Raising Children in Our Way-Past-Gender Society.

80 thoughts on Raising Children in Our Way-Past-Gender Society.

1. I am hopeful for a wife fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered womanhood (just as I think I am fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered manhood).

   What do you mean by this, specifically?

2. my family is a non traditional family in many ways, including gender identity and expression. My (male) partner and I share parenting responsibilities (including cooking, cleaning, etc) pretty equally, and the other adults in our household are queer, gender queer, and in many ways, gender is not traditionally expressed within our home. My kid understands that people determine their own gender, adn she herself says that while she is mostly girl, she is a little bit boy. Nonetheless, my four year old daughter is totally fluent in traditional gender expression, prefers pink and purple over other colors, and is obsessed with princesses. She goes to preschool, she has realtives who are traditional with regards to gender, and she exists in a world where gender roles are rigid and always on display. so, your potential kids are going to learn traditional gender concepts no matter what you do. What’s hard is raising a kid to understand gender fluidity and to respect the right of each person to express their own gender, to determine their own gender in a world/society that does not affirm or respect gender self determination.

   Are you sure your desire for a wife “fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered womanhood” isn’t based on your own desires?

3. If you want your children to be their authentic selves, shouldn’t you and their mother simply do your best to be YOUR authentic selves? I have to admit that I’m really confused with this reasoning.

4. why remain fluent in the language and practice of an antique and offensive conception of gender?

   Yes, why? Why would you saddle your children with the burden of unlearning all that crap? As someone in the midst of unlearning (for gender amongst other things), I resent it highly. I consider it a waste of time and life that could have been prevented if I had never learned it in the first place. As children we don’t choose what to absorb from the world around us. We just soak up everything with which we’re presented. I would urge you to be extremely, excruciatingly thoughtful about this course of action you’re considering.

5. There are ways you can pull it off.

   For instance, I knew a woman whose atheist-Jewish parents raised her to be an atheist, but also sent her to Hebrew school so she could learn about what it was she was being taught to reject.

   Of course, gender is a bit more pervasive in society than is Judaism.

6. I think my parents did a pretty good job of teaching me that the fact I was female didn’t have any normative content — that I was female so I couldn’t pee standing up and could give birth later on if I wanted to, but other than that what I did and how I lived my life was up to me.

   It was school — even preschool — and my friends who did the heavy-duty genderizing.

   I do wish, however, that my mother had taught me more about how to present a traditionall feminine appearance — how to apply makeup, shop for bras, shave my legs. Those were things I wanted to know how to do, and didn’t.

7. It’s actually very important (for heterosexual boys at least) to learn certain traditional gender roles simply because — for all the talk by those who almost seem to want to get the vapors about how kids these days are always hooking up and having all teh hawt casual sex — heterosexual dating is, in many environments (e.g. where I went to college), still an activity based very much on certain “old fashioned” gender roles (the guy asks the gal out on a date, he has to woo her, etc. — always the guy as the subject and the gal as the object …).

   If a boy is not comfortable at least temporarily adopting these gender roles for certain social situations, he’ll quickly turn into a Nice Guy(TM) — “I’m a nice guy; why don’t the gals wanna go out with me?” “because you are whiny and not ‘manly’ enough for them” — and you know what can happen from there. I am sure there are parallel things that go on with young straight women and even within the GLBT communities, but being a straight guy, I’m not as aware of them as I am with my own experiences.

   Also, at the very least, people need to be aware of the gender signage that still exists in our lives so as to combat it.

8. Isn’t navel-gazing like this usually reserved for one’s personal blog?

9. Of course, gender is a bit more pervasive in society than is Judaism. – zuzu

   Drats! It seems the Zionist plot for world domination just ain’t working as well as we planned 😉

10. I would contest the idea that Nice Guy-ness has anything to do with failing to adopt traditional gender roles. If anything, it’s the typical Nice Guy attachment to old-fashioned notions of chivalry that prevents him from recognize women as human beings to be engaged as equals, rather than prizes awarded to the deserving. I’d argue that trying to hang Nice Guys about the neck of those who’d seek to subvert traditional gender is itself a classic weaselish Nice Guy maneuver.

