call me by my very unisex middle name. I wasn't allowed to have Barbie dolls (had to beg beg beg for a Cabbage Patch), they bought me Tonka trucks for Christmas, and they made me play basketball instead of the gymnastics that I preferred. Talk about good intentions gone awry – what a way to make your kid stand out. Even with 4 years at an all-girls school, I'm still woefully lacking in "how to be a girl" skills.
Also, Dan Savage's new book The Committment, while uneven, has some interesting commentary on the gender stuff his son picked up when he started Kindergarten.
...where he'll be "feted" by one hundred smooth young men, who will caress the martyred stump that saved the kingdom"
...until we dress him in a leotard and Manolo Blahniks and make him work out to "Sweatin' to the Oldies 2, for we know that no sacrifice is too great for Ogged, whose heart is pure, and who knows no greater joy than to glory in our manhood."
It starts very young; I remember not wanting to wear a dress I thought made me look fat. That was kindergarten. I'm not an appearance-obsessed girl, on the spectrum of things, either.
I wouldn't worry too much about trying to ensure the kid conforms to all of his peers with toys and clothes though; IME if the clothes are a costume to make him seem less teaseable, the underlying nerdiness/unathletic/etc will out. (If they're not a costume, then you have a kid thinking that wearing what everyone else does is his raison d'être.)
(Not really directed to Joe O., just more inspired by. You could have dressed up me and my nerdy friends in the trendiest clothes possible, and we still would have looked out of place.)
On the bullying point, hitting the bully back worked in my experience. (Well, more allowing him to run into a metal locker door.) It may have been shock value, but hey, that was the last time anyone decided it was good to grope the nerd in the hallway.
sports and funny will do it. Then again, I'm pretty sure that all of the people my age that I admire were picked on in junior high. I often think the fact that I wasn't speaks poorly of me.
It starts very young; I remember not wanting to wear a dress I thought made me look fat.
This one worries me -- Sally is a huge muscular moose of a girl, and pressure to be little can only make her crazy. I spend a fair amount of time on the iron rule of food consumption: Eat as long as you're hungry, regardless of how long that is, and then stop. And on making it clear that anyone talking about dieting or being fat for a little girl is, oh, insane.
I don't know. A very small number of boys got it very, very bad in my junior high. But you could be physically anomolous, and make it by with humor and cultural knowledge. But no humor plus no cultural knowledge plus no athletic skills meant pretty horrible treatment.
Then there was the general "nerds" category, which was fairly insular and self-protective. I would guess, looking back, it would not have been so bad to be in that group.
To tell the truth, I never really noticed how girls ostracized each other at that age. I did not understand them. And still don't. Nor myself.
Sally is six? Kids are either rail-thin or butterballs at that age, depending on where they are in their growth spurt. I hate blaming 'the media' for this sort of thing, but kids really pick up everything that they see on TV, and to them it doesn't matter if the teenager worrying about her weight is 14 years old than them.
I'm not sure how my parents managed with four daughters, all of us ending up at relatively healthy weights without severe body-image problems.
Got me. I'll say rude things about my high school all day, but it was a lovely gentle place to be an outsider. Not being socially successful was a simple lack of success, there was very little active ill-treatment. (Or so I recall. Ac was certainly more social than I, but might have some perspective on how others were treated.)
Kids are either rail-thin or butterballs at that age,
19 out of 20 are. Sally looks like a small version of an adult mesomorph -- broadshouldered and muscly. She's lovely, but it's an unusual build on a six-year-old.
I was just curious as a test of my own intuitions. I read Joe O.'s comment with a little worry (replace all his clothes on the whims of his friends?), but with a sympathetic ear (eye?).
But if it were a little girl and someone were saying, 'Wow, she's tomboyish, I better have her start growing her hair and wearing pink and taking figure skating so she doesn't get made fun of at school, and I'll only buy her designer clothes', I don't think I'd be at all sympathetic. I'd think they were nuts.
And I'm trying to decide if I'm being motivated by pragmatic concerns ('Being a nerdy boy is worse than being a nerdy girl.') or vaguely gender-stereotyped roles ('Girls can act like boys and still be girls, but boys need a number of Tonka trucks so as not to catch teh ghey.)
As a fellow mesomorph, I salute Sally and silently lament that pants will be hard to find her whole life, if her mesomorphy is at all concentrated in her legs.
One of my nieces (9) is already telling her sister (11) that she's fat. The 9-year-old is very dramatic, stylish, and femmy, but also very aggressive. The mom is more like th 11-year-old, but she's trying to be cool about everything.
I think a truly gender-non-conforming boy gets it much worse than a gender-non-conforming girl, but that boys tend to conform (on gender roles) much more than girls as a result, so the real-life treatment each gets evens out.
On 117, a really tomboyish little girl just isn't in for all that much crap. Girls don't get beaten up (much, that I'm aware) for wearing jeans and scruffy T-shirts every day. On the other hand, a little boy wearing a sparkly shirt saying 'Angel' in glitter would probably be in for a world of hurt. Boys definitely get less room to deviate from gender roles.
Interesting topic we've arrived at. I was very much a misfit when I was little -- no sports, no humor, rather bookish and shy. Also, we moved to town the summer before I started first grade, so I was woefully lacking in local cultural cues (names of supermarkets, etc.) and didn't go into school with a preexisting circle of friends. Nonetheless, I was only really bullied in first grade, and then not too badly. After that I started to make friends and never had much trouble socially (although I remain very shy). I doubt this is a common experience, but there it is.
Question: Is the ostracism a non-conforming boy faces more painful than the ostracism a non-conforming girl faces?
Like text, I don't really have a basis for comparing the two. But (again, like text) there were always a few guys in my class at that age who were just brutalized. At least a couple were effectively driven out of the school, and another was later institutionalized. In all those cases, there were serious complicating factors, but I don't personally doubt that the treatment they (and others, who made it through) seriously contributed to their trauma.
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that there perhaps are structures in place, both informal and formal for girls to fall back on; I think this is less true for boys.
Sometimes I think males are not well-adapted for modern life.
My wife knew someone who was a queen bee in her grade school on the east coast who moved out to california where fashions were completely different and had a crushing drop in status.
I take kid fashion very seriously as a pain aviodance technique. It is a lot easier than having my kid change his personality even if I wanted him to. Which I don't.
I was seriously punished for non-conformity (gender and otherwise), especially in the 5th and 6th grade, less so in jr. high just because it was much bigger, so there was room to be ignored, and still in 9th grade. Then I moved to eb's high school, which was big enough that I was ignored till I made friends. I certainly didn't have a nervous breakdown, but I think it seriously affected my development, both negatively (shy, poor social skills, sometimes morbidly concerned with what other people think of me) and positively (tolerant, empathetic, etc.).
Sure -- I'm actually quite pleased by Sally's friend's fashion mentoring, given that I've got no skills in the area and it's friendly and affectionate. (In return, if anyone ever gives the friend a hard time, Sally will crush them like an insect. It's all about division of labor.)
I do think that if kids are determined to ostracise (which there's no reason to think that they are in the case of your son) clothes won't help: see FL's story about the Hawaiian shirt. Clothes can become wrong simply by being worn by the wrong person.
Girls have these really vicious systems of organized character-assassination, ridicule and ostracism which should not be underestimated. It can get physically violent too.
129: I thought the ending of About a Boy was sad. It really seems as though the price of Marcus's not getting beat up is that he has to abandon most of his personality.
I was going to say. I have the impression that the 'Mean Girls' stuff you hear about hits marginally socially successful girls hardest -- it's about carrot and stick torture: this week you're in, next week you're a pariah. It doesn't have all that much power against the total outsiders.
The straight bullying of real outsiders (which I got some of in an unpleasant milieu in which I took sailing lessons in the summer) came from boys more.
129: I thought the ending of About a Boy was sad. It really seems as though the price of Marcus's not getting beat up is that he has to abandon most of his personality.
Gawd, you're a priss, Weiner. (I don't think kids at that age have "a personality" that is somehow "authentic"; I'm not sure we have one at any age. Hard for me to begrudge anyone a few years of peace as they go through school (or otherwise).)
the trick, Joe, is to make sure that your son engages in group penis measurements as soon as possible, and that when he performs the Patriarchy Ritual, he does not spill the Chalice Of Innumerable Piss, or inadequately desecreate the Dead Squirrel Of The Dead, Very Dead Matriarchy.
136: Who's begrudging? I'm not saying that Marcus should have continued to get beat up, I just think it kind of sucks that the only way for him to avoid getting beat up is to start acting like everyone else.
Also, many fail to cross the Midnight Playground Strewn With Stored Gerbil Turds And Cheese Wax Lit Afire and drink the Purloined Beer Of The Passive Neighborhood Father. But those who do: Sweet Patriarchy!
John Doris has a rather distinct personality. I don't think he'd be able to hide behind a pseudonym. Plus, he's too big to hide behind anything.
Also, I found the ending of "About a Boy" incredibly moving, since, in my own adolescence, achieving social conformity through affection for popular culture was both deeply liberating and an antidote to preciousness.
I think I'm still too shy to talk about my adolescence. But I never got into fights. Also, I think a significant proportion of people who didn't know me well, and probably a smaller portion of those who did, thought I was insane. Which I might be.
It's been a while since I read About A Boy, actually, and I may be misremembering the ending; it may be that Marcus is just abandoning stuff his mother likes for stuff that's more like his peers, and so there's no abandonment of his personality. But it did make me think, "If he didn't want to be just like everyone else, he'd keep getting beat up." (IIRC neither getting better shoes nor getting into Nirvana is enough to help him.) I found Bad Santa much more uplifting.
The Doris book is accessible and interesting but if you read it in isolation you should know that not everyone will agree with his reading of virtue ethics (that is, not everyone thinks that virtue ethics is committed to what he thinks it's committed to.)
Anonymous annoying update: GF-R points to this, which says that "annoy" in such statutes has been generally interpreted to refer to harassment and stalking as opposed to what we all like doing. Atrios has the case for the negative.
Are you familiar with Borges' "The Circular Ruins"? "Innumerable" in text's ceremony-naming seems to me to be playing a similar role to "unanimous" in the first sentence of that story.
Oh my god, Tia would totally kick Ogged's ass. And, despite the oft-repeated Chris Noth comparison, he's much more a darker Adrien Brody. I see this going down much like the scene in Kong where Brody gets attacked by the giant insect (um, sorry Tia) -- a match where persistance, scrappiness, clawing for the eyes, and why..can't..I..get..it..off..of..me is way more effective than any any supposed strength or skillz.
