I can't help but feel that having been "gifted and talented," apparently a near universal experience here, is part of why this identification has been so easy. Perhaps going forward, with the academic achievers tilting more female, to or slightly beyond parity, will make this less likely.
Oh, skin care. After working at the notorious compulsive-commercial-femininity temple that is a top-tier Manhattan spa, I was finally bullied into two ladylike regimes: summer pedicures and expensive facial cleanser. I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!
I'm actually thinking of doing a spa day sometime soon. I'm so unfamiliar with all the beauty routines that the thought of being fussed over and polished by people who know what they're doing for once seems interesting, in a 'who knows, maybe I'll like it' kind of way.
1: Doesn't work for me -- I was feeling that way in a selective high school that had until recently (10-15 years?) been a girls school. I wasn't associating with 'my academic peers' or anything, I just couldn't keep up with the girls socially.
I accidentally showed up for school one day in eleventh grade or so looking rather well-turned out for once by Eighties standards. A bunch of popular girls were uncharacteristically friendly, coming over to me to chat, when we normally had no social contact at all. When I figured out that the willingness to speak to me was a response to the outfit, I was so horrified I wore only LL Bean turtlenecks and jeans for a couple of weeks.)
In middle school I once showed up dressed like the other guys - similar jeans and similarly designed shirt, neither of which I'd worn before - and people commented on how I was dressed "normally" for once. I never dressed that way again. I think the stakes were lower for guys because I was also never picked on for how I dressed, either.
LB: I do want to warn you that getting a spa facial (not the other kind) can be really relaxing and fun, but do be prepared for the heavy sell. When I worked at that spa, I'd go to training sessions in which a rich marketing guy would encourage all the aestheticians to *mock* whatever the client used for facial cleanser so she'd buy product. They don't make much on the services, so they push product like crazy. If you can steel yourself against that, it can be a really nice and even self-affirming experience of like, "I, too, deserve teh fancy."
3 - I've gotten kind of hooked on summer pedicures. I like having pretty toes. I have very ticklish feet, though, and am certain I'm going to accidentally kick one of the ladies in the face à la The 40 Year Old Virgin one of these days and be horrified.
I manage to look fairly femme these days on a beauty routine that consists of showering, mostly.
It's not how you look that matters. It's that now you'll hang out with your new girl friends from the spa and won't hang out with us in our secret He-Man Women Hater's Club in the treehouse. Once again, feminists ruin America.
I'm pretty sure I know at least one girl who is friends with exclusively males because she's misogynist. Really. She seems to feed on male attention and view all other women as competition. Doesn't anyone else know someone like this?
I wasn't exactly a tomboy (I default to femme), but I was the girl that knew that girls weren't good at science and said fuck it and was good at science anyway and had more boy friends than girl friends because the girls were all smarmy little airheads.
(This may be misogyny.)
I don't think it always leads to misogyny, but it can, especially in older female academics, who dealt with real misogyny in the course of their careers. (Writing a brilliant critique or inventing a new field; being called Miss X and ignored when accolades came about.) They don't hate other women, exactly, but they have no patience for any sort of femininity or weakness (often defined as 'wanting time off for kids or family.')
I find it totally amusing that I'm supposed to be the femmey one here. I think we need to start breaking down these femme/tomboy divides according to region and social class.
Anyway. I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is. (Perfectly willing to cop to having that hangup myself from time to time.) Then again, one of my favorite academic talks evah was one by a quiet feminist scholar at a mid-level liberal arts college who did a fascinating reading of Wollestonecraft and ended the talk by saying that if we don't acknowledge our own misogyny, we're never going to get anywhere.
I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is.
Or it's a totally rational position, say, circa fifth grade, to the airheads with poorly applied blue eyeshadow who didn't want to wire a circuit because Joey wouldn't like them. Maybe it's misogynist to think they're airheads, but it's not my fault they were idiots.
Seriously, though, I'm not sure it's wrong to be proud of it; token women have had to put up with a lot of shit, and it's not wrong that they feel proud for persevering. What does seem to be wrong, however, is feeling superior to other women, which isn't the same as feeling proud.
23: I think that the token woman role, as AWB and Silvana said, has a fair bit of misogyny in it, yeah. Other than that I'm not sure why (or whether) I've pissed off you, ac, and Cala.
22: I don't think I understand what you're saying, but I think you sound (or find my comments) hostile? I don't understand why.
24: I do think it's misogynistic, fifth grade or no, to think of girls as airheads and idiots, yes. I get on PK's case when he says shit like that; I'm certainly going to object to it when adults do it. I don't see a meaningful distinction between pride/superiority in this use--I can see being proud of one's achievements, but not being proud of the token status. If anything, I would think one would be very sad and lonely about it.
Oh, I'm not upset. I agree it's misogynist, but at that age the options were a) try to fit in with the girls with whom I had nothing in common (probably would have required me failing a few science/math courses and giving a damn about Teen or whatever airheaded young actor was hot) or b) enjoying my interests, which means running with the boys and at least having some friends. And quite a few of them were bright up until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
Now I know that probably wasn't their fault, but at the time believing that it wasn't inevitable probably kept me from giving up.
Adhering to b) lead to being a token, but being b) was certainly being truer to myself (and harder) than doing badly so the boys would like me would have been. In that context, just achieving means you're a token. Something to be proud of.
I'm not getting where the mysogyny comes in--women preferring like minded individuals doing things that women can do. I can sort of sense the argument about mysogyny, but I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
doing badly so the boys would like me would have been.
Did you grow up in a very conservative state? I think I'm a decade older than you, and I don't remember anything like that in high school. Thinking back, the guys with the most pull were athletes, and I'm almost certain that some of them dated for brains--I know of at least one who's girlfriend helped on (and occassionally did) his homework.
until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
That sounds like a super sucky environment.
Echoing SCMT (who is about my age), here: In high school or before, I never encountered the idea that a girl had to appear ditzy to attract boys. Whenever I hear about this phenomenon I just assume it died out in the 50s. Evidently it didn't.
25: You haven't pissed me off, and I can certainly agree that generally thinking women are airheads is misogynist (it's pretty much the definition) or seeking out a position as the token woman out of a desire for status or dislike for women is as well. Ac seemed to be saying that this comment thread was in itself misogynist, and that I didn't get.
I grew up in a relatively conservative area. (Our memorial day parade this year was lined with Santorum balloons.) Oddly enough, in high school it wasn't nearly as bad, but fifth grade seemed to be the year when everyone was taking their cues from teen magazines rather than reality.
I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
Nah, you don't need that. The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
Tim, it's not so much because women were forced to do stuff--that's too simple. It's that X, Y, and Z were socially-approved feminine traits, so women who didn't correspond to them were not socially approved. And as a result, those of us who weren't properly femmey mistook the symbol for the content, if that makes sense: we hated the girly girls because of their girlyness, rather than recognizing that, like everyone else in the entire world, some of the girly girls were perfectly fine people, and some of them weren't, and if they were being girly girls because of social pressure, they were as much victims of that (limiting themselves to get approval) as we were (not getting approval, and resenting those who did).
DA, fwiw, I don't think it's so much that girls had to behave that way as that a lot of them did, because femminess is (still) a safer route to approval for girls than not-femminess. Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
LB, thanks. I think I'm just getting tone all wrong today and feeling generally beseiged by too much taking-care-of-PK-so_Mr.B-can-get-stuff-done, combined with getting-stuff-done-myself. I need a good night's sleep.
The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
That I can see and have seen. (And seriously--Jeebus.) But I have great faith in Generation Awesome. I now meet more and more women in positions of power who are inclined to recognize these burdens. It just seems like a pyramid: the first set of women to make it are just crushed, and not inclined to be forgiving of anything less than total committment, then next generation less so, and so on. And, indeed, with more and more women in the workplace, I have seen earlier generations of women seem to loosen up on the toughness. It's pretty cool.
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
Things seem to be getting more rather than less exaggerated in this respect -- all the little girls my wife used to look after and the kids of various relatives seem much more exaggerately femmey than I remember my sister or any of her friends being when we were little.
34: Yeah, I think things are changing too. What I notice (I think) is that young men seem just a lot less hung up and a lot more accepting of women as women than I think they used to.
It's weird to occasionally think that one's own feminism may occasionally be fighting dragons that are becoming an endangered species.
38: Yeah, I think it's a weird warping of this girl power/3rd wave stuff. OTOH, it might also be that, thanks to the 3rd wave, we're getting past the idea that boy things = high status, and therefore both girls and boys should be not-femmey. At least, I'm really proud of PK (in a perverse way) for being offended by, and defensive about, the idea that boys can too wear pink.
I'm with ttaM on 38 -- while I had trouble with the required level of femminess in high school, I don't remember the pink&sparkliness being nearly as pervasive for little girls when I was a kid as it is for Sally's peers. I don't know how much to worry about it, but they're certainly almost totally socially segregated from boys, which I don't think is either innate or a particularly good thing.
I think it varies, but generally I'd say femme = high maintenance appearance stuff: dresses on little girls, eye-catching shoes, clothes that are sparkly or affect delicacy; for women, the salon/spa stuff, heels, dry-clean only clothes, makeup. Etc.
I will say that, at least at PK's school, the femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do, but the girls' are in pinks and purples and have sparkly things on them, whereas the boys are more neutrally-colored. (When he was littler, I'd put PK in the brighter colored ones b/c I think brown on little kids is boring, damnit.)
femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do
Are you checking it out in detail? IME, shoes, particularly, where the difference is only in the color and sparkliness are the exception rather than the rule. If I let Sally pick out the color shoes she wants, I have to watch like a hawk to make sure that they aren't slippery-soled and unstable.
You can find sparkly and practical, but you have to be really careful about your shopping.
I'm not sure what I think of femme clothing. (Disney princess will be banned in the restored calaphate.) Which, full disclosure, is most of my warddrobe. I tend to view clothes as costumes though, not really personality statements, so it sort of varies with whether I'm giving a damn or not.
I don't pull off butch well, though. Wrong body type.
47: Bogus and offensive. The fact that it's cute indicates low status -- if it mattered what girls thought about boys, the shirts would be offensive and wouldn't exist. (Or, if I'm wrong about that, then they're just straight out offensive.)
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey
I'm wondering now why my experience seems so atypical. Of course we played with Barbies and whatnot, but girls very seldom (if ever) wore dresses when I was in elementary school. The only girls who wore skirts or dresses were girls from families that had just immigrated.
I'm wondering if it's a class thing. In grade 8, almost every girl in my class had short hair, and when I went to the middle-class part of the city once a week for the gifted program one of the things that struck me weird was that the girls from these wealthier families all had long hair. And wore skirts.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
49: Actually, we've got a weird ethnicity dynamic going on. I'm not particularly femme (although I go to work everyday in business clothes, which require femininity); Nancy, the Columbian babysitter, is way, way femme (in a tasteful and dignified fashion). Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It's also not just the home -- peer pressure is huge.
Disney princesses are okay in moderation: dressing up and being sparkly is fine. Boys should be able to do it too (and I suspect part of the popularity of pirates is just b/c of that).
Where I used to live, there were a lot of perfectly great solid-colored all-cotton jumper-type dresses with tights outfits on girls that were, by my accounts, just fine. I bought some for PK when he was littler, in fact, b/c they were cute, damnit, and I didn't care if he was a boy. (Plus, dresses are easier to change diapers in, whereas tights are warmer under cotton pants than just socks.) Here, femminess seems more working-class than middle- or professiona-class; at least, femminess of a certain type. My very excellent lesbian colleagues dress their kids in the solid-colored cotton-jumper with tights stuff when they aren't wearing pants and t-shirts. Whereas PK's school peers are more likely to wear things that have Disney princess or Dora on them.
Dunno about femme adult women's clothing. The last few years have been very schizo: gypsies tramps and thieves for a while, and then also the tailored classic retro stuff (which I favor).
50 - I agree that all of this princess stuff is out of control but I'm also wary of the other extreme. My parents banned Barbies from the house, only bought me unisex clothing, and bought me shit like Tonka trucks instead of the toys I asked for (under the thinking that "boy stuff" was more nongendered) and it really pissed me off and, I think, has something to do with why I view other women as foreign creatures and can't really relate to them socially (and, honestly, am kinda scared of and intimidated by them). I suppose their experiment worked in that I ended up in a male-dominated profession, etc. but I sometimes wonder at what cost. (Also, remember, my parents are both psychologists.)
49: I do think that, broadly speaking, Latinas are more femmey than anglos (anglas?). But I think that American feminism, compared to other feminisms, has been a lot more hung up with eschewing femininity--which I think has something to do with American culture being hyper anxious about masculinity. (And yes, I really do think that.)
56: That's the problem. Where normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male, you end up walking a fine line between raising your daughter as a social outcast who despises other women (not good), or as a manicure-obsessed nitwit in shoes that will break your legs. (I know I sound obsessive about the shoes, but I was in the park with Sally and Newt yesterday watching a bunch of older girls (9? 10?) playing in slides. They were trying to run around, and ended up taking their shoes off and playing barefoot in an NYC concrete playground, which meant that they still couldn't run. The boys were in sneakers, and were running.) You can't accept the femme shit without serious editing, but you can't keep your daughter away from it either.
I remember my sister having femmey things -- but they were dress-up or for special occasions like birthdays. Other than that, what she wore was largely indistinguishable from what I wore. At least until we were school age and even then, outside school, there wasn't a huge difference until we were quite a bit older.
I don't think that's so much the case now.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
I think so, but I was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s and most of the girls I hung out with were either into the indie thing -- Dr Martin's, etc -- or costumey goth stuff. The student 'uniform' at college was way way less femmey than what people currently wear.
re: 54 Yeah. My wife is pretty femme -- the whole eastern european thing. There are, it seems to my superficial eyes, cultural/ethnic differences and I'm not sure that certain clothes signify the same thing in say Prague versus Glasgow.