11. first – “fluent” You mean she can dress girly and put on make up? Or you mean she can point out to your son (like I do with mine) that all the teams in his cartoons are led by boys wiht the girls as sidekicks and the girl cartoons are all about shoes and belly shirts and all of it my be fun but what the hell is wrong with this.

    second – to commenter about boys getting laid – If you are raising your son to be a non-traditional male does this mean you are raising him to be unable to talk to women? Do you think we only sleep with men who grunt, pat us on the head and show us how well he can catch a football? You think teaching non gendered ways will make him a girly man so the girls won’t want him? Or maybe you could teach him females are people and if you talk to them you will get to know them and if another person gets excited about what you’re saying and you get excited about what they are saying then you look deep into each other’s eyes and hear Issac Hayes, even though he’s nowhere to be found. Sexual Orientation doesn’t even begin to enter into it. Paying attention and reading body language does. Doesn’t seem that gendering as masculine makes either of those things happen.

    Third – can we just get rid of female and male gender terminology yet? How about Alpha (m) and Omega (f) to describe the typically divided human traits? Most the guys I know are big Omega’s under their uber “I know everything and you can’t see I hate myself for not being manly enough” personas anyway.

    But if we talk Alpha and Omega than everybody gets to be who they are without worrying about if they fit the pegboard exactly.

    Me personally? I would just like to meet an adult. Gender optional.

12. Isn’t navel-gazing like this usually reserved for one’s personal blog?

    Well, Feministe does love navel-gazing, so I’d say it’s pretty appropriate.

13. tangentially, y’all know it used to be pink for boys, blue for girls, right?

14. Hell, I think I might have found my navel here.

15. Ooh, look! Lint!

16. I don’t get it.

17. Isn’t navel-gazing like this usually reserved for one’s personal blog?

    Indeed. Unless Mikey is planning to dye his gender bright purple, this post really has no place here.

18. and wife? How is this post-gender if you are thinking of a wife? the very concept is based in gender and ownership. i think you are not as past any of this as you think you are.

19. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

20. I hope you’ll come back and clarify what you were trying to say in this this post but as was already pointed out, your kids will be confronted with gender issues outside the home no matter what you and your partner do. Your job as a parent is simply to help them make sense of what they’re seeing and use your significant positive influence to combat the ugly influences. Same thing with race issues. My son has a a boy in his preschool class who likes to dress up like a princess and draws pictures of himself dressed in skirts and with long blond hair. It’s cute as hell but I was there participating a few weeks ago on my son’s “special day” and at snack time two of the boys in his class told the boy to get up from his seat and go sit with the other girls. Even at a pretty progressive school I can’t protect my son from seeing and hearing things like that but I can talk to him about how cruel, wrong and unnecessary that and other insults this boy receives are. That’s the best I can do and I believe he gets it.

21. What Holly said. Huh?

22. But, yeah, I’m curious as to why you think we’re living in a way-past-gender society — after all, we still do act out all kinds gendered behaviors, right?

    I can understand why it’s beneficial for kids, in some ways, to be raised according to traditional gender roles. Transgressing those roles can have negative consequences, and society still rewards people who follow the gendered rules. In a lot of ways, transgressing gender is especially detrimental to boys, whose gender has traditionally accorded them substanial amounts of power. Challening the gender binary will strip those boys of some of their privilege.

    But while adhering to traditional gender roles confers major benefits on to children of both sexes, it does so at great expense to them as human beings. If you want to maximize the options for your children to express their authentic selves, doesn’t it make more sense to allow them to express whichever characteristics fit, as opposed to falling in line with the idea that “boys are x and girls are z”?