This seems relevant to one of the recent discussions, maybe even to this one:
We're trying to keep somewhat of a gender balance (which tends to be hard with 5 people), so we need at least one male (or masculine type...actual gender is less important than vibes, i suppose) and one other, male or female ok.
a match where persistance, scrappiness, clawing for the eyes, and why..can't..I..get..it..off..of..me is way more effective than any any supposed strength or skillz
You're talking about the insidious polluting power of Girl Cooties again, aren't you? With a weapon like that, women are just naturally dirty fighters.
If you've got to know, I chose "innumerable" so as to create the image of many different contributers to the Chalice, and because it sounded funny, and because it is a very old ceremony performed by children -- I wanted it to sound awkward and jargony.
Er, that is, He Who Created The Patriarchy Ceremony likely named the Chalice what He named it for those reasons.
Hey, did I fail to throw my trump card on this thread? My first name? I consider myself something of an expert on the subject of being picked on as a child for characteristics that deviate from gender norms.
Smasher's just nicer than I am. There's nothing better than changing your name and not bothering to tell your parents so they show up at parent-teacher night and wonder why nobody knows who they're talking aboout. (I at least did this out of obliviousness and not maliciousness.)
All you anonymous folks have got a lotta fucking nerver talking about first and middle names. Come the revolution you guys 'll be the first ones up against the wall.
I wish I'd arrived in the 120–130s, because I think this emphasis on ensuring that a son learns a sport is total horseshit. Come on, this is the losernets—let's act like it. It's important to instill a good sense for competition in boys and girls, but playing in band does that just as well. Sports may help kids through the physically awkward years, but a certain degree of incoordination is simply inborn.
I developed a pretty thick skin a la "Boy Named Sue" when I was a kid, and in fact, I still get shit for it, and much more frequently as I get older than I would have guessed.
Becks, please. Unless your middle name is Thurbermingus I think I'll take this round. My first name was such a target that it was almost entirely too obvious for people to mock. The sneers: "Kriston . . . the girl!"
Smashman makes a good point. If the kid isn't athletic, trying to get it to participate in a sport is a great way to make it miserable. You want to inculcate reasonably healthy habits, but that can mean going for a regular stroll.
Plus, some people will just end up competitive anyway. I never really seriously played sports, and I didn't have an opportunity to do anything else competitive (you can bet I was pissed in 5th grade that there was no inter-school spelling bee or any of that shit), but I still ended up pretty psyched about competing on just about anything.
It's masculine *and* easily converted into an insult by the addition of one letter. What the hell were my parents thinking? However, you do win by keeping your name. Major points for keeping up the fight. I gave up in 4th grade (easily done when we moved).
You know what? I had a pretty bizarre condition that affected my Achilles' tendons when I was a kid, and spent a reasonable part of elementary school in and out of surgery and casts on both legs. I was going to go somewhere funny with that, but instead I'm crying.
I tried to give up my name. I was going to be Alex. But my mom wouldn't hear it and you certainly can't expect a fair hearing from a jury of your peers with regard to your most mockworthy characteristics.
Ac was certainly more social than I, but might have some perspective on how others were treated
I have the impression that the 'Mean Girls' stuff you hear about hits marginally socially successful girls hardest
Yeah, I was always reasonably popular, in a second tier sort of way, and it was nonetheless pretty harrowing. Had these times of clutching at power and status with my fingernails.
There wasn't any bullying--too academic a place for that sort of thing. But there was plenty of bitchiness and exclusion and a kind of social horror.
There were some very nerdy boys who got up the courage to ask out girls in my group, and I can remember the tremendous discomfort and awkwardness--and outraged superiority--of those occasions; which probably turned out quite harrowing for the boys involved.
My current problem is that I have a four-year boy who tends toward acting feminine.
Dude. He's four. Give him some time.
I plan on doing my best to reproduce the patriachy.
'Blind leading the blind.'
Or, at least reproduce the patriarchy enough to prevent him from him getting bullied.
Clue: he's going to get bullied a number of times. Adults get bullied all the fucking time. The question is, is how does he respond?
My current plan:
1. Buy him clothes that his peers respect. Immediately replace clothes that his peers disdain.
Great. Maybe you can also tattoo 'doormat' onto his forehead.
2. Buy him lots of toys that his peers respect.
I have an idea. Why not buy him a reasonable number of the toys he wants?
3. Send him to schools that aren't very macho.
Well, a Catholic girls school is out then. I guess your only option is military boarding school.
Don't switch schools so that he will be the new kid.
Why doncha keep him in the same school as long as it is reasonable? (Moving every six months: out. Not having any money because you refuse to move anywhere else; out as well, I imagine.)
Make sure that he isn't isolated in the school community.
Oh, like Dear Old Dad insisting other kids play with his kid ('When I was young I was always bullied! So you kids play nicely with my son! {shakes fist impotently}') isn't a one-way ticket to 'Lord of the Flies'.
4. Encourage sports participation.
Hey! I know. Maybe you could throw him a ball occasionally. And then! He could throw it back! Yay!
5. If he is bullied, tell him to fight.
Get him a younger brother if you're that worried about it. That'll get him a practice punching bag. ('He did? Really? Well, life is unfair sometimes. So what are you gonna do about this?')
I think in general that it is like the joke about running away from the bear. He doesn't have to be the most masculine boy in the class, just not the least masculine boy in the class.
It's like the mirror image of one of those guys who has a kid in order to turn him into an NFL quarterback.
And, if he turns out to be gay, it isn't like he won't have to lift weights anyway.
I have this thesis I've been simmering for a decade or so. The worst of the normal parents (normal does not include actively abusive parents and whatnot) are the ones who try too goddamned hard. A kid cannot learn confidence if his/her parents do not model it for him or her.
Ditto. I got, from my more popular friends, a lot of "you're wearing that? Okay, if you want to..."
I remember this one time that I was out of town, and I came back to a very excited three girls who were telling me all about some guy they met over the weekend that they were convinced I should date. I was like "is he cute?" One said "well, um, I think he's good for you..."
I'm naming my daughter Chlamydia so as to build character.
That's a very pretty name, actually. Unfortunately . . . .
We named our daughter Jennifer mainly because I was extremely fond of the name. Years before, I had told my law school roommates that if I ever had a daughter, I'd name her "Jennifer Elizabeth," and I did. My wife thought the name was OK, but it wasn't her first choice. I eventually beat her into submission.
I also liked that it was a common name. I had read that kids with common names got abused less than kids with oddball names ("LizardBreath" or "ogged," for example). Some of the names my wife suggested were Amber, Avril, and even Lurline. I am not making this up. The ghastly "Lurline" is her mother's middle name, so she figured her mother would like that. She'll do anything to try to make mom happy -- not that it ever works. btw, her mother's initials after marriage are "BLT."
Jennifer has expressed her gratitude to me for not being named "Lurline."
"Lurline" just might be the worst real name I've ever heard.
But I can't imagine giving my kid a common name. My first name is tres Iranian, but pretty uncommon, even in Iran; ditto the last name. I love having a unique name--it kind of freaks me out to think that someone else could have my name.
There were twins in my middle school named Robin and Kelly. They said that their parents would have named them the same way regardless of their gender.
Ebola would be a really cute girl's name. But the scientists went and ruined it, they way they ruin everything that's mysterious and wonderful and beautiful.
Despite what the scientists say, God exists. And Ebola is a good name for a girl.
"And when I have a son, I'm going to name him . . . Bill, or George—anything but Sue!"
I'm in favor of unique names, too. I like Hayden for a boy. Maybe with a solid anchor of a middle name, Christopher or something like that, to toughen up an arguably fey touch.
My sister-in-law's legal name is Hobie, after a line of boats (specifically, the "Hobie Cat"). She's always been fine with it.
More seriously, I endorse Joe's general strategy for keeping his kid from getting stigmatized and picked on. I was similiarly vulnerable and got through with quite a lot of premeditated external help. I could be one of those people with unbearably painful memories of 9th grade, but I'm not.
Some famous contemporary actor was the son of a ballet dancer and learned ballet, but they taught hum kungfu to so it worked out.
ogged, I am very glad you like your unique name. My parents were very big on giving us unique names, with my brother's being the most unique, and I was very annoyed when he decided for a time in jr. high that he was going to go by "jake" instead. Luckily, it didn't stick.
I am, however, really regretting not beating up John Emerson when I had the chance--he escaped 9th grade, but was beaten down at...a blog meetup. Awesome.
Like Ogged, my first and last name are both very unusual, to the point that it's extremely unlikely that anyone else has ever had them together, and I'm quite pleased by that. My mom gave my sister a name that she liked a lot and thought was also unusual, but unfortunately a lot of other mothers at the time thought the exact same thing, with the result that my sister was often not the only girl in her class with her name. As soon as she went off to college she switched to using her middle name, which is very nice and much less common.
Oh, and I've never gotten hassled about my name. I have gotten a lot of compliments for it. I'm therefore skeptical of Frederick's argument.
"Lurline" just might be the worst real name I've ever heard.
It's way up there. Amazingly, if I Google "Lurline" I get 143,000 hits -- the top ones being for some ship with that name.
My first name is tres Iranian, but pretty uncommon, even in Iran; ditto the last name. I love having a unique name--it kind of freaks me out to think that someone else could have my name.
If both of your names are "pretty uncommon," I assume there are some other people who have the same name, right? When I Google my first and last names, the vast majority of the hits are for me, but there are a few other people with the same name out there. None of them have a lot of Google hits, fortunately -- losers! I did a Nexis search about 20 years ago in law school and found some guy with my name who'd died in a mining accident.
Before she married my father, my mother had a fiance with unusual names who unfortunately was captured in WWII. She waited for him actually, but after his release he married someone else. When my mother was 86 I Googled his name and found him, 92 years old. I sent him an email and he eventually answered.
I've actually heard from several of my mother's ex-beaus since she died.
A lot of people have the same first and last name I do and it's very hard to find me on google. Which is how I like it, except it does make it less likely to be able to find out if anyone has said horrible things about me in some out of the way place.
On my website I have a list of non-me's with my name. The most famous are Dred Scott's owner and Anita Loos's husband. (Not very famous). Oddly, there are several people (as many as 4) with my name in Asian studies, which is my only field of near-competence. I have received a letter intended for one of the others.
Looking at the Baby Name Wizard, I see that my sister's name peaked in the '80s (interestingly, so did mine, although much, much lower). Her middle name peaked in the 1910s, which makes sense since it was our grandmother's name.