Oh, Barbies are fine. Dressing up is fine. Pirates rule. I just loathe the princess line.
I've noticed lately that pink seems to have become a more masculine color, at least in some circles. When I was in college every young man owned a cornflower blue shirt; now a lot of them seem to own a deep rose shirt. I associate as a Latino thing, except that there seem to be more anglo men wearing pink. Probably not in the office, but it seems to be true socially.
Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It varies, of course, but my experience tends to confirm her observation. At least, Hispanics tend to be significantly more femme than Anglos (who can of course be femme as well).
On preview I see that b has said something similar.
normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male
See, it seems to me the opposite: girls can wear girls' stuff or boys' stuff, but god forbid a boy want something that isn't brown or khaki-colored. Orange seems to be about the only acceptable boys' color nowadays.
Although! It's true, I frequently find that I point PK to adult men to show him that yes, men do sometimes have long hair/wear pink/wear jewelry/whatever. People seem more hung up about gender in small kids than they do about gender in adults, which is backwards (if being hung up about gender makes any sense at all, that is).
Or maybe it's just that the hung up people are more likely to have kids?
64: You're right that the fashion controls are tighter on boys than on girls (Nancy keeps on hiding a pair of *white* shorts Newt likes. White isn't butch enough. Jesus. And yes, Sally's stereotype is more accurate than not, I was just trying to discourage the stereotyping process.). But for pastimes, it's pretty hardline segregated. Girls can do organized athletic stuff, but there's no kicking a ball around with the boys in my neighborhood -- kids playing outside are in single-sex groups.
Doesn't how femme girls are depend very much on their mothers?
It's sort of dependent on the mothers, but not entirely. My mom is very femme; apparently her first comment on learning she was pregnant with me was 'I hope I have a little girl so I can dress her up in pretty clothes.' But she's not femme in a terribly high maintenance sense; she's striking beautiful, and wore makeup, but it was all minimal over the counter makeup, not expensive facials and spas. A very midwestern femme.
But it didn't take, exactly, with all of us. I am not as femme as my mom; I rebelled against makeup for a long time and I still don't wear foundation ever. One of my sisters has traditionalist attitudes but is way more butch than me. The youngest two are ridiculously femme, one with a cutesy vibe and one with a calabat vibe.
And we're all probably butch compared to the South, where I swear women must get manicures so they can shop for groceries.
I think a fair bit of "feminine" style stuff is countersignaling. Think of the pink-polo wearing frat boy or the long haired athlete. In little kids, there is no externally masculine factors to counter-signal against, so any sort of feminine behavior is just read as straight up teh ghey.
71: These days I think of (and describe) myself as ultra-femmey, but a couple of people I've met from the blog (and my boyfriend) all say I'm actually much more granola than I realize. I think midwestern femminess is weird.
75: It is. It's like, be femme, but let's be sensible about it. So, while it drove my mother crazy that I didn't want to wear makeup, had I awakened at 5 every day to straighten my hair and put on tons of makeup, she would have gently told me it wasn't necessary because I needed my sleep.
This did lead to a few sorts of 'why don't you look like susie Q' conversations; I don't thiink I realized until college how much work my classmates had put in on their appearance. I had just assumed they were naturally prettier. (Perhaps true, but not for the reasons I thought.)
My mother hasn't done anything about the proliferation of sparkly flipflops breeding in my sister's bedroom, though.
My parents never had a problem with me playing with the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people). I probably spent less time playing with action figures than with any other toy. I probably spent the most time with board or video games, though.
75: There are all sorts of different scales. I look much less femme in an office environment than I do visiting Buck's family on a western PA farm. Law-firm femme is about being precisely turned out and polished -- disheveled is non-femme. In western PA, disheveled is fine, and long hair and tits are all the visual signifiers of femininity I need to show up with, so as long as I don't say anything surprising, I'm fine. If I showed up with hair and nails done to the nines, I'd look intimidating, which might come off as less, rather than more, feminine.
the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people)
OMG, were those the little mice that stood up and, if memory serves, were actually made of fur, and you could get them in all sorts of outrageous little outfits? My sister collected those, too. I haven't seen them as an adult, but if I ever find them I'm sure PK is going to go nuts for them.
I don't remember if the mice were made of real fur - not having developed an interest in authenticity at the time - but they at least had fake fur, stood up, and had outfits. I seem to remember them being already dressed so I don't know if you could change them. She probably gave all the mice away, but I'm pretty sure she saved the house.
56: I'm not sure I would go as far as your parents, and you're (obv.) best suited to see both the benefits and the costs, so maybe it was all a bit of a mistake, but you seem to have turned out pretty well (or you fake it well), and I still think your parents are awesome.
I can sort of guess at ac's complaint (#22), mostly because I've been on the other side when we've had similar debates before. And I think she's turned me around a bit. There's nothing inherently wrong with femme--I just don't really get it, so it's not a very useful trait a woman to have as regards me. But structuring gender around my wants is probably not the best idea; I simply don't have the time to hang out with that many women.
So I demand only a tithe: 10% of all women should be not-femme. The rest may do as they like.
86: Right, the clothes were sort of glued on or whatever. They had little ethnic costumes, or professional costumes, or just cute outfits of whatever sort. All rather elaborately detailed.
My mother, perhaps in an attempt to subvert traditional gender stereotypes, bought dolls for both my brother and myself when we were little ("girly" dolls, not G.I. Joe dolls). To her disappointment, we would make them fight like any other action figure. She really just wanted a daughter, I think.
I bought PK a doll or two. Unsurprisingly, he was as uninterested in his dolls as I was in mine when I was a kid. I didn't make mine fight, though; I stuck pins in them.
His dad had a favorite doll, though. But then Germans are freaks.
93: My son loved all sorts of dress-up stuff when he was younger. He'd routinely go to preschool in shorts, t-shirt, cowboy boots, and a cape. Or a pirate shirt and a cape. Or almost anything and a cape, really. Now (at 10) he's reluctant to wear his styling new pink shirt when he thinks his friends might see him. But it's still cool with his cousins.
We weren't really interested in the dolls themselves either (even the GI Joe's), except in their ability to be incorporated into our broader fort-building activities. Man, that's how you really keep a kid occupied: give them a big bin of wooden blocks. And that sort of stuff is pretty much a blank slate--no inherent gender issues there.
I used to looove building forts in the living room out of blankets and cushions from the couch. I should so build a fort in the living room some rainy day. Will have to find a likeminded person to build the fort with, though. Forts are much more fun when shared. Ideally, you should have at least one person to build the fort with and one person who disapproves of the fort-building (like a parent) to make it all the more satisfying. At least, that's what I recall from my childhood.
I'm so disappointed that PK doesn't really play with the Brio stuff much! BTW, Brio purchased Plan Toys, which made the most fabulous (non-train) wood toy stuff of all sorts.
Wrong with me? WRONG WITH ME! Blocks are chunky, and demand oversized buildings. Lincoln Logs have notches that are satisfying to put together. And unlike Legos buildings, Lincoln Log forts explode when bombed with marbles.
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures. No cute little patio or chimneys. And they're all brown! You can't have fun with the colors. I'm with you on Legos not being as satisfying to knock down as non-notched building materials. I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
I am a precog, and knew that Becks would want an answer. Her claim regarded blocks and Legos.
Wood toys--what's the point, beyond giving the parents the comforting feeling that they live in some patchouli scented Whole Foods? They're anachronisms in this modern world, and an indication of some bizarre unwillingness to engage childhood as it is today, with its myriad forms of plastic play.
I never liked Tinker Toys. The sticks and holes were always slightly different sizes. Either they wouldn't stay in because they were too loose or you couldn't get them to fit together because they were too tight.
I was never all that interested in Legos or Lincoln Logs. I did have a plastic race track for toy cars that you put on a staircase and set up so that the car would go through a loop and off a ramp. That got boring quickly so I sent marbles down the track and had them jump into an empty coffee can. It was very, very loud.
I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
Wooden blocks are chunky, and lack the elegant grace of the lincoln log. Kids who play with them will lack the fineness of finger articulation that lincoln log players will enjoy in later life. But, hey, someone needs to be the kid everyone else picks on.
Cushion forts are awesome. Now that you've got me thinking about forts, I recall that though I'm an only child, and had my own room, I made a fort in the closet in my room, shut the door, and hung out in there. That's fucked up. They should have seen "will hang out with computer strangers" coming twenty years ago.
Legos, it should be noted, suck. It's much more fun to build with stuff that you have to use some imagination and ingenuity to get to stand up, with the precariousness being part of the fun. This is not an erection joke.
You would, apo. PK builds his own toys out of organic hemp and dried leaves. And then we meditate on how grateful we are for all the things the good earth has given us, just as we do before every meal of sustainably harvested oats and pure rain water.
When I was very little, I was something of a tom boy. My hair was cut by a barber, and I had osh kosh bgosh overralls. I even had striped ones with a train engineer's hat. When I was 5 or 6, though, I decided that I wanted hair that waslong enough to pull back in a ponty tail, and that I wanted to be able to put my hair in a bun for ballet recitals.
The girls in my grade school wore corduroy pants and plaid skirts with tights. There was no head tossing. High school was weird, because there were girls who wouldn't leave the dorm without massive makeup, because then boy swould see them. There were also grungy types who barely bothered to groom themselves before going to breakfast. There were a lot of blazers in highschool, because that's what girls had to wear when they wore pants.
My Dad is almost a misandrist. He doesn't really like spending time with men. All of his best friends have been women. He doesn't liek the competitive one upsmansip that's common in a lot of male friendships, and he's not interested in sports (unless his daughter is competing in them. He likes watching a race or a field hockey game in crisp fall weather. He can't stand watching football.)
I think that I remember those mice dolls. Were there other animals too?
My parents liekd toys that required imagination--blocks and erector sets. They bought me a doll's house, and the furniture in it was very nice. The bathroom set was very old-fashioned; the tub had claws, and the toilet had a chain. It wasn't girly; it was tasteful decorating. I did ask for a Barbie. I got the pool set and a car. My Dad didn't like that so much, but he would have been glad for me to play with dolls id I wanted to. My Dad's idea of cute on a little girl was Mary Janes and saddle shoes. I did get kid perfume and a jewelry box.
Around the second-grade or so everyone decided that boys had cooties. This nevermade sense to me, and I didn't like losing my boy friends, but I faxed it (badly), snce I seemed to be the only one who didn't findboys gross and vice versa.
My parents loved Lincoln logs. I had two large bins of them. I didn't have the coole extras that allowed you to buidl special structurs--no fence ofr the cowboys. (They did suck for a while when they came out with a cheapo version, but the good ones seem to be back.)
Erector sets were not available, when I was little.
For one of my birthday parties everyone got hot wheels as party favors.
121: Right on. I mourn the fact that I'm at an age where sitting on the living room floor playing with Legos for hours on end is somewhat less acceptable.
You're just baiting people, teo. It's well-known that Playmobil is the favored toy of future serial killers. And, really, after being confronted for years with those inane painted smiles, you can't really blame the kids.
Okay, Tim, one, Playmobil is made of plastic. And two, Playmobil is THE BEST. My best friend and I have commisserated over how frustrating it is to be obsessed with not losing the little pieces, down to the goddamn eentsy pirate doubloons and the fucking cuffs (why must the cuffs be detachable? Jesus!). And yet. Playmobil totally rules.
Playmobil! We had a LOT of Playmobil. That shit just wasn't all that fun, and was crazy expensive, but my little brother and sister could not get enough of it.
My one beef with Playmobil is you used to be able to get the little Playmobil "multicultural" kit with different skintones, but no more. That and the cannibal/African savage/whatever it is set is gross.
On the other hand, it's really cool to be able to swap the hair so that the (always rather busty) female figures have short hair, and the flat-chested figures have long hair, making them either flat-chested women or long-haired men. You can even give the women beards.
I had some playmobil stuff, but I never got too into it--not much point to it all. And it seemed a bit too much like those miniature Christmas Villages with everyone frozen in time, from the skaters on the pond to Santa and his reindeer. Kinda creepy. Really, wooden blocks are where it's at. Block forts look pretty damn awesome when you line those little green army men up on the ramparts.
Actually, Playmobil does make advent calendars. A new one every year. Alas, they all end with Santa, so we've got several of them floating around, which is kind of odd. The up side is that not all the Santas look alike.
I liked Playdoh a lot too. The hair-dressing set (you got to grow he hair) was pretty damn cool.
I was fond of toys that seemed to have real-world applications. I liked my cvash register a lot and used it for my lemonade tsand. The snoopy slurpee maker was also great. I really wanyed the Jello Pudding pop set.
My favorite toys as a kid were the Breyer horses. I'm kind of disturbed that there's a Barbaro horse now, though, and tempted to make jokes about broken legs.
I should really ship all my Breyer horses (an entire underbed bin of them) to my horsey niece.
I'd have to check with the Elders, b. It might be against the Protocols.
Faker. There are no more Elders. Instead, World Jewry is organized in classic corporate form, with a board of elected directors that oversees a day-to-day chief known as the Head Heeb. And yes, he blogs.
I didn't spend much time with toys as a kid. I had Legos, Lite-Brite, and the rest but the novelty wore off really quickly. When I wasn't climbing trees and exploring creeks, it was mostly books and puzzles.
I do remember really, really wanting a Stretch Armstrong (whose novelty would surely have worn off even faster), and it nearly killed me not to own one of these.