23. Nevermind the rest of it. I’m not even sure how to parse the first sentence:

    I consider traditional concepts of gender to be destroyed, social constructions that, if imposed, limit human freedom

    Exactly what did you intend “destroyed” to modify here?

24. Hmph. In my family, we still have a baby dress that my great grandfather wore.

    IT IS PINK.

    So, pink as girly is NEW.

    Bah.

25. I am living up to my handle here, in terms of trying to understand what you’re saying.

    I think the best way to raise kids to transcend gender roles is to model fluid gender behaviour. Sometimes I worry about our ability to do this. On the other hand, my husband and I both display a wide spectrum of behaviours traditionally assigned to one gender or the other. We both cook; only he cleans. I work outside the home; he does not. He fixes hardware; I write software. He is most comfortable in the arts and hates math; I like both and work in a technical field, using math every day. He lifts heavy things and feels good about it. I wear a dress a couple times a year.

    Kids are going to learn gender expectations no matter what. That’s why many parents work actively against them.

26. Or maybe you could teach him females are people and if you talk to them you will get to know them and if another person gets excited about what you’re saying and you get excited about what they are saying then you look deep into each other’s eyes and hear Issac Hayes, even though he’s nowhere to be found. Sexual Orientation doesn’t even begin to enter into it. Paying attention and reading body language does. Doesn’t seem that gendering as masculine makes either of those things happen. – afm

    When and where did you go to school? What you say indeed works with grown ups, but some of us still have bitterness from our school days even if everything turned out more than alright in the end.

    Actually, paying attention and reading body language is a key part of “learning to be a man” — as is being confident about an “optimistic” reading of such language. Who has better luck on the dating scene? A guy who never asks because he is convinced, based on her ambiguous body language, that she is not interested or a guy who asks anyway? Even if the latter guy is considered an asshole whenever he asks a gal who clearly isn’t interested, he still has more success on the dating scene than a guy who never asks.

    As to the issue of Nice Guy(TM)-ness: I think there is more than one subtype of guy who gets the “you’re a Nice Guy(TM) and all but I’m not interested in you in that way” response. There is still a huge aspect of entitlement (“I deserve a date because I engage young women as friends”) but the dynamic is re-enforced when young women do go out with guys who follow traditional gender roles and woo/court women whereas the Nice Guy(TM) is stuck in the “friend zone”.

    Such a Nice Guy(TM) realizes that he might have better luck if he “had the balls to ask gals out” and was not afraid of rejection, but note the gendered language here — a guy is supposed to be able to risk rejection and ask gals out. This is a gendered role. And guys who are confident in this gendered role do better on the dating scene. The proto-Nice Guy(TM) realizes this, develops a sense of frustrated entitlement about dating and falls into the Nice Guy(TM) trap. If the guy were comfortable playing a gender role in the first place, there wouldn’t be that sense of frustrated entitlement in the first place.

27. I think everybody is tongue-in-cheek correct: this would be the first time, in comments or in posts, that one’s personal experience has ever been used as an illustrative example of anything.

    BTW, what happened to shoegazing? Did those Manchester bands of the early 90s ruin that term for everyone?

28. We are so far from getting anyone past patriarchal gender roles that we don’t need to worry about raising kids who don’t recognize or know how to interact with them. The best we can do is to raise kids who, when swamped with them, will be able to view them with a little distance instead of just adopting the package they’re handed.

    In order to be an exception to this, someone would have to be living pretty far out of the mainstream. Now, someone raising kids in an off-the-grid, homeschooling, queer/poly village environment full of androgynous and genderqueer adults might reasonably be concerned that the kids might not know the rules of patriarchal gender roles when/if they go into town for supplies.

    Anybody here fit that description?

29. Anyone?

30. Bueller?

31. You want to maximize your kids’ options? Well, than for one live your life the way you want. If you are ok with giving up traditional roles it’s not going to limit your child’s view of the world because there are enough traditional families out there. Be sure a kid sees the difference and is going to ask his or her parents why those people are different.