That Baby Name Wizard site Matt linked is indeed interesting. My name has gone from No. 39 among boys' names in the 1880's to No. 449 in 2004. (Sob!) But girls' names are way more trendy than boys': for example, Susan plummeted from No. 4 in the 1950's among girls' names to No. 565 in 2004. (Truly bizarre: supposedly it was No. 885 among boys' names in the 1960's, suggesting that there really were "boys named Sue." One wonders if someone didn't just check the wrong box on the form.) Linda suffered a similar fate to Susan. Madison, which at the time the movie "Splash" came out wasn't even in the top 1000 girls' names, got as high as No. 2. It's probably destined for the same treatment. My daughter's name, Jennifer, was No. 1 for 15 straight years, but is down to No. 38 in 2004.
"Elizabeth" was also allegedly a top n name for boys in the 1980s. It has to be people checking the wrong box.
"Michael" ended a forty-year reign at #1 recently, supplanted by (I just remembered) "Jacob." Which actually dropped in frequency from the 1990s even as it went from #5 to #1. So maybe boys' names are getting trendier.
Going back to an earlier point, it's not so necessary for boys to play sports as it is for them to do some sort of organized activity. I did sports as well as theatre/music, and actually found the theatre crowd far more close-knit. End result: you might get made fun of by the stereotypical jocks, but you won't care, and you'll be able to mock them much more effectively for being uncultured boors.
I have a German first name, a Scottish middle name and a very English family name. My mother, when asked why she did not bring me up to be bi-lingual, stated that she did not want me to be picked on at school for being a German speaker!
The trouble is there is NO known English translation of my first name.
So you see I found out about the disorientational effect of a punch to the nose very early on in life.
Good god, we're all there. My name returns ~46,500 hits, of which apostropher.com is the third hit (not bad, considering my name doesn't appear anywhere on the main page). I'm also a hockey stadium in Edmonton ("Russ Barnes has poor to partial accessibilty. Entrance accessible") and on the second page of hits, a photo captioned "Russ Barnes eats a hamburger with a spoon."
I used to think I was the only David Weman in the world, but apparently there are a couple of Americans. Sucks. But I don't really consider 'Deyvid' Weem'n the same name as mine. I'm about 99,9% of google results.
Reckon all 23,000 "Jeremy Osner"s on Google are me. Whee!
I guess that's one reason to use one's full name when leaving comments: you feel like incredibly hot shit when you Google yourself. btw, my father's first, last, and middle names (Charles Clyde Rhine) are all rivers, as my maternal grandmother (his mother-in-law) pointed out.
My name's pretty normal and boring. As Matt pointed out, Hayden's more popular (and the popularity of Hayden Christiansen among the teenage girl set probably means more), along with lots of Aidens/Aidans/Jaidens/Jaydens, etc. He's probably end up Hayden C.
It's often odd that what one thinks of as popular names ('Jennifer', etc) are usually set by the time someone leaves fifth grade. So twenty years later when people are having kids, they tend to think that no one has thought of Olivia or Emma because 'little girls are all named Jennifer and Kristen'.
Yeah, my sons' names, Keegan and Noah, both seemed uncommon, though in 2004 (according to babynamewizard), Keegan was #255 after not registering at all before the 1980s, and Noah was all the way up at #29. So maybe not so much anymore.
I've met many more kids named Keegan than Noah, though, so perhaps there's some regional concentration happening.
TIA enters stage right, clothes wrinkled and torn, dragging forgotten math homework from her right heel.
TIA [a fleck of blood stained drool running from the corner of her mouth]: You all might think that my absence last night meant that Ogged was the victor. And sure, he can still type. And that's the only way he'll ever be able to convey his affections to a woman again. I just didn't have the heart to destroy those beautiful, delicate hands, that rested at such a languid 90 degree angle from his ulna.
Lights dim.
Shockingly, having only met me once, Becks has precisely described my fighting style.
My first name is very common, but AFAIK, only my subbranch of the family has my last name (Google reveals no others). What's more, I'm the only child of my generation, and a woman. If I don't find a way to give my name to my children, it'll die with me.
I'm surprised 'Kriston' was a traumatic name -- what kept you from semi-officially dropping back to a nice manly 'Chris'? Was this a saga of continual rediscovery, where people figured out your actual name?
My birth name was so common I was absolutely invisible online -- there was no way to pull me out of the crowd of people with my same name. (Aided by the fact that there was a minor late 80's/early 90's media flap involving someone of my name.) With Mr. Breath's name hyphenated into the mix, I'm unique world-wide, as far as I know.
My google results are pretty much all me; Drymala's a really unusual last name. My paternal grandfather is also named Joe, but he's not so much with teh internet savvy.
Man, Shel Silverstein's a little too comfortable falling back on the 50's-era fag humor, huh? I'm disappointed in him.
You know, while there's lots of Silverstein' stuff that I like, I've thought ill of him since reading The Giving Tree. That is one messed-up book: I love you, and to demonstrate it I'll give you everything I have, including allowing you to dismember me, despite the fact that you show no appreciation or gratitude. I mean, there are relationships like that, but I wouldn't put one in a chidren's book.
"What Happens In Yalta Stays In Yalta"" should be a t-shirt that is owned by myself, with no other persons owning similar t-shirts.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:45 AM
I am a fool for extra punctuation.........
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:45 AM
But, but all the websites assure me that Russian women love older American men!
That's what I tell all the young lovelies. So it must me true.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:09 AM
Nah, it doesn't even scan:
"There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, dato
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, dato...."
I imagine that there's at least one three-syllable Georgian man's name ending in "a", though, and lots of cheesy Russian ABBA cover bands.
I can't immediately figure out how to work a Georgian stud into mentoring women in the professions, though
Wait a minute.... it's coming to me.... "full-body mentoring"? ..... nah, not quite.
Developing.....
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:16 AM
One could pull the 'Dato' into three syllables by pronouncing it Dah Aye Toe, or one could simply stay at home and pull the Dato.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:21 AM
Deato?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:27 AM
The mentoring post is interesting -- I've certainly felt the lack of one, but in my case it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism (prickly, socially awkward, etc.). I've had some very helpful peer relationships, but I've never had a partner who I felt was at all interested in helping me develop as a lawyer. But of course, law firms sort of suck at this globally.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:35 AM
indeed.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:37 AM
prickly, socially awkward
Interestingly, your online persona comes across as neither.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:40 AM
Neither does her real-life persona.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:41 AM
Even in the law firm context, though, mentoring is a huge deal. For most of the younger partners I know at my firm, I can clearly identify the senior partner they 'belonged to' as an associate -- you don't seem to make partner without one strong primary relationship with a partner. Which is wildly depressing because of the two partners I work with most, one is a non-communicative sadist (a funny and charming guy in many ways, but gets his entertainment from watching people squirm), and the other is trying desperately to disassociate himself from the trainwreck of the case I'm handling for him. It's gotten to the point where he aviods me in the hallways.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:43 AM
Aw, you guys. But I do take a very long time to warm up around new people, and tend to hang back socially to the point that it looks hostile -- online, hanging back is invisible, so it doesn't come off badly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:46 AM
I've found that it's been personally helpful to have, if not a mentor, a critical mass of women here at my department. Just as a role model, mostly along the 'yes, you can balance work & family'.
It's not as though the male professors respect the male graduate students more, it's just that they're likely to have more in common with them (the junior ones, at least) and hang out with them socially (some of the guys have a weightlifting group, plus drinking), which with philosophers always seems to involve discussions of metaphysics.
It's not sexism, exactly, at least not to the extent that they aren't interested in the work the female graduate students are writing, but they're developing closer non-work relationships with the men, and thus know their work better. And are in a position to suggest conferences or books, etc, to them.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:53 AM
it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism (prickly, socially awkward, etc.)
At first I attributed my lack of a mentor to that, too. None of the men who are equally prickly, etc. lacked a mentor, though. Hell, even the total fuckup I'm on the verge of firing has one. Again, I think that's a gender difference -- we're more willing to blame ourselves and think we don't deserve certain opportunities that men don't question.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:53 AM
but in my case it's much easier to attribute it to my own personal flaws than to sexism
Mmm. I read that post yesterday, and I thought there was a fair bit of merit to what Mrs. Becks (her mom) said, but I don't think its application is limited by gender or any of the other standard misery poker cards. It is really, really hard to understand the nuts and bolts of anything without someone who's slightly better than you explaining all of the little details that no one ever covers. Finding that person is not just a matter of finding someone up the food chain who's interested in mentoring; at a minimum they also have to (a) be good at what they do (by far the biggest bar), (b) have a style somewhat similar to yours (hard to be mentored in Arabic if you only speak English), and (c) see some advantage (companionship, being able to offload work, etc.) to helping you learn.
A life coach? Probably not a bad idea, but I wonder whether someone who needs a life coach (and to varying degrees, we all do) will be able to distinguish between those selling snake oil and those offering valuable advice.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:59 AM
Something interesting to note – about four years ago, one of the Senior VPs in my division (a woman) decided to hold a monthly event where people could network by getting together to knit blankets for charity. (That's actually where I learned to crochet.) After a couple of months, the event was shut down because the opposition from the men in the company was so fierce – they claimed that the women were getting unfair access to senior-level staff. (Note that she never said the even was limited to women only. It was open to anyone; the men just didn't want to knit.) The kicker was where the opposition group formed – at a corporate golf event meant for networking that was "open to anyone" but just happened to be almost entirely male.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:06 AM
A life coach? Probably not a bad idea, but I wonder whether someone who needs a life coach (and to varying degrees, we all do) will be able to distinguish between those selling snake oil and those offering valuable advice.
Are there really people who are not-too-fucked-up enough to be life coaches? Isn't it true that everyone is pretty much fucked up, and the best we can do is try to minimize our inborn fuckedupédness? I don't think I could take advice from someone who is even a little bit fucked up, much less someone one-tenth as fucked up as I am.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:15 AM
Incidentally, as per H.R.3402, "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act", Sec. 113:
as the only nymous person on this thread full of anonymous people who are deliberately trying to annoy me, I'm announcing that the jig is up!
Your anonymous asses are all headed for JAIL!
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:16 AM
Heh. That's one of the problems with 'prissy', as condemnation -- harmless women's pastimes are deviant and exclusionary, because a man couldn't be expected to learn to crochet or his balls would shrivel. Men's pastimes, on the other hand, are open to all and women who don't want to participate are just hurting themselves.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:17 AM
I am fucked up but not eacuted.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:18 AM
I think Joe and Jeremy are nymed, as is Gary. The rest of us are scrod. ("I've never heard the pluperfect used like that before...")