I don't thin that I ever owmed the Playdoh hair salon, but I played with it at someone elses house, so it never lost its allure. Playdoh was generally cool, though, cause you got to make stuff.
Silly putty was also great.
My glow-in-the dark frisbee was awesome.
One girl I knew had buildings from Mr. Rogers Make-believe Land. I really wanted the trolley car.
2: "I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!"
Actually, all my life that's struck me as the primary reason most women do most of that stuff.
Not to please men; I tend to think most men could take or leave most female beauty routines and makeup; but to meet the expectations of other women.
What astounds me is that you'd think it was otherwise.
Most of the "beauty industry" strikes me as a scam sold to women. Men have little to do with it (save to profit off it; not that they can tell one cream or blush or whatever from it from another, I mean). This surely shouldn't be revelatory?
I'm not qualified to talk about this subject; I've been highly attracted to women with nice hair on their legs, and elsewhere, so what do I know?
I was disappointed to discover that play-doh doesn't smell like play-doh anymore. They changed the scent and that's just wrong. It should have that earthy, salty smell, not some floral crap.
They also changed the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Whoever did that should be lashed.
Truly gros: Strawberry Shortcake and her smelly friends.
Lite Brite ruled I wanted to fill an entire screen with colors going in order so that I could get diagonals of the different colors by putting in te different colors in rainbow order. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and then purple. Down and across, and then following all of the colors of the rainbow from each of the colors. I never had enough of the colored plastic bits to do it.
I'm watching a little Buffy—okay, sure, I'm watching a lot of Buffy, wtfever—and I'm wondering whether the 'Xander-Buffy-Willow-Cordy axis isn't a more applicable commentary than memories of "token women." Not meaning to sound all Kim du Toit by any means, but I remember a great deal of weird gender pressure in wanting to excel in math, do my science homework, read the assigned novel, and as I recall those peers that did so with impunity were all girls.
Cripes, B, you really do hate America. Johnson's smell is a cherished memory. It's the smell of clean. And it was Castle Greyskull, He-Man, and She-Ra. And, of course, Kevin Garnett.
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
I am Becks style, there is no following me. My experience growing up was that my academic peers were all girls—the G&T classes were probably 60/40 in favor of girls, and the best students in those classes were girls, and I belonged among the girl academic cohort. My guy friends were all skateboarders and practiced things like vomiting on command. I hate to endorse what I consider to be shoddy social science conclusions, but in my experience it was true: there was more pressusr to fail (or not succeed or show ambition) among guys than amongg irls.
When I was maybe 8, among other games, I played corporate executive, which largely consisted of sketching the organizational chart of my multinational conglomerate. The conglomerate was called Centax World. I don't remember any of the subsidiaries anymore, except for YOU Personal Hygiene Products. I also would sketch the architectural plan for my mansion. It had a bowling alley and a movie theater, which seemed to me the height of luxury.
I see the discussion has moved on to playdoh, but to answer the questions about my 22, b's comment about exploring misogyny just made me roll my eyes. Because I feel we do that all the time, and the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women. So for myself, I'm not sure how much is coming out of that ongoing exploration.
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial? Chattiness, for instance, keeps women connected to one another and not isolated, so they can avoid the fate of all those people in that study who have no one to talk to? Or... any other number of other kinds of exercises.
However, despite playing corporate executive, I have never been the token women. I wasn't that femmey as a kid, but I played with girls, and as a grownup, I have to say that my close relationships with men are generally with gay men, with men I have been romantically involved with, or, in one case, with a man I really, really would have liked to have been involved with. I like teasing well enough when affection is simultaneously signalled, but I don't particularly like the jocular towel snapping routine (and IME many of the people in it don't like it as much as they pretend to), and I prefer relationships that are more straightforwardly supportive.
I'm still laughing at 'but Lincoln log forts explode when you bomb them with marbles!'
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together. Lincoln Logs were great, as were blocks because you could make tall things and knock them down. I agree with Tim that most other wooden toys are pretty silly; we have children and suddenly we're in the wholesome 1800s where each kid has a set of hand-whittled toys tooled by machine and purchased for $24.99.
I loved Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony and Herself the Elf (which I may be the only one to remember). Lite Brite ruled but like BG, I never had enough Lite Brite pieces.
173: I went to an an all-boys school until 11th grade, and there was no pressure not to succeed academically, and I had a lot of equally nerdy male friends. I think the pressure not to look like a nerd fades in the absense of chicks to impress. After the school went co-ed, I'm told that changed and that now women are disproportionately represented in the AP classes. I find that depressing. (Also they loosened the dress code, which (oddly) bothers me.)
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
Man, is that ever true, especially as the show aged.
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial?
This seems perfectly reasonable to me - certainly plenty of stereotypically feminine traits are useful and good in themselves (kindness, caretaking, sensitivity to the needs of others, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list).
This, on the other hand:
the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women.
I'm not seeing. Given that I was one of Hirshman's most fervent defenders, I figure there's a reasonable chance that you're referring to things I've said. I do, strongly, disapprove of misogyny, and I'd appreciate your walking me through what you were talking about so I can figure out if I agree with you and need to change my behavior, if you have the time to be specific.
I'd be surprised if she were thinking of you just because you were one of Hirshman's defenders. As I remember that thread, there were a lot of ways of approaching it. Pro/Anti Hirshman isn't the locus, I think. It's what people said, often quite casually, about women as they are.
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures.
You just didn't have enough lincoln logs. our set had logs of different lengths, so you could make alcoves and L-shapes entryways and so on. still, not as good as legos.
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking. Once you're starting at that position, all the women who make rather more sensible life decisions are cast as useless losers letting down the side.
Surely the point is that if you want to pursue power, or have some particular thing you want to achieve, you need to structure your life accordingly. But personal happiness is a separate matter, and to link it up solely to career is intellectually dishonest and portrays women as if they are simpletons, who are sabotaging their lives and the chances of their sisters for No Reason.
Even men might be happier if the American workplace were structured differently and people didn't work 14hr days to get ahead.
But I don't particularly want to rehash the Hirshman debate. What I said at AWB's site is that it occurred to me that people who adopt this sort of Jacobin extreme position see feminism in very abstract terms, removed from the lives of actual, likeable, not so insane or inscrutable women, perhaps because they have some history of not actually liking women all that much.
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking.
She doesn't come anywhere near assuming or asserting that. Further, if she did, while it might be wrong, it wouldn't have anything to do with misogyny.
Hirshman's claim was that a fulfilling life includes professional achievement, and that a fulfilling life is basically the same for men and for women. And further, that to the extent that women systematically make choices that involve behaving according to stereotyped sex roles and consequently eschewing professional achievement, they are less fulfilled than they would otherwise be.
If you want to say that professional achievement isn't an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone, you disagree with Hirshman, and with me, (I doubt that you are taking this position) but that doesn't render her position misogynist. If you want to argue that professional achievement is or should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for women than it is for men, you disagree with Hirshman and with me -- I can see how one might want to call Hirshman's position here misogynist, in that it denigrates the choices of women who have decided not to pursue professional achievement in favor of other aspects of their lives. I can also see how one might call the position that professional achievement is or should be a less important component of a fulfilling life for women than for men straightforwardly sexist. Given that both characterizations are terribly inflammatory, I don't think either is particularly useful.
186: I have to admit right now that I never read the Hirshman article all the way through, so I could be way off base. But isn't her whole article so obviously coming from the position of valuing power, and addressed to those who are in a position and of a disposition to pursue power, that to say she's trying to make that a universal value (and thus possibly misogynistic) ungenerous to her argument?
I admit that it's possible that part of what motivates her to make the argument is a bit of disdain for most women (in a certain class and culture), but then I'd hesitate to call that misogyny except in a generic sense. Surely it's possible to be somewhat disdainful of women (in a certain class and culture) without buying into negative patriarchal attitudes against those women. You can come up with your own negative attitudes. And anyway, her argument just as much saying that these women are disappointing themselves and neglecting their own happiness as she was that they were disappointing feminism. And I'm sure that argument has resonance for a number of high-ambition women.
I hope I'm not rehashing Hirshman so much as using her as a jumping-off point.
189 - I would argue both that (1) professional achievement is an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone however (2) professional achievement should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for both women and men than it currently is today.
And 138 -- busty Playmobil figures??? We never had any busty Playmobil figures! I always thought they were unisex; apparently we only ever got the men.
189: I'd agree with both your 1 and your 2. My sense is that Hirshman's argument (or what I am guessing she would argue on this point; I haven't seen her quite make this argument) is that women who believe your 2 can't bring it about by dropping out -- they aren't putting pressure on the system to change, they're acting as a relief valve by allowing the men in their lives to have an acceptable family life while overvaluing professional achievement.
Further, that pursuing professional advancement in the same manner and to the same extent that men do will do more to bring about your 2 than dropping out will -- a marriage with children in which both partners are working 80 hours a week is intolerable for most people. In a society, then, where caretaking wives who valued family-life over professional achievement were unavailable, professional men and the organizations that employ them would be forced to back off from the exorbitant claims on their employees time and attention.
This argument may be wrong, but it's not misogynist to make it.
199's second paragraph adds a lot of steps and inferences to what Hirshman wrote, and it's not at all obvious to me that it is what she intends. It's just as probable she believes in a super-elite where both partners work 80 hour weeks.
199: It should be noted that there's quite a phenomenon of video game programmers (usually young single guys) being hired by certaing gaming firms and worked 80 hours a week until they burn out. And so you get stories of sleeping at the office, of not even owning an apartment, and jokes about ironing boards and hammocks in cubicles. So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
That sort of attitude does sometimes make me wary of working mothers - I'm not sure whether it ever really happens, but I m conscious of not wanting to be looked down upon because I don't work, I just stay at home with my children. In fact, I met up with an old school friend last week, who is moving to my town. He came round with his wife and children - his wife has a high-powered marketing executive job, and I was nervous that she was going to be some kind of soulless bitch who would think I was wasting my life. As it turned out, she's lovely - phew.
I was a tomboy for years, and went from one extreme (all girls school from 7-16) to the other, and have been the Token Woman - accidentally, and not proud of it. Some of the TW bit was really good for me, some wasn't. My best friends was always been female - more femme than myself - but the larger group was mainly male. As I've got older, I've acquired more and more female friends, to the extent that I would now say I mostly preferred women's company to men's. But I think that just means that I've met a lot more women I like, not that my tastes have changed. I still wouldn't like the girly girls I didn't like at college.
I've got 3 daughters, and they're all far more girly in appearance than I was at their ages. But I think a large part of that is, as mentioned above, the increasing dichotomy in girl and boy stuff, and the pushing of femmey accessories onto younger and younger girls. It's so hard to buy my girls clothes which don't cost a fortune and which aren't outrageously gendered. (And I do try, because I've got a son to pass things down to!) They don't seem that much different to me in attitude though.
So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
Most men (most people generally) at some point in their lives have children. At that point, they either stop working the 80 hour weeks, or they have wives taking a disproportionate share of the parenting load.
A work culture where childless people in their 20's were expected to work ridiculous hours, and others weren't, would be workable, I guess, but it's not the culture we've got.
204: I don't know, sounds a bit like a law firm, where the people in their twenties work ridiculous hours, and the other people work slightly less ridiculous hours.
LB -- we could also, with similar justification, have a culture where the elite were encouraged not to have children or to postpone childbearing, and the underclass was expected to bear and rear the next generation.
201: Hirshman doesn't explicitly make the argument in my 199, but she does, in her controversial 'marrying down' bit of the argument, say this:
If you both are going through the elite-job hazing rituals simultaneously while having children, someone is going to have to give. Even the most devoted lawyers with the hardest-working nannies are going to have weeks when no one can get home other than to sleep. The odds are that when this happens, the woman is going to give up her ambitions and professional potential.
recognizing that the dual 80-hour-a-week-career marriage is unworkable. And she suggests solving the unworkability by making the man in the couple as much of the safety valve as the woman is.
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
Does it have to be a part of everyone's fulfilling life? No. But there's something wrong with a system where it's recognized as an important part of a fulfilling life for men, and a much less important part for women. And the gendered tendency of women to drop out of the paid workforce puts more, rather than less, pressure on the men in their families to achieve -- you've dropped out of paying work, and as a consequence your husband's freedom to drop out or cut back is vastly restricted. (Less so in England, where there's a more reasonable safety net then in the US, but still vastly restricted.)
To the extent that your decision to drop out was influenced by your gender, I think that's a bad reason to abandon professional achievement, and I don't believe that thinking that makes me a misogynist. That doesn't mean that I hold you, personally, in contempt, or think ill of you -- I just don't like the cultural framework in which I am guessing you've made your life decisions, and to the extent that what you do with your life is any of my business (an extremely limited, bordering on non-existent extent), I wish that you had examined and resisted that cultural framework to a greater extent.
I don't find it all that likely that a greater share of women ibankers would put that much pressure on the childrearing arrangements of elite men, and I'm not sure that was Hirshman's argument, either. All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
210: No, half the blogophere thinks she's a meanie weirdo woman-hater. I happen to disagree with them. (I thought that she was deliberately inflammatory, but that doesn't make her a weirdo -- heavens, an academic wrote an inflammatory polemic! Someone get my smelling salts.)
One thing I've noticed about my Generation Awesome friends and co-workers is that, for most couples I know, the woman is the primary breadwinner. If I look around at the men on my team, I think almost all of their wives make more than they do. They're no slouches (engineers, etc.) but their wives are all lawyers and doctors and I-bankers. It's the men in my office who are always cutting out to take their kid to doctor's appointments, etc.
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together.
Yes! This.
Lincoln Logs were great. I wanted to be Abe Lincoln! It was so easy to take them apart and build something new. You could build a wide variety of structures, if you just used the logs of varying lengths.