    Children are only happy when their parents are happy, too. So ensuring a fulfilling life that doesn’t freak you out should be every responsible parent’s priority.

    For me that would not include playing traditional family on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

    So what do you think, how do you want to include traditional gender lifestyles into your postmodern way of life?

32. Kids these days get exposed to a lot more than they did even 30 years ago. My childhood was in the 1980s and early 90s, and I was exposed to far more ideas about how genders could be (as opposed to how they are, or should be) as I was growing up. Young people are actually pretty good at formulating their own ideas about the world and how it should be – that’s what brings about cultural movements from hippies to punk to rave to whatever. Feminism actually has done a huge amount in that respect, to change and improve the options available to us all.

    Sadly, most of those options are not as widely accepted as the media would sometimes present to us, and people who want to reject some or all of their socially-determined gender identity, in many communities do face problems. However, there is certainly much more acceptance than there was 20 or 30 years ago.

    In other words, your kids will be able to form their own ideas as long as you give them a chance to find source material. There’s certainly no need to feel you have to be the exemplar for everything!

33. We are so far from getting anyone past patriarchal gender roles that we don’t need to worry about raising kids who don’t recognize or know how to interact with them. – Thomas

    I would argue that, at least as of when I was growing up, we are so far from getting past patriarchal gender roles that boys, as a matter of survival, need to be able to comfortably adopt them in certain situations. It is amazing the degree to which, as a boy, you are told “be a man”, etc. — and a boy who transgresses these norms is a “sissy” (which is even “worse” according to a child’s peers than a girl being a “tomboy”, nu?).

    So boys do need to be comfortable in these roles and with adopting the package they are handed even if we must also teach our children how to view such roles with some distance, etc. And to do either, you really need to be fluent in the language of these gender roles and to teach your kids this language, even if it’s a language that you find offensive and wish to teach your kids that it’s offensive.

34. Gender issues weren’t a part of it as such, but my parents did a really good job separating out “the way we do things in our family” from what everyone else might or might not do. As in, “they can eat in front of the television every night if they want to, and when you visit them, you can enjoy it with them, but here in our family we eat together in the dining room” to choose a fairly neutral one.

    Seems to me, as a non-parent and unlikely to ever be one (though being a grandparent may be in the future at some point), that the thing to do is feel perfectly free to model and encourage all the gendered activities and roles you want that aren’t limiting. “A gentleman holds the door for a lady, and a lady accepts graciously” (As well as “a younger person holds the door for an older person, and the older person accepts graciously”). Teach kids of both genders how to play dress up according to the standard social rules (and negotiate non-standard stuff like punk or goth as it comes up).

    But actively pooh-pooh the limiting stuff. Girls can kill bugs, and boys can fold laundry. All of us kids, boys and girls, were expected to learn to cook and take our turns feeding the family. And vacuum, and help in the yard. Academic subjects were completely gender neutral, whether it was poetry or engineering.

    I think it is disservice to try to pretend to the kids that the world doesn’t have gender roles, but I know a lot of things that my parents dealt with with us, like racism, were presented honestly and early, but with a whole, “and isn’t it so sad that they think that way” vibe.

    I cannot even begin to imagine that it would be easy – and it would have to end up with you challenging a lot of your own views, but it would be worth it.

    The trick has to be to present “gender roles” as essentially “dress-up” — something you do (when you choose) as opposed to something you are. Teaching a girl, for example, how to do knock-em-dead hair and makeup, but at the same time teaching them that it is something you do when you want, for a party or a date, but not for a soccer game or rearranging furniture. Or a boy that he needs to be functional in the kitchen and laundry as well as wherever else he finds himself.

35. I’m with Thomas here. What exactly do you mean when you say you want a “wife” who is “fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered womanhood”?