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:19 AM
And John, Becks pwned your ass on the Historical Jesus thread.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:20 AM
20 - weird; it shows up normal on my browser. You see the code?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:20 AM
Joe -- I am betting your browser is Internet Explorer, and that if you looked at it with a non-IE browser you would see code. To write good HTML, put a semicolon after é.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:23 AM
Thanks. My HTML is a joke in your town.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:25 AM
I'm totally on board with the value of mentors for everyone -- my wife has benefited from some very strong, successful female mentors in her field -- but the only "life coaches" I've ever been personally familiar with have been near-complete fuck-ups themselves and/or insufferably new-age-y.
An actual, non-annoying life coach sounds like something anyone would want. I kinda want one now.
Posted by Matt #3 | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:32 AM
I kinda want one now.
ATM?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:38 AM
In the newly-opened life-coaching and mentoring annex. Seems to me like Akbar and Jeff should work there but I'm not able to work this into a coherent bit.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:43 AM
Note that she never said the even was limited to women only. It was open to anyone; the men just didn't want to knit.) The kicker was where the opposition group formed – at a corporate golf event meant for networking that was "open to anyone" but just happened to be almost entirely male.
Classic.
I'm nymed enough that anyone with half a brain (that excludes most of the Bush administration, admittedly) could figure out my name from my handle and the URL of the (defunct) blog I link to.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:44 AM
I met some life coaches at a party. Painful. This is not to say there aren't good ones out there, but the ones I met went from being articulate and funny when talking about theater (the field they came from) to teeth-achingly insipid when they talked about life coaching, and it was really sad to watch. I think part of the problem is that they were all encouraged to brand themselves for the ruthless life-coaching market, and the process of branding required them to condense their thoughts into fortune cookies. The guy who had branded himself as Stop Stressing Now (or something like that) informed us all that his personal philosophy was that "stress is what happens when your life circumstances don't conform to your ideal."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:45 AM
"life is what happens when your life circumstances don't conform to your ideal."
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:49 AM
I could have really used both a life coach and a good therapist for a long, long time.
Tia's comment is hilarious, though. There is this awful guy they show on PBS during pledge drives named Wayne Dwyer (sp?) whose entire philosophy is about "The Power of Intention."
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:58 AM
My mother, who had worked for a number of year as a career consultant both in out-placement (which is a pretty absurd euphemism) specifically and in private practice, has moved into doing some coaching work. Since I have some idea what being a career consultant means, I take coaching to basically be that except that the client is allowed/encouraged to also go a little bit into things they would like to improve in their life which are not as explicitly related to work status. Is this the same thing everyone else is talking about, or is life coaching more thoroughgoing?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:10 PM
I definitely agree with Tia that there are some life coaches out there who deserve ridicule. The no credentials, low barrier to entry thing means there have to be a number of screwups out there, including a lot of weirdo, new-age types and people who've done nothing more than spend time watching Dr. Phil. My mother says that there are definitely reputable people doing it, though – a number of the psychologists she worked with are moving in that direction because they find it more satisfying to help people work towards short-term, concrete goals than listening to someone complain about their childhood for 5 years. Also, it pays better because there's no dealing with insurance companies.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:11 PM
Otherwise it is more, umm, how shall I say, a 'conventionally female' event. Unless the guy taking it was Rosie Greer I think he might be suspected of being a sissy or a wimp.
Read Becks' 16. The event got shut down because the men in the company wouldn't participate, but believed that their lack of participation gave the participating women an unfair professional advantage. That's the problem, or a problem, with treating femininity as contaminating; situations that historically/socially favor men are treated as neutral, and women are expected to cope. Situations that historically/socially favor women are intolerably oppressive to men.
(I was delayed posting this comment by looking for a Making Light post on the same topic -- linking to a kerfuffle in some slash pictures Usenet group, but I couldn't find it. Anyone else remember it?)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:16 PM
Situations that historically/socially favor women are intolerably oppressive to men.
And those men feeling oppressed by such are being total priss-sacks.
"Look -- we are all reasonable men here; we don't have to give assurances as if we were lawyers..."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:20 PM
Hm, serious issues have overwhelmed smutty speculations about Russian girls. As a man, I find this unconscionable and completely inappropriate.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:21 PM
I'll drop this, because I've gotten to the point of boring myself, but one of the things about despising prissiness, even if you don't define prissiness as 'having girl cooties', is that there's a real population of men out there who still have a problem with the girl cooties. And they cause trouble, as in Becks' 16. And without some careful clarity about what it is you decent guys are despising, all those other twerps are going to think you're allies of theirs. There's a limit to what you should have to do to disassociate yourselves from the twerps, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:26 PM
That's the problem, or a problem, with treating femininity as contaminating; situations that historically/socially favor men are treated as neutral, and women are expected to cope. Situations that historically/socially favor women are intolerably oppressive to men.
Some of this is simply generational, and will go away as time goes on. But (and I wildly guessing here) some of this is the difference in the nature the activities vis-a-vis the level of social skills needed to make them work as enjoyable activities. Golf? STFU and keep walking. Knitting circle? Do not be a social maladjust who will reveal himself with each and every word he utters.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:26 PM
all those other twerps are going to think you're allies of theirs.
Which means it's incumbent on us to say, "What, are fucking kidding me, you fucking loser?" when those jackasses act up.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:29 PM
Golf? STFU and keep walking.
They were clearly talking enough to organize the opposition to the knitting group. And golf has very high barriers to entry; if you haven't played a lot, you can't play a round with real players without annoying the crap out of them and looking like a fool. It's not softball.
Knitting or crochet, on the other hand, you can do badly after about ten minutes instruction, and no one else participating cares what level you're performing at.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:30 PM
Re: 40.
See my 560.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:33 PM
There's a limit to what you should have to do to disassociate yourselves from the twerps
Wasn't that dissociation the entire point of this interminable linguistic exercise?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:35 PM
There was an article in teh Globe about this. One of the law firms organized a women's pampering night at a salon to which a bunch of potential clients were also invited, e.g., the person who handles all IP matters for Harvard. It didn't hurt that the spa was also a client of the law firm's.
Previously the big client/lawyer networking events had been softball games.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:35 PM
Well, yes, that was the point, and that was why I said I was dropping it. I just wanted to pound humorlessly on the sub-point that however pure your own state of mind, there's a real value in making it clear to all the other less enlighted folks out there how you feel.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:39 PM
I didn't mean to write softball games. I meant to write Red Sox games.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:42 PM
46: The difference is negligible.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:46 PM
41: I wasn't arguing that golf was a more inclusive activity. I simply meant that for some men, particularly those a generation above us, chit chat is strangely difficult. I could enjoy the competition of a round of golf (if I enjoyed golf) even if there were only 30 words exchanged the whole time. If I went to a knitting circle, and there wasn't any chit chat, I wouldn't come back - too boring. Assuming chit chat, I'd prefer the knitting circle.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 12:49 PM
Jeremy 22, the new law obviously excludes the possibility of anonymous pwnage. Even the very claim of anonymous pwnage is annoying and thus actionable. As far as I can tale, the nymous few have achieved a transcendant power over the dispossessed and dehumanized anons.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:00 PM
Joe and Jeremy, how about we do a blog rerun of the Milgram experiment, and use the coercive power of the State to harass and abuse the rest of the Unfogged community?
We'd have to find out what jurisdiction Unfogged is in. To do this we might have to out Ogged with a discovery procedure, after which time, of course, the now-nymous Ogged would have the right to be as annoying as he wished. He could still be prosecuted for past annoying behavior, however.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:07 PM
I will weild my newfound power with care.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:07 PM
I am hoping to be shielded from the full fury of the law by being only incompetently anonymous.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:08 PM
What about the pseudonymous? How does this new law affect them? (I'm looking at you, Wolfson.)
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:09 PM
(I am looking at you in order to deter you from pointing out my erratum in 51.)
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:10 PM
There was a translator and teacher at my alma mater who took the Portuguese pseudonym "Lobo-filho". Her actual name was "Wolfson". She obviously was no feminist, or she would have been "Loba-filha".
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:13 PM
I will wield my newfound power with care.
Jeremy, look up "Milgram experiment". You don't seem to understand the plan here.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:14 PM
The thread's moved on from this but from LB's 12:
But I do take a very long time to warm up around new people, and tend to hang back socially to the point that it looks hostile
I'm pretty much like this too and from what I can tell a lot of people make their connections very early on - within the first, or first couple of, meetings. So if you don't join in various activities early, by the time you warm up it's likely to be assumed that you simply have no interest in being included even when that's not true.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:15 PM
Mm, only if her surname had been Wolfsdaughter. But I could see an argument for Loba-filho, "Son-of-a-bitch".
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:17 PM
There are some gender differences vis a vis 'talking versus doing' preferences during socialization. I suppose acknowledging and accepting the differences is the best way to go.
Personally I've worked with the same group long enough to finally convince them to socialize my way - LAZERTAG baybee.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:18 PM
So shall we just call this new law the Luap Nangied Protection Act?
(Incidentally, I was looking at the text of the law on Thomas.loc.gov, and I couldn't find the 'annoy' language. But the site is pretty damned non-transparent.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:18 PM
John, my 51 was cross-posted with your 50. I'm on board for the experiments. Let the annoyance begin!
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:18 PM
Now it seems to me as though the 'annoy' language was in the old stalking laws and the new laws added e-mail and web sites to the venues for cyberstalking. My prediction: Luap Nangied-type trivial suit based on this law, followed by judicial trainwreck. Unless "annoy" has already been defined in case law to exclude this sort of thing.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:22 PM
Not sure what to make of it, but Deignan seems to have quit blogging in the aftermath of his subpoena-waving.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:25 PM
John, we want to first get the results of the reverse-Stanford prison experiment we're conducting on Ogged and Labs, no?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:26 PM
Luap Nangied
I think that was my Sherpa's name.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:34 PM
Hey, wait! Is this anonymity language a result of some Paul Deignan lobbying effort?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:35 PM
Luap Nangied, Joe.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:41 PM
Too late. He's already reading this. Hi, Luap!
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:42 PM
I can see subtle arguments about intent arising. If I, using my own name, pretend to be a lawyer, for example, and some anonymous slump starts telling lawyer jokes, can I call the law on him even if I am not a lawyer and am not actually annoyed? It seems that I could.
It would seem that if I posted all the things that I find annoying as soon as I join a thread, that would have the effect of making intent-to-annoy easier to establish later in the thread.
As I read the law, it is not directed against annoying behavior per se, but against anonymity, and actually privileges nymous annoyance.
And that's the way it should be.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:42 PM
Hrm -- you talk all big now, but I remember being distinctly peeved by one Zizka. What's the statute of limitations on this sucker? (Concerns about the constitutionality of ex post facto laws are so last milennium.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:51 PM
Con-sti-too-shun-al-i-tee? Is that how it's pronounced?