Did anyone else have the gigantic multivolume Childcraft book series? They were like encyclopedias for kids. I read like a squillion of them. "The How and Why Library", I think it was called. Childcraft taught me everything.
I played with so much He-Man, and yet, there was always someone who had more He-Man products than I. I didn't really feel like I had the power. Perhaps this is what drew me to Howard Dean. Interestingly, I knew a guy on the Dean campaign who looked a lot like Skeletor.
All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
It's a question of cultural pressures. Most people in the US are formally committed to the equality of the sexes on some level. Now, men in the professional elite can marry women who are their professional equals (graduates of the same schools, etc.) and still be fairly likely to get the caretaking benefits of marrying a non-professional. If that possibility is taken away from them, we get to see whether they're committed to the romantic ideal of marriages between equals, or if marriage is, as you suggest, a more complex way of hiring a housekeeper. I have to say I have a certain amount of faith in romance on this one.
215: Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man. And being quite dismissive of women who did not take her favored path. Which I think was part of the idea behind the charge of hostility to actually existing women.
I also find the 'smelling salts' line unfortunate here, when we're discussing whether this position involves contempt for a lot of femmier women.
I wisely skipped all the Hirshman discussion, but now I have to ask whether anyone even bothered to argue that women, generally speaking, are and always will be better natural (yeah, natural) child-rearers? If not, you gotta admit that's pretty funny.
As long as we're talking about things that bother us, I've never been happy with language that presumes that two people from a different class, or with different professional credentials, are not equals.
If you were talking about the division of labor in the relationship, it's already evident that these hypothetical men are not committed to any particular symmetry, since their wives are leaving the workforce,.
If someone willing to have that sort of arrangement isn't willing to marry someone slightly lower on the socioeconomic ladder than they are, the only ideal being upheld is class isolation. But if that winds up meaning that women have fewer barriers to the professional class, I guess it did some good.
215: There's barely any housewives in Sweden, since well before I was born. The whole concept is kinda weird to me. So it's not like some science fiction scenario you're discussing.
Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man.
I can see how her tone would lead you to that conclusion, but I don't think that's a necessary part of her argument. She characterizes the work she values for women as "good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power," and talks about money as a marker of where power lies:
Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.
I don't believe that she's making the claim that money is the only thing that matters, but rather that making decisions in the direction of more money (a) is a good rule of thumb for figuring out if you're taking your profession seriously, and doing good work in it, and (b) will often enable you to continue to take your profession seriously. The problem with idealism and social services isn't so much that they're low-paying, but that they're markers of being a dilettante -- if you want to pursue an idealistic career seriously and professionally, I don't believe Hirshman would disapprove of that.
213: My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist. He likes going to work though. I've been trying to persuade him recently to take compressed hours (here, if your youngest child is under 6, you have the right to do 4 longer days rather than 5), but I'm not getting anywhere! He has a vague plan to work less in 'the future'.
Really, I try to live my life doing what *I* want to do. I got a decent degree from a good university, I worked for a few years. I've thought loads since I was about 22 about what I want to do with my lfe, and its implications, and I have never managed to get my head round the idea that to be a 'good feminist' (or whatever) I should go to work every day rather than doing what I want to.
Luckily, my vagina does indeed send out child-calming rays, so that makes for a happy home life.
The idea of making decisions in the direction of more money repels me. If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
225: Hey, a possible model for successful marriage and childrearing would be one partner in a high-pressured, elite job, and one partner not working or in a much less pressured job. If that were a non-gendered pattern (in which both male and female professionals tended to marry those who wanted a less demanding professional life) I'd be happier than I am with the current highly gendered norm.
Not as happy as I'd be if professional life were less demanding for everyone, but happier than I am now.
Arguably you did in 203 -- not having worked for money in 10 years and simultaneously having a child implies the existence of some non-work source of income; so either you were born wealthy or have a husband or wife earning money, no?
My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist.
You don't work. You do eat. Assuming that someone pays the bills doesn't seem out of line.
If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
Certainly (once we get past the annoying realities of buying food, and clothing, and paying rent or a mortgage). But whether you're making money is a fair rule-of-thumb way of determining whether you're taking your profession seriously or being a dilettante. I fully support the right of women to be selfishly committed avant-garde artists, supported by the self-abasing men who love them over the long decades until their genius is recognized -- they're taking their professional lives seriously, whether or not they're making money. But that sort of thing doesn't apply to most of us.
227/229: I think we should look at how this happened; that might help us evalute whether Hirshman's prescriptions are a plausible way to eliminate gender barriers.
I'm really skeptical of the idea that elite women can force top jobs to have more reasonable hours by working absurd hours themselves (as per 208). If making partner takes working 80 hours a week, and if a man with an elite wife can't work 80 hours a week, my guess is that the people who make partner will be men who don't have elite wives (as per 214); and people who don't have children. Romance (221) may keep many men married to elite wives, but those men won't make partner.
"Make partner" is here shorthand for obtaining those ridiculous jobs, I have no insight into law firm dynamics. But I just have trouble imagining someone saying "Joe is always at the office late at night, and his wife takes care of the kids. Bob has to switch off evenings with his wife. Let's promote Bob, because we must understand his plight!" Men might get more of a hearing than women about childcare issues, but I'd guess that in the end the men who work the most hours will still be considered the best team players.
The point being that reforming these jobs can't be done entirely by working within the system. We should promote the "nobody should work 80 hours" ethos as well as encouraging women to strive for high-powered jobs. In fact, the more that ethos obtains, the easier it'll be to attain gender equity in the workplace, I bet. (Though I'd hope not because high-powered women would still be assuming a disproportionate childcare burden.)
Clown's 237 made the same point I meant to in the beginning of 238 much less rudely -- I didn't mean to be offensive, I'm just jotting down responses quickly.
237 and 238: I'm British - I could be a lone parent living here on benefits for my entire life. But it was the husband thing that amused me most really - if I were talking to someone I didn't know, I'd always say partner. I could be living with anyone, married or not.
Selfishly-committed, self-abasing? Doesn't sound like full support!
241: Sorry, I'm American and we've got some cultural differences going. While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe. I understand the odds are different in England.
While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe.
Ah, I see. I don't know what the stats are here, but I know plenty of couples who aren't married, gay and straight.
239: The thing is (and I'm making wild-ass-guesses about how stuff would work out. I could be entirely wrong) that (a) there's no necessary connection between the quality of your work and your willingness to work stupid hours but (b) when willingness to work stupid hours is the (masculine) norm, there's no risk of losing high-quality work by screening out those who won't work the hours. When Bob, who wants evenings off, is more common than Phil, who doesn't have kids and will work till he drops in harness, firms will be stuck choosing between their best lawyers and their lawyers who work the longest hours, who won't necessarily be the same people.
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
I can't help but feel that having been "gifted and talented," apparently a near universal experience here, is part of why this identification has been so easy. Perhaps going forward, with the academic achievers tilting more female, to or slightly beyond parity, will make this less likely.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:30 PM
Oh, skin care. After working at the notorious compulsive-commercial-femininity temple that is a top-tier Manhattan spa, I was finally bullied into two ladylike regimes: summer pedicures and expensive facial cleanser. I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:32 PM
I'm actually thinking of doing a spa day sometime soon. I'm so unfamiliar with all the beauty routines that the thought of being fussed over and polished by people who know what they're doing for once seems interesting, in a 'who knows, maybe I'll like it' kind of way.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:35 PM
1: Doesn't work for me -- I was feeling that way in a selective high school that had until recently (10-15 years?) been a girls school. I wasn't associating with 'my academic peers' or anything, I just couldn't keep up with the girls socially.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:36 PM
3: Great. Y'all are turning LB into a girl.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:38 PM
Oh, I don't come off as butch as I write. I manage to look fairly femme these days on a beauty routine that consists of showering, mostly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:41 PM
I accidentally showed up for school one day in eleventh grade or so looking rather well-turned out for once by Eighties standards. A bunch of popular girls were uncharacteristically friendly, coming over to me to chat, when we normally had no social contact at all. When I figured out that the willingness to speak to me was a response to the outfit, I was so horrified I wore only LL Bean turtlenecks and jeans for a couple of weeks.)
In middle school I once showed up dressed like the other guys - similar jeans and similarly designed shirt, neither of which I'd worn before - and people commented on how I was dressed "normally" for once. I never dressed that way again. I think the stakes were lower for guys because I was also never picked on for how I dressed, either.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:41 PM
LB: I do want to warn you that getting a spa facial (not the other kind) can be really relaxing and fun, but do be prepared for the heavy sell. When I worked at that spa, I'd go to training sessions in which a rich marketing guy would encourage all the aestheticians to *mock* whatever the client used for facial cleanser so she'd buy product. They don't make much on the services, so they push product like crazy. If you can steel yourself against that, it can be a really nice and even self-affirming experience of like, "I, too, deserve teh fancy."
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:42 PM
3 - I've gotten kind of hooked on summer pedicures. I like having pretty toes. I have very ticklish feet, though, and am certain I'm going to accidentally kick one of the ladies in the face à la The 40 Year Old Virgin one of these days and be horrified.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:42 PM
eb -- I wasn't picked on or anything, just ignored.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:46 PM
I manage to look fairly femme these days on a beauty routine that consists of showering, mostly.
It's not how you look that matters. It's that now you'll hang out with your new girl friends from the spa and won't hang out with us in our secret He-Man Women Hater's Club in the treehouse. Once again, feminists ruin America.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:47 PM
I'm pretty sure I know at least one girl who is friends with exclusively males because she's misogynist. Really. She seems to feed on male attention and view all other women as competition. Doesn't anyone else know someone like this?
Posted by duck | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:49 PM
Waitaminute. LL Bean wasn't "well-turned out" in the 1980s?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:51 PM
10: Ah, ok. I think I was ignored, too. But I wasn't really paying much attention (except for that day when I got it).
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:51 PM
In response to 11 (and the original post) I see nobody has mentioned that, "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's Interweb"
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:57 PM
I get along best with women who get along best with men.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 4:57 PM
I wasn't exactly a tomboy (I default to femme), but I was the girl that knew that girls weren't good at science and said fuck it and was good at science anyway and had more boy friends than girl friends because the girls were all smarmy little airheads.
(This may be misogyny.)
I don't think it always leads to misogyny, but it can, especially in older female academics, who dealt with real misogyny in the course of their careers. (Writing a brilliant critique or inventing a new field; being called Miss X and ignored when accolades came about.) They don't hate other women, exactly, but they have no patience for any sort of femininity or weakness (often defined as 'wanting time off for kids or family.')
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 5:44 PM
I get along best with women who get along best with men.
I get along best with women who get along best with me.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 5:53 PM
I get along best with all y'all's moms.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 6:02 PM
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was easy-to-get-along-with like me? Dontcha? Dontcha? Oh, you don't. Sorry.
Posted by heebie_geebie | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 6:10 PM
I find it totally amusing that I'm supposed to be the femmey one here. I think we need to start breaking down these femme/tomboy divides according to region and social class.
Anyway. I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is. (Perfectly willing to cop to having that hangup myself from time to time.) Then again, one of my favorite academic talks evah was one by a quiet feminist scholar at a mid-level liberal arts college who did a fascinating reading of Wollestonecraft and ended the talk by saying that if we don't acknowledge our own misogyny, we're never going to get anywhere.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 6:21 PM
if we don't acknowledge our own misogyny, we're never going to get anywhere
If these comments are an indication of the results of that reflection, I'm not sure where you expect to get. Seems self-reinforcing to me.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 6:58 PM
Not following you. Or, at least, I'm understanding you to say that these comments are misogynistic, and I'm not getting it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:00 PM
I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is.
Or it's a totally rational position, say, circa fifth grade, to the airheads with poorly applied blue eyeshadow who didn't want to wire a circuit because Joey wouldn't like them. Maybe it's misogynist to think they're airheads, but it's not my fault they were idiots.
Seriously, though, I'm not sure it's wrong to be proud of it; token women have had to put up with a lot of shit, and it's not wrong that they feel proud for persevering. What does seem to be wrong, however, is feeling superior to other women, which isn't the same as feeling proud.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:02 PM
23: I think that the token woman role, as AWB and Silvana said, has a fair bit of misogyny in it, yeah. Other than that I'm not sure why (or whether) I've pissed off you, ac, and Cala.
22: I don't think I understand what you're saying, but I think you sound (or find my comments) hostile? I don't understand why.
24: I do think it's misogynistic, fifth grade or no, to think of girls as airheads and idiots, yes. I get on PK's case when he says shit like that; I'm certainly going to object to it when adults do it. I don't see a meaningful distinction between pride/superiority in this use--I can see being proud of one's achievements, but not being proud of the token status. If anything, I would think one would be very sad and lonely about it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:10 PM
Oh, I'm not upset. I agree it's misogynist, but at that age the options were a) try to fit in with the girls with whom I had nothing in common (probably would have required me failing a few science/math courses and giving a damn about Teen or whatever airheaded young actor was hot) or b) enjoying my interests, which means running with the boys and at least having some friends. And quite a few of them were bright up until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
Now I know that probably wasn't their fault, but at the time believing that it wasn't inevitable probably kept me from giving up.
Adhering to b) lead to being a token, but being b) was certainly being truer to myself (and harder) than doing badly so the boys would like me would have been. In that context, just achieving means you're a token. Something to be proud of.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:22 PM
Whew, I'm glad.
It's interesting; at that age, I didn't really hate those girls, I just was kind of puzzled by them. But yeah, I get what you're saying now.
God I am so tired.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:27 PM
I'm not getting where the mysogyny comes in--women preferring like minded individuals doing things that women can do. I can sort of sense the argument about mysogyny, but I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
doing badly so the boys would like me would have been.