    What the hell is “traditional gendered womanhood” other than subservience?

36. I consider traditional concepts of gender to be destroyed, social constructions that, if imposed, limit human freedom. And yet, when I think about raising children (Mikey wants to be a daddy someday), I am hopeful for a wife fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered womanhood (just as I think I am fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered manhood). What’s going on?

    Translation: “I like all that radical feminist stuff in theory, but in practice I’d really like my wife to shave her legs and wear high heels and let me be The Man of the house even if it’s never explicitly stated that way.”

37. What the hell is “traditional gendered womanhood” other than subservience?

    Exactly. Sounds like this guy is very conflicted about his true desires and what he thinks he should desire.

38. I would argue that, at least as of when I was growing up, we are so far from getting past patriarchal gender roles that boys, as a matter of survival, need to be able to comfortably adopt them in certain situations. It is amazing the degree to which, as a boy, you are told “be a man”, etc. — and a boy who transgresses these norms is a “sissy” (which is even “worse” according to a child’s peers than a girl being a “tomboy”, nu?).

    As someone who had a very hard time growing up due to an impaired ability to comfortably adopt patriarchal male gender roles, I can only add my voice to agree with this. Back in my school days I was skinny, small, bookish, quiet, unathletic. In Texas. I didn’t (and still don’t) like football. I knew better than to wear girl clothes, but I always envied the cisgirls around me (it wasn’t until later that I knew about the way girls were expected to dress was part of their own oppression, all I knew then was they got to wear pretty dresses and I didn’t).

    It wasn’t for lack of trying. My grandmother in particular was constantly working to get me to look more masculine, to little effect.

    I’m not saying that every boy who has trouble conforming to the Patriarchy-Approved Gender Role for Boys™ is transgendered — far from it! But even boys who know what the Patriarchy-Approved Gender Role for Boys™ is will sometimes be unable, for various reasons, to conform to it. The only advice I have for parents is to not make it worse. This means not only not punishing, mocking, or belittling your child for being who he is and acting accordingly when he’s at home, but also being wary about interfering at school. I got beat up more after my mom and grandparents complained to the school and the bullies were told to cut it out. They meant well, but it had the opposite effect.

    It’s hard — of course you want to protect your child, but you can’t always be there. Tell him that you love him, that you think he’s perfectly fine the way he is, and that you’re sorry that other people don’t. Be a safe haven.

39. It’s hard — of course you want to protect your child, but you can’t always be there. Tell him that you love him, that you think he’s perfectly fine the way he is, and that you’re sorry that other people don’t. Be a safe haven.

    Wise words.

    Bitch PhD had a good post on painting her son’s nails some months ago, I remember thinking, maybe posting “This is a good mom.”

40. My parents had a traditional division of labor, but worked actively to ensure their children had more options. They were largely sucessful. While this is very good for me as a partnered adult, I think the point on the Nice Guy side track is accurate as well. At least my own personal issues with Nice Guyness is attributable to my own insecurities about lacking traditional male interest. Try talking gardening sometime with a teenage girl and see how ambivalent her body language gets.

    Back to raising our own children, there is enough where we transgress the traditional, that I’m optimistic we can give our children the confidence to do so themselves. However, we do have many other traditional gender skills and interests, that I do worry about this too.

    Also, what Moira said. Be a safe haven.

41. Double-post. Damm the internets.

42. Translation: “I like all that radical feminist stuff in theory, but in practice I’d really like my wife to shave her legs and wear high heels and let me be The Man of the house even if it’s never explicitly stated that way.”

    Exactly.