I keep seeing this word in historical documents but it seems to have fallen out of everyday conversational usage.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:53 PM
Fuck. Oops.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 1:56 PM
And now I see that my brilliant flash of insight is old news.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 2:00 PM
GF-R relates it to existing stalking laws. She thinks 'annoy' is not particularly problematic. Hope she's right, and it gets interpreted sensibly.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 2:07 PM
I agree with lizardbreath in 38 and in other places. Male disdain for prissiness is a problem because it is rooted in anti-female beliefs.
My current problem is that I have a four-year boy who tends toward acting feminine. I plan on doing my best to reproduce the patriachy. Or, at least reproduce the patriarchy enough to prevent him from him getting bullied.
My current plan:
1. Buy him clothes that his peers respect. Immediately replace clothes that his peers disdain.
2. Buy him lots of toys that his peers respect.
3. Send him to schools that aren't very macho. Don't switch schools so that he will be the new kid. Make sure that he isn't isolated in the school community.
4. Encourage sports participation.
5. If he is bullied, tell him to fight.
I think in general that it is like the joke about running away from the bear. He doesn't have to be the most masculine boy in the class, just not the least masculine boy in the class. And, if he turns out to be gay, it isn't like he won't have to lift weights anyway.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 2:40 PM
Male disdain for prissiness is a problem because it is rooted in anti-female beliefs
Only if you think females are essentially prissy, or that prissiness is a solely female attribute, no?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 2:56 PM
Zizka who?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 2:59 PM
Zizka who?
Zizka not be happening to me.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:01 PM
Joe O -- Tell the kid that it's OK to fight, and show him a few tricks, but if he's not a fighter let it drop.
When my son was about 13 I read a newspaper piece about how a sharp blow to the nose disorients people, and I told him about it. He tried it out on one of the bullies in school, and it worked.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:03 PM
76 gets it exactly right. If you think using the word "prissy" is sexist, then you're being teh sexist.
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:07 PM
At the next Unfogged meetup: we rumble.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:11 PM
I would say that also key in 75 is do nothing that the kid is going to perceive as punitive or negative about his feminine tendencies unless it's necessary to cut down on crap he's getting from peers. And at 4 I doubt (could be wrong, but I doubt) that he is getting significant crap from peers about being girly.
Go ahead and buy him GI Joe with Exploding Massive Cock Action, if you like, but I wouldn't take away his Barbies.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:19 PM
RE 76
I in general think your quest for a non-sexist word to insult male jazzersizers and quilters is doomed to failure. Either the word is a non-sexist equivalent of lame in which case it can't be applied to male, but not female, jazzersizers and quilters. Or the word is just used to make fun of feminine men. I was using prissy using its second inevitable meaning.
Re 79
The hit to the nose is a good idea. The other thing they tell kids to do is to step toward a bully when he talks to you. I think it would be easier just to get into a fight and get over it.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:21 PM
Your prissy ass is grass, Ogged.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:22 PM
GI Joe with Exploding Massive Cock Action
This wouldn't be my first choice, for heteros.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:26 PM
We'll see about that, Miss Priss. I'll send you home in that little backpack of yours.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:26 PM
[Editor's Note--Beating up girls: Totally not prissy.]
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:27 PM
I bet I outweigh you.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:27 PM
Your prissy ass is grass, Ogged.
This approach totally won't work if you have a lisp.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:27 PM
People will say, "That guy looks like a skinny, Iranian Chris Noth...who got his face rearranged by a pissed off feminist. Or maybe a couple. Damn, what did get to him?"
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:29 PM
LB, I have a 3 yr old daughter. She is terrified of being accused of being a boy at Kindergarten. The sudden and extreme interest in all things pink and barbie like was breathtaking. She used to play with the Brio trainset; now it is "for boys"...
What kind of parents do this to their kids, so that the kids then terrorise each other with role-stereotypes?
What was that song about a boy named Sue?
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:30 PM
People will say, "That guy looks like a skinny, Iranian Chris Noth...who got his face rearranged by a pissed off feminist...
...it's a good thing he was able to beat them off with his massive manly dong, or they might have gotten 'ideas'."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:32 PM
When my son was about 13 I read a newspaper piece about how a sharp blow to the nose disorients people...
Not an empiricist then?
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:32 PM
Joe O -- not flinching or moving away, and not being tentative help, up to the point that a fight actually happens. Moving forward is good, unless the guy actually is itching to punch you. I learned all the fight-avoidance psyche, but I never learned much of the actual fighting stuff. (One girly trick that works -- convince the guy that you'll go for his face. It's not macho, but most guys don't want to lose their good looks.)
Lion trainers have a whole system -- get close enough to the lion to make them uneasy, but not close enough to frighten them. In the first case they back off, but in the second they attack.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:33 PM
my name is sue. how do you do? now you gonna die!
The lesson was not to name your son sue.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:34 PM
...it's a good thing he was able to beat them off with his massive manly dong, or they might have gotten 'ideas'."
...what a pity his dong isn't so massive anymore as a result of the confrontation. Oh well, he has other assets. We'll still let him into the Mineshaft.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:38 PM
Me:
When my son was about 13 I read a newspaper piece about how a sharp blow to the nose disorients people...
Austro:
Not an empiricist then?
I certainly didn't have enough fighting experience to generalize. As soon as I reached the not-victim level, I ceased to increase my toughness.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:38 PM
RE 82
Some 4 year old did make fun of him for having a "poofy" jacket. We pulled the jacket.
I think this kind of thing happens even for real young kids. It isn't out of hand, but I just want to do what I can now to avoid bigger problems in grade and middle school.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:39 PM
..what a pity his dong isn't so massive anymore as a result of the confrontation. Oh well, he has other assets. We'll still let him into the Mineshaft.
...where he'll be "feted" by one hundred smooth young men, who will caress the martyred stump that saved the kingdom."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:44 PM
In anecdotal support of Joe O, not only I, but basically all the other girls, were aware of our (potential) sexuality in kindergarten (or maybe first grade--I can't swear which year these memories come from). I can remember being accused of trying to act sexy because my shoulder strap was down on my shirt. Also somewhere around six or seven, my thinner friend pointed out that she was prettier than I because she was more dainty and more of a girl, and should get to play the princess roles in make believe. Also, I complained to my teachers at age 5 or 6 that my thighs were fat. I have seen girls just that young do the same. I got it from the other direction (6 or7) when I got to excited about how beautiful a stream was and wanted to twirl around, and my female friend said, mockingly, that I was too girly, and I should be more of a tomboy, like her.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:45 PM
who will caress the martyred stump
Hedwogged and the Angry Inch
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:49 PM
around the same age, all of us boys were measuring our penises side-by-side, and swearing blood oaths to support the patriarchy.
Which is what we still do.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:49 PM
What kind of parents do this to their kids, so that the kids then terrorise each other with role-stereotypes?
I think you don't have to do much -- kids are very, very quick to pick up on what is regarded as appropriate gender behavior. I am, as I've said, less than successful at being stereotypically feminine, but Sally is totally into the pink and sparkly. (Something that I find hilarious is that she shares my lack of fashion aptitude, and at six, her best friend will occasionally inform her that she is not allowed to leave the house like that -- wear this instead. From a purely esthetic point of view, the friend is always right.)
Newt is less consistently gender appropriate, but that's because he spends a lot of time playing with Sally and her friends; I expect that he'll butch up more when he gets to Kindergarten.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:51 PM
I think this kind of thing happens even for real young kids. It isn't out of hand, but I just want to do what I can now to avoid bigger problems in grade and middle school.
Totally get this. Pick a sport (basketball!). Make him reasonably good at it. And make him funny.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:55 PM
My parents (psychologists both) dressed me in unisex clothes all through my childhood, gave me a unisex haircut, and still call me by my very unisex middle name. I wasn't allowed to have Barbie dolls (had to beg beg beg for a Cabbage Patch), they bought me Tonka trucks for Christmas, and they made me play basketball instead of the gymnastics that I preferred. Talk about good intentions gone awry – what a way to make your kid stand out. Even with 4 years at an all-girls school, I'm still woefully lacking in "how to be a girl" skills.
Also, Dan Savage's new book The Committment, while uneven, has some interesting commentary on the gender stuff his son picked up when he started Kindergarten.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:56 PM
...where he'll be "feted" by one hundred smooth young men, who will caress the martyred stump that saved the kingdom"
...until we dress him in a leotard and Manolo Blahniks and make him work out to "Sweatin' to the Oldies 2, for we know that no sacrifice is too great for Ogged, whose heart is pure, and who knows no greater joy than to glory in our manhood."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:58 PM
It starts very young; I remember not wanting to wear a dress I thought made me look fat. That was kindergarten. I'm not an appearance-obsessed girl, on the spectrum of things, either.
I wouldn't worry too much about trying to ensure the kid conforms to all of his peers with toys and clothes though; IME if the clothes are a costume to make him seem less teaseable, the underlying nerdiness/unathletic/etc will out. (If they're not a costume, then you have a kid thinking that wearing what everyone else does is his raison d'être.)
(Not really directed to Joe O., just more inspired by. You could have dressed up me and my nerdy friends in the trendiest clothes possible, and we still would have looked out of place.)
On the bullying point, hitting the bully back worked in my experience. (Well, more allowing him to run into a metal locker door.) It may have been shock value, but hey, that was the last time anyone decided it was good to grope the nerd in the hallway.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 3:58 PM
sports and funny will do it. Then again, I'm pretty sure that all of the people my age that I admire were picked on in junior high. I often think the fact that I wasn't speaks poorly of me.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:00 PM
Question: Is the ostracism a non-conforming boy faces more painful than the ostracism a non-conforming girl faces?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:02 PM
It starts very young; I remember not wanting to wear a dress I thought made me look fat.
This one worries me -- Sally is a huge muscular moose of a girl, and pressure to be little can only make her crazy. I spend a fair amount of time on the iron rule of food consumption: Eat as long as you're hungry, regardless of how long that is, and then stop. And on making it clear that anyone talking about dieting or being fat for a little girl is, oh, insane.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:04 PM
Not that I spend time on it actively, just that when she drops references, which she does already, I am quick to mock.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:05 PM
I don't know. A very small number of boys got it very, very bad in my junior high. But you could be physically anomolous, and make it by with humor and cultural knowledge. But no humor plus no cultural knowledge plus no athletic skills meant pretty horrible treatment.
Then there was the general "nerds" category, which was fairly insular and self-protective. I would guess, looking back, it would not have been so bad to be in that group.