Did you grow up in a very conservative state? I think I'm a decade older than you, and I don't remember anything like that in high school. Thinking back, the guys with the most pull were athletes, and I'm almost certain that some of them dated for brains--I know of at least one who's girlfriend helped on (and occassionally did) his homework.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:31 PM
until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
That sounds like a super sucky environment.
Echoing SCMT (who is about my age), here: In high school or before, I never encountered the idea that a girl had to appear ditzy to attract boys. Whenever I hear about this phenomenon I just assume it died out in the 50s. Evidently it didn't.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:41 PM
25: You haven't pissed me off, and I can certainly agree that generally thinking women are airheads is misogynist (it's pretty much the definition) or seeking out a position as the token woman out of a desire for status or dislike for women is as well. Ac seemed to be saying that this comment thread was in itself misogynist, and that I didn't get.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:44 PM
I grew up in a relatively conservative area. (Our memorial day parade this year was lined with Santorum balloons.) Oddly enough, in high school it wasn't nearly as bad, but fifth grade seemed to be the year when everyone was taking their cues from teen magazines rather than reality.
I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
Nah, you don't need that. The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:47 PM
Tim, it's not so much because women were forced to do stuff--that's too simple. It's that X, Y, and Z were socially-approved feminine traits, so women who didn't correspond to them were not socially approved. And as a result, those of us who weren't properly femmey mistook the symbol for the content, if that makes sense: we hated the girly girls because of their girlyness, rather than recognizing that, like everyone else in the entire world, some of the girly girls were perfectly fine people, and some of them weren't, and if they were being girly girls because of social pressure, they were as much victims of that (limiting themselves to get approval) as we were (not getting approval, and resenting those who did).
DA, fwiw, I don't think it's so much that girls had to behave that way as that a lot of them did, because femminess is (still) a safer route to approval for girls than not-femminess. Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
LB, thanks. I think I'm just getting tone all wrong today and feeling generally beseiged by too much taking-care-of-PK-so_Mr.B-can-get-stuff-done, combined with getting-stuff-done-myself. I need a good night's sleep.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:56 PM
Why is it that supposedly stupid women's heads are full of air, while supposedly stupid men's heads are full of meat?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:59 PM
The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
That I can see and have seen. (And seriously--Jeebus.) But I have great faith in Generation Awesome. I now meet more and more women in positions of power who are inclined to recognize these burdens. It just seems like a pyramid: the first set of women to make it are just crushed, and not inclined to be forgiving of anything less than total committment, then next generation less so, and so on. And, indeed, with more and more women in the workplace, I have seen earlier generations of women seem to loosen up on the toughness. It's pretty cool.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:59 PM
Haven't you seen that Burger King ad, Adam?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:00 PM
You should write 'IKEA' on your bed. That would make everything better.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:01 PM
lined with Santorum balloons
Thank god I finished swallowing a mouthful of tea before I read that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:02 PM
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
Things seem to be getting more rather than less exaggerated in this respect -- all the little girls my wife used to look after and the kids of various relatives seem much more exaggerately femmey than I remember my sister or any of her friends being when we were little.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:03 PM
34: Yeah, I think things are changing too. What I notice (I think) is that young men seem just a lot less hung up and a lot more accepting of women as women than I think they used to.
It's weird to occasionally think that one's own feminism may occasionally be fighting dragons that are becoming an endangered species.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:05 PM
38: Yeah, I think it's a weird warping of this girl power/3rd wave stuff. OTOH, it might also be that, thanks to the 3rd wave, we're getting past the idea that boy things = high status, and therefore both girls and boys should be not-femmey. At least, I'm really proud of PK (in a perverse way) for being offended by, and defensive about, the idea that boys can too wear pink.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:06 PM
I'm with ttaM on 38 -- while I had trouble with the required level of femminess in high school, I don't remember the pink&sparkliness being nearly as pervasive for little girls when I was a kid as it is for Sally's peers. I don't know how much to worry about it, but they're certainly almost totally socially segregated from boys, which I don't think is either innate or a particularly good thing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:09 PM
What are we meaning here by femme? (Just curious. No large point.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:10 PM
40: See, there's nothing wrong with the pink, but IME the pink goes with the segregation and the rigid gender roles.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:10 PM
I think it varies, but generally I'd say femme = high maintenance appearance stuff: dresses on little girls, eye-catching shoes, clothes that are sparkly or affect delicacy; for women, the salon/spa stuff, heels, dry-clean only clothes, makeup. Etc.
I will say that, at least at PK's school, the femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do, but the girls' are in pinks and purples and have sparkly things on them, whereas the boys are more neutrally-colored. (When he was littler, I'd put PK in the brighter colored ones b/c I think brown on little kids is boring, damnit.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:13 PM
42: Behaving in a stereotypically feminine manner. For little girls, bedizened in the latest tulle Disney Princess gear.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:14 PM
43: It does, and I'm bothered by that (as is PK).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:14 PM
LB, what do you think of the "boys suck" or "girls rule" stuff on little kids' clothes?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:15 PM
femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do
Are you checking it out in detail? IME, shoes, particularly, where the difference is only in the color and sparkliness are the exception rather than the rule. If I let Sally pick out the color shoes she wants, I have to watch like a hawk to make sure that they aren't slippery-soled and unstable.
You can find sparkly and practical, but you have to be really careful about your shopping.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:17 PM
Doesn't how femme girls are depend very much on their mothers?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:18 PM
I'm not sure what I think of femme clothing. (Disney princess will be banned in the restored calaphate.) Which, full disclosure, is most of my warddrobe. I tend to view clothes as costumes though, not really personality statements, so it sort of varies with whether I'm giving a damn or not.
I don't pull off butch well, though. Wrong body type.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:19 PM
47: Bogus and offensive. The fact that it's cute indicates low status -- if it mattered what girls thought about boys, the shirts would be offensive and wouldn't exist. (Or, if I'm wrong about that, then they're just straight out offensive.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:19 PM
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey
I'm wondering now why my experience seems so atypical. Of course we played with Barbies and whatnot, but girls very seldom (if ever) wore dresses when I was in elementary school. The only girls who wore skirts or dresses were girls from families that had just immigrated.
I'm wondering if it's a class thing. In grade 8, almost every girl in my class had short hair, and when I went to the middle-class part of the city once a week for the gifted program one of the things that struck me weird was that the girls from these wealthier families all had long hair. And wore skirts.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:20 PM
48: No, I see the shoes in the store. But you know where I live. Feminism is rooted here in different ways than it is there.
49: It probably does, but I'm not sure it's as simple as "femme mom = femme girl" or vice-versa.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:20 PM
49: Actually, we've got a weird ethnicity dynamic going on. I'm not particularly femme (although I go to work everyday in business clothes, which require femininity); Nancy, the Columbian babysitter, is way, way femme (in a tasteful and dignified fashion). Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It's also not just the home -- peer pressure is huge.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:23 PM
Disney princesses are okay in moderation: dressing up and being sparkly is fine. Boys should be able to do it too (and I suspect part of the popularity of pirates is just b/c of that).
Where I used to live, there were a lot of perfectly great solid-colored all-cotton jumper-type dresses with tights outfits on girls that were, by my accounts, just fine. I bought some for PK when he was littler, in fact, b/c they were cute, damnit, and I didn't care if he was a boy. (Plus, dresses are easier to change diapers in, whereas tights are warmer under cotton pants than just socks.) Here, femminess seems more working-class than middle- or professiona-class; at least, femminess of a certain type. My very excellent lesbian colleagues dress their kids in the solid-colored cotton-jumper with tights stuff when they aren't wearing pants and t-shirts. Whereas PK's school peers are more likely to wear things that have Disney princess or Dora on them.
Dunno about femme adult women's clothing. The last few years have been very schizo: gypsies tramps and thieves for a while, and then also the tailored classic retro stuff (which I favor).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:26 PM
50 - I agree that all of this princess stuff is out of control but I'm also wary of the other extreme. My parents banned Barbies from the house, only bought me unisex clothing, and bought me shit like Tonka trucks instead of the toys I asked for (under the thinking that "boy stuff" was more nongendered) and it really pissed me off and, I think, has something to do with why I view other women as foreign creatures and can't really relate to them socially (and, honestly, am kinda scared of and intimidated by them). I suppose their experiment worked in that I ended up in a male-dominated profession, etc. but I sometimes wonder at what cost. (Also, remember, my parents are both psychologists.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:26 PM
49: I do think that, broadly speaking, Latinas are more femmey than anglos (anglas?). But I think that American feminism, compared to other feminisms, has been a lot more hung up with eschewing femininity--which I think has something to do with American culture being hyper anxious about masculinity. (And yes, I really do think that.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:29 PM
56: Did they call your crib the "Becks box"?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:32 PM
56: That's the problem. Where normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male, you end up walking a fine line between raising your daughter as a social outcast who despises other women (not good), or as a manicure-obsessed nitwit in shoes that will break your legs. (I know I sound obsessive about the shoes, but I was in the park with Sally and Newt yesterday watching a bunch of older girls (9? 10?) playing in slides. They were trying to run around, and ended up taking their shoes off and playing barefoot in an NYC concrete playground, which meant that they still couldn't run. The boys were in sneakers, and were running.) You can't accept the femme shit without serious editing, but you can't keep your daughter away from it either.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:33 PM
I remember my sister having femmey things -- but they were dress-up or for special occasions like birthdays. Other than that, what she wore was largely indistinguishable from what I wore. At least until we were school age and even then, outside school, there wasn't a huge difference until we were quite a bit older.
I don't think that's so much the case now.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
I think so, but I was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s and most of the girls I hung out with were either into the indie thing -- Dr Martin's, etc -- or costumey goth stuff. The student 'uniform' at college was way way less femmey than what people currently wear.
re: 54 Yeah. My wife is pretty femme -- the whole eastern european thing. There are, it seems to my superficial eyes, cultural/ethnic differences and I'm not sure that certain clothes signify the same thing in say Prague versus Glasgow.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:34 PM
Oh, Barbies are fine. Dressing up is fine. Pirates rule. I just loathe the princess line.
I've noticed lately that pink seems to have become a more masculine color, at least in some circles. When I was in college every young man owned a cornflower blue shirt; now a lot of them seem to own a deep rose shirt. I associate as a Latino thing, except that there seem to be more anglo men wearing pink. Probably not in the office, but it seems to be true socially.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:34 PM
57: I think this is right: that there's nothing wrong with femme stuff generally. What's wrong is the rigid division.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:34 PM
Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It varies, of course, but my experience tends to confirm her observation. At least, Hispanics tend to be significantly more femme than Anglos (who can of course be femme as well).
On preview I see that b has said something similar.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:36 PM
normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male
See, it seems to me the opposite: girls can wear girls' stuff or boys' stuff, but god forbid a boy want something that isn't brown or khaki-colored. Orange seems to be about the only acceptable boys' color nowadays.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:37 PM
I frequently wear pink shirts.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:39 PM
You're an adult. I'm talking about little kids.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:39 PM
I frequently wore gray.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:40 PM
Although! It's true, I frequently find that I point PK to adult men to show him that yes, men do sometimes have long hair/wear pink/wear jewelry/whatever. People seem more hung up about gender in small kids than they do about gender in adults, which is backwards (if being hung up about gender makes any sense at all, that is).
Or maybe it's just that the hung up people are more likely to have kids?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:41 PM
64: You're right that the fashion controls are tighter on boys than on girls (Nancy keeps on hiding a pair of *white* shorts Newt likes. White isn't butch enough. Jesus. And yes, Sally's stereotype is more accurate than not, I was just trying to discourage the stereotyping process.). But for pastimes, it's pretty hardline segregated. Girls can do organized athletic stuff, but there's no kicking a ball around with the boys in my neighborhood -- kids playing outside are in single-sex groups.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:42 PM
I was responding to Cala's 61, b. Not everything is about you.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:43 PM
Doesn't how femme girls are depend very much on their mothers?
It's sort of dependent on the mothers, but not entirely. My mom is very femme; apparently her first comment on learning she was pregnant with me was 'I hope I have a little girl so I can dress her up in pretty clothes.' But she's not femme in a terribly high maintenance sense; she's striking beautiful, and wore makeup, but it was all minimal over the counter makeup, not expensive facials and spas. A very midwestern femme.
But it didn't take, exactly, with all of us. I am not as femme as my mom; I rebelled against makeup for a long time and I still don't wear foundation ever. One of my sisters has traditionalist attitudes but is way more butch than me. The youngest two are ridiculously femme, one with a cutesy vibe and one with a calabat vibe.
And we're all probably butch compared to the South, where I swear women must get manicures so they can shop for groceries.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:44 PM
Deep rose is such a lovely color.
EB, that's true; boys can also wear gray. And navy. God, it's like little boys are supposed to be morose all the time, or something.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:46 PM
And men who can pull it off look hott.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:48 PM
Re: 68
I think a fair bit of "feminine" style stuff is countersignaling. Think of the pink-polo wearing frat boy or the long haired athlete. In little kids, there is no externally masculine factors to counter-signal against, so any sort of feminine behavior is just read as straight up teh ghey.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:49 PM
70: Mean! I had somehow missed Cala's 61.
71: These days I think of (and describe) myself as ultra-femmey, but a couple of people I've met from the blog (and my boyfriend) all say I'm actually much more granola than I realize. I think midwestern femminess is weird.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:50 PM
You know I love you.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:51 PM
I think 74 is true.