43. afm – while I totally question Mikey’s motivations in wanting “a woman who is versed in traditional gender” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, if one can construe something out of it other than “I want my woman to do all the cooking and cleaning without complaint, and wear makeup”) – I would beg a little patience with the terminology associated with legal marital unions. For those of us who are (a) hetero, and (b) currently availing ourselves of the legal benefits of civil marriage that should be available to any couple that want them, it’s almost impossible to purge the words “husband” and “wife” from our lexicon when referring to ourselves. They are short words, and to those of us who aren’t living gender-assigned roles and gender-assigned duties, “wife” and “husband” mean nothing more than referring to the one with the flat hairy chest and penis, versus the one with breasts and vagina. I’m well aware that the root etymology assigns certain roles to “husband’ (e.g. “steward”) and “wife.” But we really haven’t the foggiest how else to refer to ourselves. Hello this is my…partner? Spouse? Heck even some of my gay male friends joks about “Husband Hunting.”

    I guess this hearkens back to the old question of whether a traditionally biased-in-practice institution like marriage can either be revolutionized to mean whatever its constituents decide to make of it, or has to be scrapped entirely. I know how I feel about my particular union, but it’s also just my personal choice, and I understand and take into account the arguments against it.

44. Wishy Washy, my doctor refers to the man she’s married to as her partner, always. It’s fine to use that if you don’t want to use a gendered word to refer to your spouse.

45. Wow, what the hell kind of crap is this? So, let me get this straight–you want a subservient wife so your kids will be exposed to “traditional gender roles”, as if evidence and practice of those roles were not all over the damn place anyway? What makes you think the only way your kids will know about traditional gender roles is if their parents demonstrate them? Do you happen to own a television? Have you ever read a book, seen a movie, read a magazine? Been to school? Been outside your house?

    Also: “why remain fluent in the language and practice of an antique and offensive conception of gender?”

    Why indeed? And what was this post supposed to accomplish? Isn’t this the sort of fluff that should be confined to one’s LiveJournal?

46. Our way-past-gender society? I don’t get it. Is this supposed to be satire?

47. I’m going to direct you back to the post five down from this one:

    Read. Rinse. Repeat.

48. “And what if” this and “what if” that… and “what if an asteroid falls on me???”

    Sigh… Mikey, you’re WAY over-thinking the entire thing. Life’s not that damned complicated. Just find someone who you can talk to and who you care about, be honest with each other, and if you DO have kiddos, don’t sweat it if they don’t come with a manual. Life is not “gender perfect”; life is a process. Be honest and do your best.

    And when in doubt, raise a puppy first…

49. How about considering teaching your children to live on their own and be self sufficient for a good long time after they’ve left the nest? Wouldn’t they be better off if they each knew how to:

    Prepare decent meals (no take out or frozen pot pies), clean out laundry stains, fix the toilet, clean the gutters, prepare their own taxes, make sound financial investments, install an electrical outlet, kill roaches with a shoe or capture them in a jar and release (whichever floats your boat), create a home, paint a room, appreciate some form of art, etc.

    “Traditional gender roles” be damned. Develop people with character, not caricatures.

50. How about considering teaching your children to live on their own and be self sufficient for a good long time after they’ve left the nest? Wouldn’t they be better off if they each knew how to:

    Prepare decent meals (no take out or frozen pot pies), clean out laundry stains, fix the toilet, clean the gutters, prepare their own taxes, make sound financial investments, install an electrical outlet, kill roaches with a shoe or capture them in a jar and release (whichever floats your boat), create a home, paint a room, appreciate some form of art, etc.

    “Traditional gender roles” be damned. Develop people with character, not caricatures.

51. I would contest the idea that Nice Guy-ness has anything to do with failing to adopt traditional gender roles. If anything, it’s the typical Nice Guy attachment to old-fashioned notions of chivalry that prevents him from recognize women as human beings to be engaged as equals, rather than prizes awarded to the deserving

    I think Nice Guys do fail to (properly) adopt their traditional gender role, and then most of their “problems” with women come about because a Nice Guy expects women to be traditionally gendered and expects these women to react to him as though he were the exemplar of all that is (traditionally) male, which he isn’t. This in no way excuses Nice Guys for being whiny and feeling entitled.