To tell the truth, I never really noticed how girls ostracized each other at that age. I did not understand them. And still don't. Nor myself.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:07 PM
112 to 109.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:08 PM
Sally is six? Kids are either rail-thin or butterballs at that age, depending on where they are in their growth spurt. I hate blaming 'the media' for this sort of thing, but kids really pick up everything that they see on TV, and to them it doesn't matter if the teenager worrying about her weight is 14 years old than them.
I'm not sure how my parents managed with four daughters, all of us ending up at relatively healthy weights without severe body-image problems.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:09 PM
109:
Got me. I'll say rude things about my high school all day, but it was a lovely gentle place to be an outsider. Not being socially successful was a simple lack of success, there was very little active ill-treatment. (Or so I recall. Ac was certainly more social than I, but might have some perspective on how others were treated.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:10 PM
Kids are either rail-thin or butterballs at that age,
19 out of 20 are. Sally looks like a small version of an adult mesomorph -- broadshouldered and muscly. She's lovely, but it's an unusual build on a six-year-old.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:12 PM
I was just curious as a test of my own intuitions. I read Joe O.'s comment with a little worry (replace all his clothes on the whims of his friends?), but with a sympathetic ear (eye?).
But if it were a little girl and someone were saying, 'Wow, she's tomboyish, I better have her start growing her hair and wearing pink and taking figure skating so she doesn't get made fun of at school, and I'll only buy her designer clothes', I don't think I'd be at all sympathetic. I'd think they were nuts.
And I'm trying to decide if I'm being motivated by pragmatic concerns ('Being a nerdy boy is worse than being a nerdy girl.') or vaguely gender-stereotyped roles ('Girls can act like boys and still be girls, but boys need a number of Tonka trucks so as not to catch teh ghey.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:14 PM
As a fellow mesomorph, I salute Sally and silently lament that pants will be hard to find her whole life, if her mesomorphy is at all concentrated in her legs.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:16 PM
One of my nieces (9) is already telling her sister (11) that she's fat. The 9-year-old is very dramatic, stylish, and femmy, but also very aggressive. The mom is more like th 11-year-old, but she's trying to be cool about everything.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:19 PM
5!
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:22 PM
I think a truly gender-non-conforming boy gets it much worse than a gender-non-conforming girl, but that boys tend to conform (on gender roles) much more than girls as a result, so the real-life treatment each gets evens out.
On 117, a really tomboyish little girl just isn't in for all that much crap. Girls don't get beaten up (much, that I'm aware) for wearing jeans and scruffy T-shirts every day. On the other hand, a little boy wearing a sparkly shirt saying 'Angel' in glitter would probably be in for a world of hurt. Boys definitely get less room to deviate from gender roles.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:22 PM
Interesting topic we've arrived at. I was very much a misfit when I was little -- no sports, no humor, rather bookish and shy. Also, we moved to town the summer before I started first grade, so I was woefully lacking in local cultural cues (names of supermarkets, etc.) and didn't go into school with a preexisting circle of friends. Nonetheless, I was only really bullied in first grade, and then not too badly. After that I started to make friends and never had much trouble socially (although I remain very shy). I doubt this is a common experience, but there it is.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:23 PM
119: Poison the 9 year old. It's the kindest solution for everyone.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:24 PM
Question: Is the ostracism a non-conforming boy faces more painful than the ostracism a non-conforming girl faces?
Like text, I don't really have a basis for comparing the two. But (again, like text) there were always a few guys in my class at that age who were just brutalized. At least a couple were effectively driven out of the school, and another was later institutionalized. In all those cases, there were serious complicating factors, but I don't personally doubt that the treatment they (and others, who made it through) seriously contributed to their trauma.
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that there perhaps are structures in place, both informal and formal for girls to fall back on; I think this is less true for boys.
Sometimes I think males are not well-adapted for modern life.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:27 PM
RE 117
My wife knew someone who was a queen bee in her grade school on the east coast who moved out to california where fashions were completely different and had a crushing drop in status.
I take kid fashion very seriously as a pain aviodance technique. It is a lot easier than having my kid change his personality even if I wanted him to. Which I don't.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:30 PM
I was seriously punished for non-conformity (gender and otherwise), especially in the 5th and 6th grade, less so in jr. high just because it was much bigger, so there was room to be ignored, and still in 9th grade. Then I moved to eb's high school, which was big enough that I was ignored till I made friends. I certainly didn't have a nervous breakdown, but I think it seriously affected my development, both negatively (shy, poor social skills, sometimes morbidly concerned with what other people think of me) and positively (tolerant, empathetic, etc.).
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:33 PM
Sure -- I'm actually quite pleased by Sally's friend's fashion mentoring, given that I've got no skills in the area and it's friendly and affectionate. (In return, if anyone ever gives the friend a hard time, Sally will crush them like an insect. It's all about division of labor.)
I do think that if kids are determined to ostracise (which there's no reason to think that they are in the case of your son) clothes won't help: see FL's story about the Hawaiian shirt. Clothes can become wrong simply by being worn by the wrong person.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:36 PM
Girls have these really vicious systems of organized character-assassination, ridicule and ostracism which should not be underestimated. It can get physically violent too.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:38 PM
I take kid fashion very seriously as a pain aviodance technique. It is a lot easier than having my kid change his personality even if I wanted him to.
This reminds me of About a Boy, and is spot on. But look, your son's father is a surfer - no worries, he'll be fine.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:39 PM
Interestingly, for me the bad treatment came from boys.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:39 PM
Have I mentioned, Tia, that I'm going to beat you up?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:42 PM
129: I thought the ending of About a Boy was sad. It really seems as though the price of Marcus's not getting beat up is that he has to abandon most of his personality.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:44 PM
Have I mentioned that those years forged my iron will in fire?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:44 PM
And that I'm a biter?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:44 PM
I was going to say. I have the impression that the 'Mean Girls' stuff you hear about hits marginally socially successful girls hardest -- it's about carrot and stick torture: this week you're in, next week you're a pariah. It doesn't have all that much power against the total outsiders.
The straight bullying of real outsiders (which I got some of in an unpleasant milieu in which I took sailing lessons in the summer) came from boys more.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:45 PM
129: I thought the ending of About a Boy was sad. It really seems as though the price of Marcus's not getting beat up is that he has to abandon most of his personality.
Gawd, you're a priss, Weiner. (I don't think kids at that age have "a personality" that is somehow "authentic"; I'm not sure we have one at any age. Hard for me to begrudge anyone a few years of peace as they go through school (or otherwise).)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 4:47 PM
the trick, Joe, is to make sure that your son engages in group penis measurements as soon as possible, and that when he performs the Patriarchy Ritual, he does not spill the Chalice Of Innumerable Piss, or inadequately desecreate the Dead Squirrel Of The Dead, Very Dead Matriarchy.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:03 PM
that is, desecrate. Forgive me, Patriarchy Ritual.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:04 PM
Chalice Of Innumerable Piss
Those piss are innumerable, all right.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:09 PM
136: Who's begrudging? I'm not saying that Marcus should have continued to get beat up, I just think it kind of sucks that the only way for him to avoid getting beat up is to start acting like everyone else.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:15 PM
The COIP is not succeptible to grammatical improvement. That is why Ben Wolfson could not join.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:15 PM
I don't think kids at that age have "a personality" that is somehow "authentic"; I'm not sure we have one at any age.
And I'm outing you as John Doris.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:18 PM
Also, many fail to cross the Midnight Playground Strewn With Stored Gerbil Turds And Cheese Wax Lit Afire and drink the Purloined Beer Of The Passive Neighborhood Father. But those who do: Sweet Patriarchy!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:20 PM
Is the book any good? I might look into it.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:21 PM
John Doris has a rather distinct personality. I don't think he'd be able to hide behind a pseudonym. Plus, he's too big to hide behind anything.
Also, I found the ending of "About a Boy" incredibly moving, since, in my own adolescence, achieving social conformity through affection for popular culture was both deeply liberating and an antidote to preciousness.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:26 PM
where is my support? without the Patriarchy Ritual, it all falls apart.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:30 PM
Why was "precious" rejected again?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:30 PM
It wasn't; no one said anything about it after I mentioned it.
You can listen to an interview with Doris here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:33 PM
because no word will do what you want it to do. There's no word for stereotypically gay behavior that doesn't also connote gay sexuality.
You can either admit you're a homophobe, and use teh ghey, or stop making fun of limp wristed people.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:34 PM
I tried to answer that objection here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:39 PM
I think I'm still too shy to talk about my adolescence. But I never got into fights. Also, I think a significant proportion of people who didn't know me well, and probably a smaller portion of those who did, thought I was insane. Which I might be.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:48 PM
it's a good thing he was able to beat them off
I only hope they returned the favor.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:50 PM
It's been a while since I read About A Boy, actually, and I may be misremembering the ending; it may be that Marcus is just abandoning stuff his mother likes for stuff that's more like his peers, and so there's no abandonment of his personality. But it did make me think, "If he didn't want to be just like everyone else, he'd keep getting beat up." (IIRC neither getting better shoes nor getting into Nirvana is enough to help him.) I found Bad Santa much more uplifting.
The Doris book is accessible and interesting but if you read it in isolation you should know that not everyone will agree with his reading of virtue ethics (that is, not everyone thinks that virtue ethics is committed to what he thinks it's committed to.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:52 PM
"If he didn't want to be just like everyone else, he'd keep getting beat up."
And we know by whom.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 5:56 PM
Thought that link would go here.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:00 PM
Anonymous annoying update: GF-R points to this, which says that "annoy" in such statutes has been generally interpreted to refer to harassment and stalking as opposed to what we all like doing. Atrios has the case for the negative.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:22 PM
I found Bad Santa much more uplifting.
I thought the ending was way too pat and uplifting for the rest of the movie. But that's just me.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:25 PM
ogged, I don't mean to call you a homophobe; it can't be true given what I've seen. I just don't think there's a word that does what you want here.
Sissy comes closest, but really, it's just a childish word for gay.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:27 PM
Those piss are innumerable, all right.
Are you familiar with Borges' "The Circular Ruins"? "Innumerable" in text's ceremony-naming seems to me to be playing a similar role to "unanimous" in the first sentence of that story.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:35 PM
157: True 'nuf; I thought of adding "but unrealistic."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:38 PM
Oh my god, Tia would totally kick Ogged's ass. And, despite the oft-repeated Chris Noth comparison, he's much more a darker Adrien Brody. I see this going down much like the scene in Kong where Brody gets attacked by the giant insect (um, sorry Tia) -- a match where persistance, scrappiness, clawing for the eyes, and why..can't..I..get..it..off..of..me is way more effective than any any supposed strength or skillz.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:43 PM
I'm glad you caught that, Jeremy. Standpipe, I expect better.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:44 PM
I wouldn't call Ogged a homophobe, just conflicted.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:44 PM
This seems relevant to one of the recent discussions, maybe even to this one:
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:51 PM
I'm really going to have to beat up Tia now, aren't I?