76: Oh, so you're just pulling my pigtails? So typically boy.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:55 PM
75: It is. It's like, be femme, but let's be sensible about it. So, while it drove my mother crazy that I didn't want to wear makeup, had I awakened at 5 every day to straighten my hair and put on tons of makeup, she would have gently told me it wasn't necessary because I needed my sleep.
This did lead to a few sorts of 'why don't you look like susie Q' conversations; I don't thiink I realized until college how much work my classmates had put in on their appearance. I had just assumed they were naturally prettier. (Perhaps true, but not for the reasons I thought.)
My mother hasn't done anything about the proliferation of sparkly flipflops breeding in my sister's bedroom, though.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:56 PM
My parents never had a problem with me playing with the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people). I probably spent less time playing with action figures than with any other toy. I probably spent the most time with board or video games, though.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:57 PM
Also, if I had insisted I needed designer face creams or washes, my mom probably would have never heard of them. Midwest femme is strange.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:57 PM
75: There are all sorts of different scales. I look much less femme in an office environment than I do visiting Buck's family on a western PA farm. Law-firm femme is about being precisely turned out and polished -- disheveled is non-femme. In western PA, disheveled is fine, and long hair and tits are all the visual signifiers of femininity I need to show up with, so as long as I don't say anything surprising, I'm fine. If I showed up with hair and nails done to the nines, I'd look intimidating, which might come off as less, rather than more, feminine.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 8:58 PM
the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people)
OMG, were those the little mice that stood up and, if memory serves, were actually made of fur, and you could get them in all sorts of outrageous little outfits? My sister collected those, too. I haven't seen them as an adult, but if I ever find them I'm sure PK is going to go nuts for them.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:04 PM
Oh, we had those too! And we put them in a dollhouse.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:07 PM
We didn't bother with the dollhouse, but she kept them all on a shelf. God, those were cute.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:07 PM
My sister loved tucking the baby mouse into the bed. I had some really great little dollhouse pieces: porcelain washbowls, that sort of thing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:10 PM
I don't remember if the mice were made of real fur - not having developed an interest in authenticity at the time - but they at least had fake fur, stood up, and had outfits. I seem to remember them being already dressed so I don't know if you could change them. She probably gave all the mice away, but I'm pretty sure she saved the house.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:10 PM
You could always get PK taxidermied mice that are all dressed up and pretty.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:11 PM
I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with G.I Joes. But that wasn't playing, it was setting up ambushes. I'm not a girl.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:14 PM
nice, Becks. I like the St. Sebastian one best. Though really, one should collect them all.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:18 PM
56: I'm not sure I would go as far as your parents, and you're (obv.) best suited to see both the benefits and the costs, so maybe it was all a bit of a mistake, but you seem to have turned out pretty well (or you fake it well), and I still think your parents are awesome.
I can sort of guess at ac's complaint (#22), mostly because I've been on the other side when we've had similar debates before. And I think she's turned me around a bit. There's nothing inherently wrong with femme--I just don't really get it, so it's not a very useful trait a woman to have as regards me. But structuring gender around my wants is probably not the best idea; I simply don't have the time to hang out with that many women.
So I demand only a tithe: 10% of all women should be not-femme. The rest may do as they like.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:23 PM
86: Right, the clothes were sort of glued on or whatever. They had little ethnic costumes, or professional costumes, or just cute outfits of whatever sort. All rather elaborately detailed.
Those taxidermied mice are a little disturbing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:28 PM
My mother, perhaps in an attempt to subvert traditional gender stereotypes, bought dolls for both my brother and myself when we were little ("girly" dolls, not G.I. Joe dolls). To her disappointment, we would make them fight like any other action figure. She really just wanted a daughter, I think.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:43 PM
I bought PK a doll or two. Unsurprisingly, he was as uninterested in his dolls as I was in mine when I was a kid. I didn't make mine fight, though; I stuck pins in them.
His dad had a favorite doll, though. But then Germans are freaks.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:44 PM
93: My son loved all sorts of dress-up stuff when he was younger. He'd routinely go to preschool in shorts, t-shirt, cowboy boots, and a cape. Or a pirate shirt and a cape. Or almost anything and a cape, really. Now (at 10) he's reluctant to wear his styling new pink shirt when he thinks his friends might see him. But it's still cool with his cousins.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:50 PM
We weren't really interested in the dolls themselves either (even the GI Joe's), except in their ability to be incorporated into our broader fort-building activities. Man, that's how you really keep a kid occupied: give them a big bin of wooden blocks. And that sort of stuff is pretty much a blank slate--no inherent gender issues there.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 9:54 PM
95: Yup. Or Legos. PK is really into the Legos.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:00 PM
I used to looove building forts in the living room out of blankets and cushions from the couch. I should so build a fort in the living room some rainy day. Will have to find a likeminded person to build the fort with, though. Forts are much more fun when shared. Ideally, you should have at least one person to build the fort with and one person who disapproves of the fort-building (like a parent) to make it all the more satisfying. At least, that's what I recall from my childhood.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:00 PM
I'm game for cushion forts.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:02 PM
That reminds me: BRIO. I also had an engineer outfit when I was really young.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:03 PM
OMG! I suspect Standpipe would be the best cushion fort builder evah!
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:04 PM
I'm so disappointed that PK doesn't really play with the Brio stuff much! BTW, Brio purchased Plan Toys, which made the most fabulous (non-train) wood toy stuff of all sorts.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:06 PM
Wood toys suck. Except for Lincoln Logs.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:08 PM
Lincoln Logs suck. You just can't build as many things out of them as Legos or good old-fashioned blocks.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:09 PM
Tim, seriously. What is wrong with you?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:09 PM
I want to hear Tim's case for Lincoln Logs.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:12 PM
Wrong with me? WRONG WITH ME! Blocks are chunky, and demand oversized buildings. Lincoln Logs have notches that are satisfying to put together. And unlike Legos buildings, Lincoln Log forts explode when bombed with marbles.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:12 PM
Your original claim was wood toys v. Lincoln Logs, not Legos v. Lincoln Logs.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:13 PM
What about Tinker Toys? That's a good wooden toy.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:15 PM
You know what's neat, along the Tinker Toy line, is Zome.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:16 PM
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures. No cute little patio or chimneys. And they're all brown! You can't have fun with the colors. I'm with you on Legos not being as satisfying to knock down as non-notched building materials. I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:16 PM
I am a precog, and knew that Becks would want an answer. Her claim regarded blocks and Legos.
Wood toys--what's the point, beyond giving the parents the comforting feeling that they live in some patchouli scented Whole Foods? They're anachronisms in this modern world, and an indication of some bizarre unwillingness to engage childhood as it is today, with its myriad forms of plastic play.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:17 PM
I never liked Tinker Toys. The sticks and holes were always slightly different sizes. Either they wouldn't stay in because they were too loose or you couldn't get them to fit together because they were too tight.
(A preemptive "ATM")
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:18 PM
I make my kids build things out of broken glass and thumbtacks.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:18 PM
You know me well, Tim. (And I never thanked you for 90 -- that was sweet. You're still totally wrong about the Lincoln Logs, though.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:19 PM
I was never all that interested in Legos or Lincoln Logs. I did have a plastic race track for toy cars that you put on a staircase and set up so that the car would go through a loop and off a ramp. That got boring quickly so I sent marbles down the track and had them jump into an empty coffee can. It was very, very loud.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:21 PM
I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
Wooden blocks are chunky, and lack the elegant grace of the lincoln log. Kids who play with them will lack the fineness of finger articulation that lincoln log players will enjoy in later life. But, hey, someone needs to be the kid everyone else picks on.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:22 PM
Cushion forts are awesome. Now that you've got me thinking about forts, I recall that though I'm an only child, and had my own room, I made a fort in the closet in my room, shut the door, and hung out in there. That's fucked up. They should have seen "will hang out with computer strangers" coming twenty years ago.
Legos, it should be noted, suck. It's much more fun to build with stuff that you have to use some imagination and ingenuity to get to stand up, with the precariousness being part of the fun. This is not an erection joke.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:22 PM
You would, apo. PK builds his own toys out of organic hemp and dried leaves. And then we meditate on how grateful we are for all the things the good earth has given us, just as we do before every meal of sustainably harvested oats and pure rain water.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:25 PM
Gawd, I hate the words femme and femmy.
When I was very little, I was something of a tom boy. My hair was cut by a barber, and I had osh kosh bgosh overralls. I even had striped ones with a train engineer's hat. When I was 5 or 6, though, I decided that I wanted hair that waslong enough to pull back in a ponty tail, and that I wanted to be able to put my hair in a bun for ballet recitals.
The girls in my grade school wore corduroy pants and plaid skirts with tights. There was no head tossing. High school was weird, because there were girls who wouldn't leave the dorm without massive makeup, because then boy swould see them. There were also grungy types who barely bothered to groom themselves before going to breakfast. There were a lot of blazers in highschool, because that's what girls had to wear when they wore pants.
My Dad is almost a misandrist. He doesn't really like spending time with men. All of his best friends have been women. He doesn't liek the competitive one upsmansip that's common in a lot of male friendships, and he's not interested in sports (unless his daughter is competing in them. He likes watching a race or a field hockey game in crisp fall weather. He can't stand watching football.)
I think that I remember those mice dolls. Were there other animals too?
My parents liekd toys that required imagination--blocks and erector sets. They bought me a doll's house, and the furniture in it was very nice. The bathroom set was very old-fashioned; the tub had claws, and the toilet had a chain. It wasn't girly; it was tasteful decorating. I did ask for a Barbie. I got the pool set and a car. My Dad didn't like that so much, but he would have been glad for me to play with dolls id I wanted to. My Dad's idea of cute on a little girl was Mary Janes and saddle shoes. I did get kid perfume and a jewelry box.
Around the second-grade or so everyone decided that boys had cooties. This nevermade sense to me, and I didn't like losing my boy friends, but I faxed it (badly), snce I seemed to be the only one who didn't findboys gross and vice versa.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:25 PM
>Legos, it should be noted, suck.
This is the most wrong thing you have ever said.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:25 PM
I think the trick with Legos, people, is to move past building solid rectangular constructions with them.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:27 PM
Ok ok, they don't suck, and I liked building with just about anything, but they always kinda annoyed me.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:28 PM
I think we should ban Ogged until he updates his blog.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:29 PM
Whew!
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:30 PM
Whew!
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:31 PM
My parents loved Lincoln logs. I had two large bins of them. I didn't have the coole extras that allowed you to buidl special structurs--no fence ofr the cowboys. (They did suck for a while when they came out with a cheapo version, but the good ones seem to be back.)
Erector sets were not available, when I was little.
For one of my birthday parties everyone got hot wheels as party favors.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:31 PM
Or is this not the thread to bait Farber?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:32 PM
121: Right on. I mourn the fact that I'm at an age where sitting on the living room floor playing with Legos for hours on end is somewhat less acceptable.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:32 PM
You know what's awesome? Playmobil.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:32 PM
Off to bed!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:36 PM
You're just baiting people, teo. It's well-known that Playmobil is the favored toy of future serial killers. And, really, after being confronted for years with those inane painted smiles, you can't really blame the kids.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:36 PM
Playmobil is both awesome and disturbing.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:36 PM
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
They'll freeze your bank accounts, y'know.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:38 PM
I had to look up Playmobil. I sort of recognize the design, but don't think I ever played with them.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:41 PM
Okay, Tim, one, Playmobil is made of plastic. And two, Playmobil is THE BEST. My best friend and I have commisserated over how frustrating it is to be obsessed with not losing the little pieces, down to the goddamn eentsy pirate doubloons and the fucking cuffs (why must the cuffs be detachable? Jesus!). And yet. Playmobil totally rules.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:42 PM
That's it, Tim, your bank account is frozen.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:43 PM
Playmobil! We had a LOT of Playmobil. That shit just wasn't all that fun, and was crazy expensive, but my little brother and sister could not get enough of it.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:45 PM
My one beef with Playmobil is you used to be able to get the little Playmobil "multicultural" kit with different skintones, but no more. That and the cannibal/African savage/whatever it is set is gross.
On the other hand, it's really cool to be able to swap the hair so that the (always rather busty) female figures have short hair, and the flat-chested figures have long hair, making them either flat-chested women or long-haired men. You can even give the women beards.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:46 PM
I had some playmobil stuff, but I never got too into it--not much point to it all. And it seemed a bit too much like those miniature Christmas Villages with everyone frozen in time, from the skaters on the pond to Santa and his reindeer. Kinda creepy. Really, wooden blocks are where it's at. Block forts look pretty damn awesome when you line those little green army men up on the ramparts.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:49 PM
B understands. The rest of y'all seem to want frozen bank accounts too.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:51 PM
Actually, Playmobil does make advent calendars. A new one every year. Alas, they all end with Santa, so we've got several of them floating around, which is kind of odd. The up side is that not all the Santas look alike.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:53 PM
Playmobil was pretty cool.
Also awesome: Mr. Potatohead.
I liked Playdoh a lot too. The hair-dressing set (you got to grow he hair) was pretty damn cool.
I was fond of toys that seemed to have real-world applications. I liked my cvash register a lot and used it for my lemonade tsand. The snoopy slurpee maker was also great. I really wanyed the Jello Pudding pop set.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:53 PM
140: Do I get to dip into any of those accounts? B/c that would be cool.
142: BG, except for the Playmobil thing, you have perverse toy preferences. The playdoh set where you grow hair is just awful. It only does one thing.
I'll give you a pass on the cash register, though. Barely. But the other stuff? Boring.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:55 PM
I loved my Lite Brite.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:56 PM
Potatohead & Playdoh: excellent calls, BG.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 10:56 PM
My favorite toys as a kid were the Breyer horses. I'm kind of disturbed that there's a Barbaro horse now, though, and tempted to make jokes about broken legs.