    Like some others, I would like a clarification of the post. The first sentence, in its convoluted way, says that “traditional concepts of gender” have been destroyed. I guess I missed something.

52. Kill the roaches. The only purpose they serve (me) is as cat toys. And then my darling clever beautiful children get bored when their toy breaks and they leave it in the middle of the floor to pick up the pieces.

    Anatolia, it’s a good list.

53. why remain fluent in the language and practice of an antique and offensive conception of gender?

    Assuming that the patriarchy is, in some sense, our enemy, shouldn’t we know our enemy?

    One expects “I shouldn’t know my enemy, ’cause for me to speak in their language is for me to be on their side” thinking from the right, but it’s disappointing when lefties do it, dontcha think? Certainly just ’cause you can speak a language and you teach your kids a language, doesn’t mean you or your kids are adopting the values of that language. My parents taught my brother and I the language of fundie Christians — does that mean they were trying to raise fundie Christians or good Jewish kids who wouldn’t be swayed by fundie Christian arguments?

    Perhaps I’m misreading the original question of this thread, but it does seem that part of what Mikey’s getting at is “if I have a daughter, will we be able to make her aware of what gender roles she’ll be expected to fulfill”. ‘Cause, kids are, alas, expected to play certain roles, and even those of us who oppose those roles need to fully speak the language of those roles in order to teach our kids how to navigate situations that might arise.

    *

    my parents had a traditional division of labor, but worked actively to ensure their children had more options. They were largely sucessful. While this is very good for me as a partnered adult, I think the point on the Nice Guy side track is accurate as well. At least my own personal issues with Nice Guyness is attributable to my own insecurities about lacking traditional male interest. Try talking gardening sometime with a teenage girl and see how ambivalent her body language gets. – Ron O.

    FWIW, this could describe my upbringing (traditional division of labor parents who actively opposed certain gender roles — e.g., don’t get my mom started on dressing girls up in pink or “boys will be boys” as an excuse …) and myself to a tee (substituting “cooking” or “fashion” for “gardening” — I don’t have a green thumb whatsoever).

54. Raising Children in Our Way-Past-Gender Society.

    The title is my main problem with this post; our society isn’t even close to being “way past gender.”

55. Subservience is one type of traditional, gendered womanhood, but it’s not the only one. Looking at me, I embody traditional, gendered, womanliness – I wear dresses and make-up, I have long hair, I wear delicate jewelry, etc. If you talk to me, you get a different story. I do not lower my voice, I am a direct communicator, I disagree in plain terms, I look people in the eye and do not tilt my head. I’m not the only woman I’ve met who has these characteristics, either. I’ve also met stone butches who are, maybe not subservient, but are accomodating and don’t make direct statements or requests. Who is the more traditionally gendered woman?

56. Seems like the “expand or prohibit?” question which often pops up in feminism.

    This post appears to be suggesting that he wants his kids to be able to adopt traditional gender roles if they so choose, therefore enhancing their total choices (I’m tipped off to this by the word “menu”).

    However, he seems to be pretty clear that he would prefer that they not go there.

    It’s a difficult situation–I’m facing it myself, as I’ve written in my various “Raising Feminist Daughters” posts on my blog. I hate gendered shit–but does that mean I should be trying to give them alternatives to traditional gender roles (expand) or trying to keep them from wearing pink dresses (prohibit)?

    Is telling them they shouldn’t be math-hating cheerleaders more, or less, empowering? And so on.

    I still haven’t gotten clear on whether my goal is to reject gender roles, or provide alternatives to gender roles. Rejection seems like it might work better (this would be good) but it’s merely exchanging one limit for another (bad, at least IMO). Alternatives give wider limits (good) but suggest that gender roles are OK (not so good.)

    I can see where he’s a tad confused. I just don’t think the post is all that clear.