Adrien Brody?? Yeesh.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:54 PM
162 -- I'm not saying your ceremony-naming is quite grammatical, just that there may be poetic justification for the deviation from the norm.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:54 PM
I wouldn't call Ogged a homophobe, just conflicted.
"questioning"
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:56 PM
a match where persistance, scrappiness, clawing for the eyes, and why..can't..I..get..it..off..of..me is way more effective than any any supposed strength or skillz
You're talking about the insidious polluting power of Girl Cooties again, aren't you? With a weapon like that, women are just naturally dirty fighters.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:57 PM
What? There's nothing wrong with Adrien Brody.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 6:59 PM
If you've got to know, I chose "innumerable" so as to create the image of many different contributers to the Chalice, and because it sounded funny, and because it is a very old ceremony performed by children -- I wanted it to sound awkward and jargony.
Er, that is, He Who Created The Patriarchy Ceremony likely named the Chalice what He named it for those reasons.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 7:01 PM
I've already told so many secrets of the Patriarchy that I cannot avoid dying in my sleep tonight.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 7:03 PM
Been nice knowing you.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 7:13 PM
Hey, did I fail to throw my trump card on this thread? My first name? I consider myself something of an expert on the subject of being picked on as a child for characteristics that deviate from gender norms.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:16 PM
To say nothing of the girlfriend off researching Fernando in Georgia.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:38 PM
Please. My middle name could so take your first name (or at least match it).
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:39 PM
I'm naming my daughter Chlamydia so as to build character.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:41 PM
Smasher's just nicer than I am. There's nothing better than changing your name and not bothering to tell your parents so they show up at parent-teacher night and wonder why nobody knows who they're talking aboout. (I at least did this out of obliviousness and not maliciousness.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:41 PM
All you anonymous folks have got a lotta fucking nerver talking about first and middle names. Come the revolution you guys 'll be the first ones up against the wall.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:43 PM
I wish I'd arrived in the 120–130s, because I think this emphasis on ensuring that a son learns a sport is total horseshit. Come on, this is the losernets—let's act like it. It's important to instill a good sense for competition in boys and girls, but playing in band does that just as well. Sports may help kids through the physically awkward years, but a certain degree of incoordination is simply inborn.
I developed a pretty thick skin a la "Boy Named Sue" when I was a kid, and in fact, I still get shit for it, and much more frequently as I get older than I would have guessed.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:49 PM
Becks, please. Unless your middle name is Thurbermingus I think I'll take this round. My first name was such a target that it was almost entirely too obvious for people to mock. The sneers: "Kriston . . . the girl!"
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:54 PM
Smashman makes a good point. If the kid isn't athletic, trying to get it to participate in a sport is a great way to make it miserable. You want to inculcate reasonably healthy habits, but that can mean going for a regular stroll.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:55 PM
Plus, some people will just end up competitive anyway. I never really seriously played sports, and I didn't have an opportunity to do anything else competitive (you can bet I was pissed in 5th grade that there was no inter-school spelling bee or any of that shit), but I still ended up pretty psyched about competing on just about anything.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:56 PM
A giant hamster wheel is a good substitute for those not athletically inclined.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:57 PM
Geez, you did have a rough childhood, smasher.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:58 PM
It's masculine *and* easily converted into an insult by the addition of one letter. What the hell were my parents thinking? However, you do win by keeping your name. Major points for keeping up the fight. I gave up in 4th grade (easily done when we moved).
Also, The Father of the Boy Named Sue.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 8:59 PM
You know what? I had a pretty bizarre condition that affected my Achilles' tendons when I was a kid, and spent a reasonable part of elementary school in and out of surgery and casts on both legs. I was going to go somewhere funny with that, but instead I'm crying.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:01 PM
I tried to give up my name. I was going to be Alex. But my mom wouldn't hear it and you certainly can't expect a fair hearing from a jury of your peers with regard to your most mockworthy characteristics.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:02 PM
"First of all, it's pronounced Eve-elyn."
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:18 PM
I realize now that I have been grumpy and trying to pick fights on this thread since 161 as a way of procrastinating. I ban myself until morning.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:24 PM
Oh, that's just great. Now that I've kicked the crap out of Tia and stuffed her in a locker, you decide that you didn't really mean it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:26 PM
I posted 188 before realizing that that name corresponds to my pseudonymous initials. I'm assuming that at least Tim will know where it's from.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:32 PM
Ac was certainly more social than I, but might have some perspective on how others were treated
I have the impression that the 'Mean Girls' stuff you hear about hits marginally socially successful girls hardest
Yeah, I was always reasonably popular, in a second tier sort of way, and it was nonetheless pretty harrowing. Had these times of clutching at power and status with my fingernails.
There wasn't any bullying--too academic a place for that sort of thing. But there was plenty of bitchiness and exclusion and a kind of social horror.
There were some very nerdy boys who got up the courage to ask out girls in my group, and I can remember the tremendous discomfort and awkwardness--and outraged superiority--of those occasions; which probably turned out quite harrowing for the boys involved.
But that must typical high school stuff.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:34 PM
191, me. Obviously.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:34 PM
must be
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:34 PM
I wonder what percentage of unfogged comments involve 1) claiming mistakenly unsigned comments and 2)correcting one's own grammar and spelling?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:38 PM
Evelyn Barbarossa?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:39 PM
My current problem is that I have a four-year boy who tends toward acting feminine.
Dude. He's four. Give him some time.
I plan on doing my best to reproduce the patriachy.
'Blind leading the blind.'
Or, at least reproduce the patriarchy enough to prevent him from him getting bullied.
Clue: he's going to get bullied a number of times. Adults get bullied all the fucking time. The question is, is how does he respond?
My current plan:
1. Buy him clothes that his peers respect. Immediately replace clothes that his peers disdain.
Great. Maybe you can also tattoo 'doormat' onto his forehead.
2. Buy him lots of toys that his peers respect.
I have an idea. Why not buy him a reasonable number of the toys he wants?
3. Send him to schools that aren't very macho.
Well, a Catholic girls school is out then. I guess your only option is military boarding school.
Don't switch schools so that he will be the new kid.
Why doncha keep him in the same school as long as it is reasonable? (Moving every six months: out. Not having any money because you refuse to move anywhere else; out as well, I imagine.)
Make sure that he isn't isolated in the school community.
Oh, like Dear Old Dad insisting other kids play with his kid ('When I was young I was always bullied! So you kids play nicely with my son! {shakes fist impotently}') isn't a one-way ticket to 'Lord of the Flies'.
4. Encourage sports participation.
Hey! I know. Maybe you could throw him a ball occasionally. And then! He could throw it back! Yay!
5. If he is bullied, tell him to fight.
Get him a younger brother if you're that worried about it. That'll get him a practice punching bag. ('He did? Really? Well, life is unfair sometimes. So what are you gonna do about this?')
I think in general that it is like the joke about running away from the bear. He doesn't have to be the most masculine boy in the class, just not the least masculine boy in the class.
It's like the mirror image of one of those guys who has a kid in order to turn him into an NFL quarterback.
And, if he turns out to be gay, it isn't like he won't have to lift weights anyway.
I have this thesis I've been simmering for a decade or so. The worst of the normal parents (normal does not include actively abusive parents and whatnot) are the ones who try too goddamned hard. A kid cannot learn confidence if his/her parents do not model it for him or her.
ash
['Woot.']
Posted by Piper at the Gates of Dawn | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:41 PM
reasonably popular, in a second tier sort of way
Ditto. I got, from my more popular friends, a lot of "you're wearing that? Okay, if you want to..."
I remember this one time that I was out of town, and I came back to a very excited three girls who were telling me all about some guy they met over the weekend that they were convinced I should date. I was like "is he cute?" One said "well, um, I think he's good for you..."
I mean, damn.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:41 PM
I'm naming my daughter Chlamydia so as to build character.
That's a very pretty name, actually. Unfortunately . . . .
We named our daughter Jennifer mainly because I was extremely fond of the name. Years before, I had told my law school roommates that if I ever had a daughter, I'd name her "Jennifer Elizabeth," and I did. My wife thought the name was OK, but it wasn't her first choice. I eventually beat her into submission.
I also liked that it was a common name. I had read that kids with common names got abused less than kids with oddball names ("LizardBreath" or "ogged," for example). Some of the names my wife suggested were Amber, Avril, and even Lurline. I am not making this up. The ghastly "Lurline" is her mother's middle name, so she figured her mother would like that. She'll do anything to try to make mom happy -- not that it ever works. btw, her mother's initials after marriage are "BLT."
Jennifer has expressed her gratitude to me for not being named "Lurline."
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:44 PM
ash, criticizing someone else's parenting in that way is a bit much.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:45 PM
"Lurline" just might be the worst real name I've ever heard.
But I can't imagine giving my kid a common name. My first name is tres Iranian, but pretty uncommon, even in Iran; ditto the last name. I love having a unique name--it kind of freaks me out to think that someone else could have my name.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:49 PM
There were twins in my middle school named Robin and Kelly. They said that their parents would have named them the same way regardless of their gender.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:53 PM
Ebola would be a really cute girl's name. But the scientists went and ruined it, they way they ruin everything that's mysterious and wonderful and beautiful.
Despite what the scientists say, God exists. And Ebola is a good name for a girl.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:53 PM
"And when I have a son, I'm going to name him . . . Bill, or George—anything but Sue!"
I'm in favor of unique names, too. I like Hayden for a boy. Maybe with a solid anchor of a middle name, Christopher or something like that, to toughen up an arguably fey touch.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:55 PM
What, your kids aren't going to be named Legbreaker and Skullcrusher?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 9:59 PM
My sister-in-law's legal name is Hobie, after a line of boats (specifically, the "Hobie Cat"). She's always been fine with it.
More seriously, I endorse Joe's general strategy for keeping his kid from getting stigmatized and picked on. I was similiarly vulnerable and got through with quite a lot of premeditated external help. I could be one of those people with unbearably painful memories of 9th grade, but I'm not.