I should really ship all my Breyer horses (an entire underbed bin of them) to my horsey niece.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:00 PM
I have the Lite Brite jingle stuck in my head. Also I really liked jello pudding pops, but as sweets, not toys.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:01 PM
I'd have to check with the Elders, b. It might be against the Protocols.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:01 PM
148: Fair enough. After all, I'm a big fan of the Playmobil Nativity sets, that's gotta count against me.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:04 PM
I'd have to check with the Elders, b. It might be against the Protocols.
Faker. There are no more Elders. Instead, World Jewry is organized in classic corporate form, with a board of elected directors that oversees a day-to-day chief known as the Head Heeb. And yes, he blogs.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:05 PM
Yeah, probably.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:06 PM
And just who do you think those directors are, Tim?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:07 PM
I didn't spend much time with toys as a kid. I had Legos, Lite-Brite, and the rest but the novelty wore off really quickly. When I wasn't climbing trees and exploring creeks, it was mostly books and puzzles.
I do remember really, really wanting a Stretch Armstrong (whose novelty would surely have worn off even faster), and it nearly killed me not to own one of these.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:09 PM
There are no more Elders.
Sure there are. They're just Mormons now.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:10 PM
I don't thin that I ever owmed the Playdoh hair salon, but I played with it at someone elses house, so it never lost its allure. Playdoh was generally cool, though, cause you got to make stuff.
Silly putty was also great.
My glow-in-the dark frisbee was awesome.
One girl I knew had buildings from Mr. Rogers Make-believe Land. I really wanted the trolley car.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:10 PM
2: "I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!"
Actually, all my life that's struck me as the primary reason most women do most of that stuff.
Not to please men; I tend to think most men could take or leave most female beauty routines and makeup; but to meet the expectations of other women.
What astounds me is that you'd think it was otherwise.
Most of the "beauty industry" strikes me as a scam sold to women. Men have little to do with it (save to profit off it; not that they can tell one cream or blush or whatever from it from another, I mean). This surely shouldn't be revelatory?
I'm not qualified to talk about this subject; I've been highly attracted to women with nice hair on their legs, and elsewhere, so what do I know?
Ignore me.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:13 PM
I got tired of Slinkys pretty quickly.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:14 PM
I was disappointed to discover that play-doh doesn't smell like play-doh anymore. They changed the scent and that's just wrong. It should have that earthy, salty smell, not some floral crap.
They also changed the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Whoever did that should be lashed.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:18 PM
Truly gros: Strawberry Shortcake and her smelly friends.
Lite Brite ruled I wanted to fill an entire screen with colors going in order so that I could get diagonals of the different colors by putting in te different colors in rainbow order. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and then purple. Down and across, and then following all of the colors of the rainbow from each of the colors. I never had enough of the colored plastic bits to do it.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:21 PM
They also changed the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Whoever did that should be lashed.
Until they cry.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:25 PM
Speaking of cushion forts, I really liked this old MAD TV skit.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:28 PM
160: Like a little girl.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:29 PM
Truly gross: Strawberry Shortcake and her smelly friends.
I agree. Also gross -- my cousin had the Star Wars action figure that smelled like a skunk. He used to chase us around with it.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:29 PM
Until they cry.
Oh, the irony!
Now I have the Johnson's Baby Shampoo commercial theme song in my head.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:32 PM
Somebody I knew had a Heman set with a castle. The names are truly cringeworthy. He man and Shera. What were they thinking?
My sister really liked the My little pnoies. I kind of liked them too, though I'm embarassed to admit it now.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:35 PM
Johnson's Baby Shampoo smells different? Good. B/c that stuff smelled nasty.
I haven't noticed that Play-Doh smells any different, though.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:37 PM
We would make fun of them by mixing up the names: She-man and He-ra.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:38 PM
What about that Operation game? That was fun.
I have to say, though, that as an adult, Mouse Trap is incredibly sloooooow and boring.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:39 PM
I'm watching a little Buffy—okay, sure, I'm watching a lot of Buffy, wtfever—and I'm wondering whether the 'Xander-Buffy-Willow-Cordy axis isn't a more applicable commentary than memories of "token women." Not meaning to sound all Kim du Toit by any means, but I remember a great deal of weird gender pressure in wanting to excel in math, do my science homework, read the assigned novel, and as I recall those peers that did so with impunity were all girls.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:40 PM
166 - But it was the nastiness that made it Johnson's! That's what babies are supposed to smell like!
(And I wouldn't call it nasty. Just...odd.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:40 PM
It was sharp and chemically. Gross.
Smasher, elaborate. I'm not following you.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:41 PM
Cripes, B, you really do hate America. Johnson's smell is a cherished memory. It's the smell of clean. And it was Castle Greyskull, He-Man, and She-Ra. And, of course, Kevin Garnett.
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:50 PM
I am Becks style, there is no following me. My experience growing up was that my academic peers were all girls—the G&T classes were probably 60/40 in favor of girls, and the best students in those classes were girls, and I belonged among the girl academic cohort. My guy friends were all skateboarders and practiced things like vomiting on command. I hate to endorse what I consider to be shoddy social science conclusions, but in my experience it was true: there was more pressusr to fail (or not succeed or show ambition) among guys than amongg irls.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:50 PM
163: No. Your cousin had Stinkor, a villain from the He-Man ouvre.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:53 PM
That's because of the war on boys, Smasher.
Actually, I think this is true: bookish pursuits are for pussies. This gets back to that American anxiety about masculinity thing, doesn't it?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:54 PM
174 - Ah! I do believe you are correct, sir.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 11:54 PM
When I was maybe 8, among other games, I played corporate executive, which largely consisted of sketching the organizational chart of my multinational conglomerate. The conglomerate was called Centax World. I don't remember any of the subsidiaries anymore, except for YOU Personal Hygiene Products. I also would sketch the architectural plan for my mansion. It had a bowling alley and a movie theater, which seemed to me the height of luxury.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 5:22 AM
I see the discussion has moved on to playdoh, but to answer the questions about my 22, b's comment about exploring misogyny just made me roll my eyes. Because I feel we do that all the time, and the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women. So for myself, I'm not sure how much is coming out of that ongoing exploration.
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial? Chattiness, for instance, keeps women connected to one another and not isolated, so they can avoid the fate of all those people in that study who have no one to talk to? Or... any other number of other kinds of exercises.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 5:43 AM
Because I don't have my glasses on, I read Tia's mansion as having a howling alley. Which would be kind of cool.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 5:48 AM
However, despite playing corporate executive, I have never been the token women. I wasn't that femmey as a kid, but I played with girls, and as a grownup, I have to say that my close relationships with men are generally with gay men, with men I have been romantically involved with, or, in one case, with a man I really, really would have liked to have been involved with. I like teasing well enough when affection is simultaneously signalled, but I don't particularly like the jocular towel snapping routine (and IME many of the people in it don't like it as much as they pretend to), and I prefer relationships that are more straightforwardly supportive.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 6:11 AM
I'm still laughing at 'but Lincoln log forts explode when you bomb them with marbles!'
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together. Lincoln Logs were great, as were blocks because you could make tall things and knock them down. I agree with Tim that most other wooden toys are pretty silly; we have children and suddenly we're in the wholesome 1800s where each kid has a set of hand-whittled toys tooled by machine and purchased for $24.99.
I loved Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony and Herself the Elf (which I may be the only one to remember). Lite Brite ruled but like BG, I never had enough Lite Brite pieces.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 6:11 AM
173: I went to an an all-boys school until 11th grade, and there was no pressure not to succeed academically, and I had a lot of equally nerdy male friends. I think the pressure not to look like a nerd fades in the absense of chicks to impress. After the school went co-ed, I'm told that changed and that now women are disproportionately represented in the AP classes. I find that depressing. (Also they loosened the dress code, which (oddly) bothers me.)
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
Man, is that ever true, especially as the show aged.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 6:18 AM
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial?
This seems perfectly reasonable to me - certainly plenty of stereotypically feminine traits are useful and good in themselves (kindness, caretaking, sensitivity to the needs of others, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list).
This, on the other hand:
the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women.
I'm not seeing. Given that I was one of Hirshman's most fervent defenders, I figure there's a reasonable chance that you're referring to things I've said. I do, strongly, disapprove of misogyny, and I'd appreciate your walking me through what you were talking about so I can figure out if I agree with you and need to change my behavior, if you have the time to be specific.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 6:24 AM
I'd be surprised if she were thinking of you just because you were one of Hirshman's defenders. As I remember that thread, there were a lot of ways of approaching it. Pro/Anti Hirshman isn't the locus, I think. It's what people said, often quite casually, about women as they are.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:30 AM
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures.
You just didn't have enough lincoln logs. our set had logs of different lengths, so you could make alcoves and L-shapes entryways and so on. still, not as good as legos.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:31 AM
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking. Once you're starting at that position, all the women who make rather more sensible life decisions are cast as useless losers letting down the side.
Surely the point is that if you want to pursue power, or have some particular thing you want to achieve, you need to structure your life accordingly. But personal happiness is a separate matter, and to link it up solely to career is intellectually dishonest and portrays women as if they are simpletons, who are sabotaging their lives and the chances of their sisters for No Reason.
Even men might be happier if the American workplace were structured differently and people didn't work 14hr days to get ahead.
But I don't particularly want to rehash the Hirshman debate. What I said at AWB's site is that it occurred to me that people who adopt this sort of Jacobin extreme position see feminism in very abstract terms, removed from the lives of actual, likeable, not so insane or inscrutable women, perhaps because they have some history of not actually liking women all that much.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:40 AM
Just occurred to me as a possibility. I don't know that it's true.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:50 AM
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
A while back I e-mailed somebody this link and they were too chickenshit to post it. But I, I, will bravely post it.
Posted by Fanny Najef-Yoga | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:52 AM
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking.
She doesn't come anywhere near assuming or asserting that. Further, if she did, while it might be wrong, it wouldn't have anything to do with misogyny.
Hirshman's claim was that a fulfilling life includes professional achievement, and that a fulfilling life is basically the same for men and for women. And further, that to the extent that women systematically make choices that involve behaving according to stereotyped sex roles and consequently eschewing professional achievement, they are less fulfilled than they would otherwise be.
If you want to say that professional achievement isn't an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone, you disagree with Hirshman, and with me, (I doubt that you are taking this position) but that doesn't render her position misogynist. If you want to argue that professional achievement is or should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for women than it is for men, you disagree with Hirshman and with me -- I can see how one might want to call Hirshman's position here misogynist, in that it denigrates the choices of women who have decided not to pursue professional achievement in favor of other aspects of their lives. I can also see how one might call the position that professional achievement is or should be a less important component of a fulfilling life for women than for men straightforwardly sexist. Given that both characterizations are terribly inflammatory, I don't think either is particularly useful.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:56 AM
186: I have to admit right now that I never read the Hirshman article all the way through, so I could be way off base. But isn't her whole article so obviously coming from the position of valuing power, and addressed to those who are in a position and of a disposition to pursue power, that to say she's trying to make that a universal value (and thus possibly misogynistic) ungenerous to her argument?
I admit that it's possible that part of what motivates her to make the argument is a bit of disdain for most women (in a certain class and culture), but then I'd hesitate to call that misogyny except in a generic sense. Surely it's possible to be somewhat disdainful of women (in a certain class and culture) without buying into negative patriarchal attitudes against those women. You can come up with your own negative attitudes. And anyway, her argument just as much saying that these women are disappointing themselves and neglecting their own happiness as she was that they were disappointing feminism. And I'm sure that argument has resonance for a number of high-ambition women.
I hope I'm not rehashing Hirshman so much as using her as a jumping-off point.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 7:58 AM
A while back I e-mailed somebody this link
Hey! I know who you are!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:00 AM
Pwnd!
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:00 AM
I found out recently that FNY believed his identity (another regular commenter) to be transparently obvious. To which I say, not so much.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:03 AM
I thought it was pretty easy to tell that is a pseudonym for Agoy-Fejan Ynnaf.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:06 AM
189 - I would argue both that (1) professional achievement is an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone however (2) professional achievement should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for both women and men than it currently is today.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:08 AM
And 138 -- busty Playmobil figures??? We never had any busty Playmobil figures! I always thought they were unisex; apparently we only ever got the men.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:09 AM
193: No, that was one of my other sock puppets that's transparently obvious. This one's supposed to confuse people.
Posted by Fanny Najef-Yoga | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:10 AM
FNY, I know who you are. Because I read Unfogged. (What motivates you to show up as FNY when you do?)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:16 AM
189: I'd agree with both your 1 and your 2. My sense is that Hirshman's argument (or what I am guessing she would argue on this point; I haven't seen her quite make this argument) is that women who believe your 2 can't bring it about by dropping out -- they aren't putting pressure on the system to change, they're acting as a relief valve by allowing the men in their lives to have an acceptable family life while overvaluing professional achievement.
Further, that pursuing professional advancement in the same manner and to the same extent that men do will do more to bring about your 2 than dropping out will -- a marriage with children in which both partners are working 80 hours a week is intolerable for most people. In a society, then, where caretaking wives who valued family-life over professional achievement were unavailable, professional men and the organizations that employ them would be forced to back off from the exorbitant claims on their employees time and attention.
This argument may be wrong, but it's not misogynist to make it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:17 AM
199: "Unavailable" should be "not a role that women are disproportionately willing to take on due to gendered social pressures".
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:19 AM
199's second paragraph adds a lot of steps and inferences to what Hirshman wrote, and it's not at all obvious to me that it is what she intends. It's just as probable she believes in a super-elite where both partners work 80 hour weeks.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:23 AM
199: It should be noted that there's quite a phenomenon of video game programmers (usually young single guys) being hired by certaing gaming firms and worked 80 hours a week until they burn out. And so you get stories of sleeping at the office, of not even owning an apartment, and jokes about ironing boards and hammocks in cubicles. So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:24 AM
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
That sort of attitude does sometimes make me wary of working mothers - I'm not sure whether it ever really happens, but I m conscious of not wanting to be looked down upon because I don't work, I just stay at home with my children. In fact, I met up with an old school friend last week, who is moving to my town. He came round with his wife and children - his wife has a high-powered marketing executive job, and I was nervous that she was going to be some kind of soulless bitch who would think I was wasting my life. As it turned out, she's lovely - phew.
I was a tomboy for years, and went from one extreme (all girls school from 7-16) to the other, and have been the Token Woman - accidentally, and not proud of it. Some of the TW bit was really good for me, some wasn't. My best friends was always been female - more femme than myself - but the larger group was mainly male. As I've got older, I've acquired more and more female friends, to the extent that I would now say I mostly preferred women's company to men's. But I think that just means that I've met a lot more women I like, not that my tastes have changed. I still wouldn't like the girly girls I didn't like at college.
I've got 3 daughters, and they're all far more girly in appearance than I was at their ages. But I think a large part of that is, as mentioned above, the increasing dichotomy in girl and boy stuff, and the pushing of femmey accessories onto younger and younger girls. It's so hard to buy my girls clothes which don't cost a fortune and which aren't outrageously gendered. (And I do try, because I've got a son to pass things down to!) They don't seem that much different to me in attitude though.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:25 AM
So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
Most men (most people generally) at some point in their lives have children. At that point, they either stop working the 80 hour weeks, or they have wives taking a disproportionate share of the parenting load.
A work culture where childless people in their 20's were expected to work ridiculous hours, and others weren't, would be workable, I guess, but it's not the culture we've got.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:28 AM
I liked the large cardboard bricks. One could build a small house and destroy it in under twenty minutes.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:30 AM
204: I don't know, sounds a bit like a law firm, where the people in their twenties work ridiculous hours, and the other people work slightly less ridiculous hours.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:32 AM
LB -- we could also, with similar justification, have a culture where the elite were encouraged not to have children or to postpone childbearing, and the underclass was expected to bear and rear the next generation.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:34 AM
201: Hirshman doesn't explicitly make the argument in my 199, but she does, in her controversial 'marrying down' bit of the argument, say this:
recognizing that the dual 80-hour-a-week-career marriage is unworkable. And she suggests solving the unworkability by making the man in the couple as much of the safety valve as the woman is.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:34 AM
206: No they don't. Partners, in the places I've worked, bill as many or more hours as associates.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:35 AM
Am I the only one who finds Hirschman to be a big weirdo?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:40 AM
210: No. Though, as I said before, I find her arguments pretty compelling.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:42 AM
What motivates you to show up as FNY when you do?
Whimsy or, as in this case, not wanting to have my real name anywhere near comment 188.
Posted by Fanny Najef-Yoga | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:42 AM
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
Does it have to be a part of everyone's fulfilling life? No. But there's something wrong with a system where it's recognized as an important part of a fulfilling life for men, and a much less important part for women. And the gendered tendency of women to drop out of the paid workforce puts more, rather than less, pressure on the men in their families to achieve -- you've dropped out of paying work, and as a consequence your husband's freedom to drop out or cut back is vastly restricted. (Less so in England, where there's a more reasonable safety net then in the US, but still vastly restricted.)
To the extent that your decision to drop out was influenced by your gender, I think that's a bad reason to abandon professional achievement, and I don't believe that thinking that makes me a misogynist. That doesn't mean that I hold you, personally, in contempt, or think ill of you -- I just don't like the cultural framework in which I am guessing you've made your life decisions, and to the extent that what you do with your life is any of my business (an extremely limited, bordering on non-existent extent), I wish that you had examined and resisted that cultural framework to a greater extent.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:43 AM
I don't find it all that likely that a greater share of women ibankers would put that much pressure on the childrearing arrangements of elite men, and I'm not sure that was Hirshman's argument, either. All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:44 AM
210: No, half the blogophere thinks she's a meanie weirdo woman-hater. I happen to disagree with them. (I thought that she was deliberately inflammatory, but that doesn't make her a weirdo -- heavens, an academic wrote an inflammatory polemic! Someone get my smelling salts.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:45 AM
"thought that she was deliberately inflammatory, but that doesn't make her a weirdo"
Yes, it does.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:46 AM
211: "No" should have been "yes." She's a freak.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:46 AM
One thing I've noticed about my Generation Awesome friends and co-workers is that, for most couples I know, the woman is the primary breadwinner. If I look around at the men on my team, I think almost all of their wives make more than they do. They're no slouches (engineers, etc.) but their wives are all lawyers and doctors and I-bankers. It's the men in my office who are always cutting out to take their kid to doctor's appointments, etc.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:47 AM
we've worked different places, LB. but you have a lot more experience in the profession, and either way, everyone worked pretty hard where I was.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:47 AM
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together.
Yes! This.
Lincoln Logs were great. I wanted to be Abe Lincoln! It was so easy to take them apart and build something new. You could build a wide variety of structures, if you just used the logs of varying lengths.
Did anyone else have the gigantic multivolume Childcraft book series? They were like encyclopedias for kids. I read like a squillion of them. "The How and Why Library", I think it was called. Childcraft taught me everything.
I played with so much He-Man, and yet, there was always someone who had more He-Man products than I. I didn't really feel like I had the power. Perhaps this is what drew me to Howard Dean. Interestingly, I knew a guy on the Dean campaign who looked a lot like Skeletor.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:48 AM
All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
It's a question of cultural pressures. Most people in the US are formally committed to the equality of the sexes on some level. Now, men in the professional elite can marry women who are their professional equals (graduates of the same schools, etc.) and still be fairly likely to get the caretaking benefits of marrying a non-professional. If that possibility is taken away from them, we get to see whether they're committed to the romantic ideal of marriages between equals, or if marriage is, as you suggest, a more complex way of hiring a housekeeper. I have to say I have a certain amount of faith in romance on this one.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:49 AM
218: Maybe Hirshman's behind the curve, and people are doing the sorts of things she advises. Excellent, if true.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:51 AM
215: Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man. And being quite dismissive of women who did not take her favored path. Which I think was part of the idea behind the charge of hostility to actually existing women.
I also find the 'smelling salts' line unfortunate here, when we're discussing whether this position involves contempt for a lot of femmier women.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:54 AM
I wisely skipped all the Hirshman discussion, but now I have to ask whether anyone even bothered to argue that women, generally speaking, are and always will be better natural (yeah, natural) child-rearers? If not, you gotta admit that's pretty funny.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:57 AM
romantic ideal of marriages between equals
As long as we're talking about things that bother us, I've never been happy with language that presumes that two people from a different class, or with different professional credentials, are not equals.
If you were talking about the division of labor in the relationship, it's already evident that these hypothetical men are not committed to any particular symmetry, since their wives are leaving the workforce,.
If someone willing to have that sort of arrangement isn't willing to marry someone slightly lower on the socioeconomic ladder than they are, the only ideal being upheld is class isolation. But if that winds up meaning that women have fewer barriers to the professional class, I guess it did some good.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:58 AM
220: Legoes now come with a tool, a thin lever, that helps children pry the bricks apart. I find this almost unsportsmanlike.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:59 AM
215: There's barely any housewives in Sweden, since well before I was born. The whole concept is kinda weird to me. So it's not like some science fiction scenario you're discussing.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 8:59 AM
The first line should be italicized, since I'm quoting LB.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:00 AM
Housewife s/b stay at home mom, I guess. Hmm.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:01 AM
226: Legoes now come with a tool, a thin lever, that helps children pry the bricks apart. I find this almost unsportsmanlike.
Children today are too soft. It's a good thing there's going to be plenty of war around to toughen them up a bit.
Posted by Felix | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:02 AM
224: I think I argued that their vaginas send out child-calming rays, which is pretty much the same argument.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:04 AM
Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man.
I can see how her tone would lead you to that conclusion, but I don't think that's a necessary part of her argument. She characterizes the work she values for women as "good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power," and talks about money as a marker of where power lies:
Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.
I don't believe that she's making the claim that money is the only thing that matters, but rather that making decisions in the direction of more money (a) is a good rule of thumb for figuring out if you're taking your profession seriously, and doing good work in it, and (b) will often enable you to continue to take your profession seriously. The problem with idealism and social services isn't so much that they're low-paying, but that they're markers of being a dilettante -- if you want to pursue an idealistic career seriously and professionally, I don't believe Hirshman would disapprove of that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:06 AM
227: Well, then she's addressing an issue that you're personally unfamiliar with. Calling her a weirdo for that seems out of place.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:08 AM
213: My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist. He likes going to work though. I've been trying to persuade him recently to take compressed hours (here, if your youngest child is under 6, you have the right to do 4 longer days rather than 5), but I'm not getting anywhere! He has a vague plan to work less in 'the future'.
Really, I try to live my life doing what *I* want to do. I got a decent degree from a good university, I worked for a few years. I've thought loads since I was about 22 about what I want to do with my lfe, and its implications, and I have never managed to get my head round the idea that to be a 'good feminist' (or whatever) I should go to work every day rather than doing what I want to.
Luckily, my vagina does indeed send out child-calming rays, so that makes for a happy home life.
The idea of making decisions in the direction of more money repels me. If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:09 AM
my vagina does indeed send out child-calming rays
Do they interfere with your wireless phone reception?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:12 AM
225: Hey, a possible model for successful marriage and childrearing would be one partner in a high-pressured, elite job, and one partner not working or in a much less pressured job. If that were a non-gendered pattern (in which both male and female professionals tended to marry those who wanted a less demanding professional life) I'd be happier than I am with the current highly gendered norm.
Not as happy as I'd be if professional life were less demanding for everyone, but happier than I am now.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:12 AM
My husband? Did I mention a husband?
Arguably you did in 203 -- not having worked for money in 10 years and simultaneously having a child implies the existence of some non-work source of income; so either you were born wealthy or have a husband or wife earning money, no?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:15 AM
My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist.
You don't work. You do eat. Assuming that someone pays the bills doesn't seem out of line.
If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
Certainly (once we get past the annoying realities of buying food, and clothing, and paying rent or a mortgage). But whether you're making money is a fair rule-of-thumb way of determining whether you're taking your profession seriously or being a dilettante. I fully support the right of women to be selfishly committed avant-garde artists, supported by the self-abasing men who love them over the long decades until their genius is recognized -- they're taking their professional lives seriously, whether or not they're making money. But that sort of thing doesn't apply to most of us.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:17 AM
227/229: I think we should look at how this happened; that might help us evalute whether Hirshman's prescriptions are a plausible way to eliminate gender barriers.
I'm really skeptical of the idea that elite women can force top jobs to have more reasonable hours by working absurd hours themselves (as per 208). If making partner takes working 80 hours a week, and if a man with an elite wife can't work 80 hours a week, my guess is that the people who make partner will be men who don't have elite wives (as per 214); and people who don't have children. Romance (221) may keep many men married to elite wives, but those men won't make partner.
"Make partner" is here shorthand for obtaining those ridiculous jobs, I have no insight into law firm dynamics. But I just have trouble imagining someone saying "Joe is always at the office late at night, and his wife takes care of the kids. Bob has to switch off evenings with his wife. Let's promote Bob, because we must understand his plight!" Men might get more of a hearing than women about childcare issues, but I'd guess that in the end the men who work the most hours will still be considered the best team players.
The point being that reforming these jobs can't be done entirely by working within the system. We should promote the "nobody should work 80 hours" ethos as well as encouraging women to strive for high-powered jobs. In fact, the more that ethos obtains, the easier it'll be to attain gender equity in the workplace, I bet. (Though I'd hope not because high-powered women would still be assuming a disproportionate childcare burden.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:20 AM
Clown's 237 made the same point I meant to in the beginning of 238 much less rudely -- I didn't mean to be offensive, I'm just jotting down responses quickly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:21 AM
237 and 238: I'm British - I could be a lone parent living here on benefits for my entire life. But it was the husband thing that amused me most really - if I were talking to someone I didn't know, I'd always say partner. I could be living with anyone, married or not.
Selfishly-committed, self-abasing? Doesn't sound like full support!
235: Only when it's set on vibrate.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:24 AM
240: Hey - s'ok - I was trying to get across my mild amusement without using a damn smiley, and clearly failed.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:27 AM
241: Sorry, I'm American and we've got some cultural differences going. While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe. I understand the odds are different in England.
Didn't mean to cause offence.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:29 AM
242: Okay, I'll stop apologizing now.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:30 AM
Try turning your vagina to the "amusement ray" setting.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:30 AM
While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe.
Ah, I see. I don't know what the stats are here, but I know plenty of couples who aren't married, gay and straight.
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:34 AM
239: The thing is (and I'm making wild-ass-guesses about how stuff would work out. I could be entirely wrong) that (a) there's no necessary connection between the quality of your work and your willingness to work stupid hours but (b) when willingness to work stupid hours is the (masculine) norm, there's no risk of losing high-quality work by screening out those who won't work the hours. When Bob, who wants evenings off, is more common than Phil, who doesn't have kids and will work till he drops in harness, firms will be stuck choosing between their best lawyers and their lawyers who work the longest hours, who won't necessarily be the same people.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:34 AM
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:35 AM
245: will that help with the clown-fucking too?
Posted by asilon | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:35 AM
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:35 AM
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:36 AM
245: Or the hamburger setting.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-25-06 9:37 AM
248, 250, 251: Which I'm also all for.
Posted by LizardBreath |