Some famous contemporary actor was the son of a ballet dancer and learned ballet, but they taught hum kungfu to so it worked out.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:00 PM
ogged, I am very glad you like your unique name. My parents were very big on giving us unique names, with my brother's being the most unique, and I was very annoyed when he decided for a time in jr. high that he was going to go by "jake" instead. Luckily, it didn't stick.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:01 PM
Hum kungfu is especially deadly. I'll leave the details to your imaginations.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:02 PM
I used to know an Iranian woman named Anahita, after a pagan love goddess. I wish I knew the story behind that.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:03 PM
I am, however, really regretting not beating up John Emerson when I had the chance--he escaped 9th grade, but was beaten down at...a blog meetup. Awesome.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:04 PM
I have a cousin named Anahita.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:04 PM
This thread makes me wonder what advice is given to parents of children who seem likely to become bullies.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:06 PM
I have a cousin who's a pagan love goddess.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:07 PM
Like Ogged, my first and last name are both very unusual, to the point that it's extremely unlikely that anyone else has ever had them together, and I'm quite pleased by that. My mom gave my sister a name that she liked a lot and thought was also unusual, but unfortunately a lot of other mothers at the time thought the exact same thing, with the result that my sister was often not the only girl in her class with her name. As soon as she went off to college she switched to using her middle name, which is very nice and much less common.
Oh, and I've never gotten hassled about my name. I have gotten a lot of compliments for it. I'm therefore skeptical of Frederick's argument.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:17 PM
"Lurline" just might be the worst real name I've ever heard.
It's way up there. Amazingly, if I Google "Lurline" I get 143,000 hits -- the top ones being for some ship with that name.
My first name is tres Iranian, but pretty uncommon, even in Iran; ditto the last name. I love having a unique name--it kind of freaks me out to think that someone else could have my name.
If both of your names are "pretty uncommon," I assume there are some other people who have the same name, right? When I Google my first and last names, the vast majority of the hits are for me, but there are a few other people with the same name out there. None of them have a lot of Google hits, fortunately -- losers! I did a Nexis search about 20 years ago in law school and found some guy with my name who'd died in a mining accident.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:18 PM
Do you have another cousin named Proochie?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:19 PM
I assume there are some other people who have the same name, right?
No, as with teofilo, it's a good bet that no one has had my full name. And like him, I get lots of compliments on it. Go unusual names!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:21 PM
No, I do not have another cousin named Proochie, which was almost surely not that person's given name.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:22 PM
Before she married my father, my mother had a fiance with unusual names who unfortunately was captured in WWII. She waited for him actually, but after his release he married someone else. When my mother was 86 I Googled his name and found him, 92 years old. I sent him an email and he eventually answered.
I've actually heard from several of my mother's ex-beaus since she died.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:22 PM
Wow, 92-year-olds respond to e-mail?
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:23 PM
if I Google "Lurline" I get 143,000 hits
Even more hits, when you add in another spelling.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:24 PM
Nickname.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:24 PM
And.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:24 PM
Via one or several intermediaries.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:24 PM
I just googled my name and got 11 hits, all me. Life is good.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:27 PM
OK, "Lurline" apparently is not the worst real name. I found a site with weird names, including mention of a girl named "Euthanasia"(!!)
http://www.namenerds.com/uucn/advice/legendsubmit.html
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:28 PM
Hayden was the 88th most common boy's name in 2004, and shooting up in popularity. This happens for a lot of seemingly unusual names.
My candidate, "Marbury" (figure she'll beat up all the Madisons) isn't on the list anywhere, but I figure by the time (if!) I have kids it will be.
All stats via the way cool and previously linked Baby Name Wizard.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:28 PM
I'm also pretty confident that no one else has the same full name as I do. At least, not the same spelling/gender combination.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:32 PM
If I Google all versions of my name, I get 187 hits, 95% or so of which are me.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:33 PM
A lot of people have the same first and last name I do and it's very hard to find me on google. Which is how I like it, except it does make it less likely to be able to find out if anyone has said horrible things about me in some out of the way place.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:37 PM
On my website I have a list of non-me's with my name. The most famous are Dred Scott's owner and Anita Loos's husband. (Not very famous). Oddly, there are several people (as many as 4) with my name in Asian studies, which is my only field of near-competence. I have received a letter intended for one of the others.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:39 PM
Looking at the Baby Name Wizard, I see that my sister's name peaked in the '80s (interestingly, so did mine, although much, much lower). Her middle name peaked in the 1910s, which makes sense since it was our grandmother's name.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:40 PM
That Baby Name Wizard site Matt linked is indeed interesting. My name has gone from No. 39 among boys' names in the 1880's to No. 449 in 2004. (Sob!) But girls' names are way more trendy than boys': for example, Susan plummeted from No. 4 in the 1950's among girls' names to No. 565 in 2004. (Truly bizarre: supposedly it was No. 885 among boys' names in the 1960's, suggesting that there really were "boys named Sue." One wonders if someone didn't just check the wrong box on the form.) Linda suffered a similar fate to Susan. Madison, which at the time the movie "Splash" came out wasn't even in the top 1000 girls' names, got as high as No. 2. It's probably destined for the same treatment. My daughter's name, Jennifer, was No. 1 for 15 straight years, but is down to No. 38 in 2004.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 10:50 PM
"Elizabeth" was also allegedly a top n name for boys in the 1980s. It has to be people checking the wrong box.
"Michael" ended a forty-year reign at #1 recently, supplanted by (I just remembered) "Jacob." Which actually dropped in frequency from the 1990s even as it went from #5 to #1. So maybe boys' names are getting trendier.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:04 PM
Googling "ben wolfson" (in quotes) gets 40,000 hits, and many are me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:07 PM
"Beverly" is the name of a famous Republican Moral Majority child molester.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:13 PM
re 235
I am particularly impressed with your contributions to the american cocksucker .
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:24 PM
Going back to an earlier point, it's not so necessary for boys to play sports as it is for them to do some sort of organized activity. I did sports as well as theatre/music, and actually found the theatre crowd far more close-knit. End result: you might get made fun of by the stereotypical jocks, but you won't care, and you'll be able to mock them much more effectively for being uncultured boors.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 9-06 11:25 PM
I have a German first name, a Scottish middle name and a very English family name. My mother, when asked why she did not bring me up to be bi-lingual, stated that she did not want me to be picked on at school for being a German speaker!
The trouble is there is NO known English translation of my first name.
So you see I found out about the disorientational effect of a punch to the nose very early on in life.
Posted by Austro | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 2:12 AM
your contributions to the american cocksucker
Good god, we're all there. My name returns ~46,500 hits, of which apostropher.com is the third hit (not bad, considering my name doesn't appear anywhere on the main page). I'm also a hockey stadium in Edmonton ("Russ Barnes has poor to partial accessibilty. Entrance accessible") and on the second page of hits, a photo captioned "Russ Barnes eats a hamburger with a spoon."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 4:39 AM
I used to think I was the only David Weman in the world, but apparently there are a couple of Americans. Sucks. But I don't really consider 'Deyvid' Weem'n the same name as mine. I'm about 99,9% of google results.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 4:43 AM
I mean 'Deyvid Weem'n'. You shouldn't give a kid a weird name. I'm not sure all unusual names are ones you'd get teased for.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 5:10 AM
I mean 'Deyvid Weem'n'. You shouldn't give a kid a weird name. I'm not sure all unusual names are ones you'd get teased about.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 5:13 AM
Reckon all 23,000 "Jeremy Osner"s on Google are me. Whee!
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 5:20 AM
My name is distressingly common, although I narrowly avoided being named Maximillian.
Posted by Matt #3 | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 6:45 AM
Reckon all 23,000 "Jeremy Osner"s on Google are me. Whee!
I guess that's one reason to use one's full name when leaving comments: you feel like incredibly hot shit when you Google yourself. btw, my father's first, last, and middle names (Charles Clyde Rhine) are all rivers, as my maternal grandmother (his mother-in-law) pointed out.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:10 AM
My name's pretty normal and boring. As Matt pointed out, Hayden's more popular (and the popularity of Hayden Christiansen among the teenage girl set probably means more), along with lots of Aidens/Aidans/Jaidens/Jaydens, etc. He's probably end up Hayden C.
It's often odd that what one thinks of as popular names ('Jennifer', etc) are usually set by the time someone leaves fifth grade. So twenty years later when people are having kids, they tend to think that no one has thought of Olivia or Emma because 'little girls are all named Jennifer and Kristen'.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:11 AM
Yeah, my sons' names, Keegan and Noah, both seemed uncommon, though in 2004 (according to babynamewizard), Keegan was #255 after not registering at all before the 1980s, and Noah was all the way up at #29. So maybe not so much anymore.
I've met many more kids named Keegan than Noah, though, so perhaps there's some regional concentration happening.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:27 AM
TIA enters stage right, clothes wrinkled and torn, dragging forgotten math homework from her right heel.
TIA [a fleck of blood stained drool running from the corner of her mouth]: You all might think that my absence last night meant that Ogged was the victor. And sure, he can still type. And that's the only way he'll ever be able to convey his affections to a woman again. I just didn't have the heart to destroy those beautiful, delicate hands, that rested at such a languid 90 degree angle from his ulna.
Lights dim.
Shockingly, having only met me once, Becks has precisely described my fighting style.
My first name is very common, but AFAIK, only my subbranch of the family has my last name (Google reveals no others). What's more, I'm the only child of my generation, and a woman. If I don't find a way to give my name to my children, it'll die with me.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:29 AM
And Adrien Brody is teh swoonworthy, Ogged. Qu'est-ce que c'est ton probleme?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:44 AM
Re: 180 and others
I'm surprised 'Kriston' was a traumatic name -- what kept you from semi-officially dropping back to a nice manly 'Chris'? Was this a saga of continual rediscovery, where people figured out your actual name?
My birth name was so common I was absolutely invisible online -- there was no way to pull me out of the crowd of people with my same name. (Aided by the fact that there was a minor late 80's/early 90's media flap involving someone of my name.) With Mr. Breath's name hyphenated into the mix, I'm unique world-wide, as far as I know.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 7:49 AM
My google results are pretty much all me; Drymala's a really unusual last name. My paternal grandfather is also named Joe, but he's not so much with teh internet savvy.
Man, Shel Silverstein's a little too comfortable falling back on the 50's-era fag humor, huh? I'm disappointed in him.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01-10-06 8:24 AM
You know, while there's lots of Silverstein' stuff that I like, I've thought ill of him since reading The Giving Tree. That is one messed-up book: I love you, and to demonstrate it I'll give you everything I have, including allowing you to dismember me, despite the fact that you show no appreciation or gratitude. I mean, there are relationships like that, but I wouldn't put one in a chidren's book.
Posted by LizardBreath |