57. I’m in my first trimester, with my first kid, and so this whole discussion of how to raise a kid without grotesqueries of gender norming stomping down upon them at all times hits rather close to home. I’d like to give my kids possibilities — if my boy wants to be a ballet dancer or my girl wants to be an astronaut, I want to let them explore what interests them (and, truth be told, I think I might have an easier way with that combination than if the interests and the sex of the kid are overly stereotypically aligned). I’m just not sure how to give them that freedom in a world where baby girl clothes are pink and flowery and boy clothes are blue and transportation-oriented (with the awkward neuter in yellow or green with zoo animals hanging in the background with an embattled sigh). It’s hard not to see this stuff in a zero sum light.

    My (male) spouse and I, despite growing up in houses where traditional norms were supported, even when they weren’t followed, are an odd mix of traditional and anti-traditional ourselves. Having both been dorks growing up, each of us has come out of that period of our lives with a different point of view that colors how we feel about our kid following gender norms. He wants our kid to be accepted, so he feels more comfortable with conformity. I want our kid to be able to stand up to bullying and think for itself, so I want to support deviations when they exist. I’m sure he’ll lose some battles and I’ll lose others — such is the way of co-parenting — but I’ll be sad if our kid feels pressured by us to live up to a standard that will, to one extent or another, disserve the kid forever.

58. This has to be satire.

59. I’m just not sure how to give them that freedom in a world where baby girl clothes are pink and flowery and boy clothes are blue and transportation-oriented

    The one piece of advice I’d give is to start young. Don’t be afraid to nudge the kid in the direction you’d like it to wind up really early in the going.

    I see a lot of parents who take a passive approach when their kids’ attitudes are getting formed, and then when they don’t like how things turn out they start trying to alter things, and that turns into a huge struggle. If you take the initiative, a lot of those struggles won’t materialize.

    Hate the Wiggles? Introduce your kid to the music you do like while she’s still in the crib. Want your kid to share? Make it clear that that’s an expectation from well before she learns the word. Don’t want your daughter to be obsessed with pink? Tell her early and often that your favorite color is blue — chances are she’ll mimic you. And if she does, reinforce it — let her pick what color to paint her room, or what color outfit to buy for a special occasion, or what color sheets or blanket to sleep with, or even what color construction paper you’re going to put her name up on the wall in.

    In my experience, you’ve got a pretty short window before your kid’s peers start having a huge influence. Make the most of that window.

60. Re: holding doors and dates.

    I am a 19-year-old female college student. I hold doors for everyone when I go through first — even middle-aged men, who sometimes refuse to go through. The traditional acts of “chivalry” should be provided to everyone or to no one. Don’t hold a door for me because I have breasts, hold it because I am a fellow human being, because I’m carrying something, because I look tired, because you want to be nice, because it’s a moment of connection with someone you don’t know.

    Similarly, offer to pay when you’re eating with someone you like. Friends treat friends. I went out to dinner with one of my male friends last winter, and he didn’t have any cash. He asked me to wait while he went to the ATM, but I paid for him instead, and he seemed shocked. He even wrote me an e-mail thanking me profusely and saying how nice it was. But my male friends pay for me all the time, even when I do have cash on hand. And yeah, it’s nice — I like it when people pay for me, or hold a door for me, or stand aside and let me go first, or give me a chair, but I want them to do it because I’m a fellow human being or because they like me personally, not because of my biology.

    As for dates and the traditional masculinity of dating — no one I know dates. Period. This is from 13 years of co-ed private school and a year of the “Gay Ivy,” and no one dates. People hang out together, sometimes even one-on-one, but nobody goes on dates. There simply isn’t a culture of dating. Occasionally people will go out to dinner one-on-one, but among my circle of friends it’s much more likely that we’re doing it because we have some particular issue to discuss (logistic or philosophical) and want to have time to do it. My girlfriend and I had been sleeping together for more than a month the first time we…oh, wait, I lie. We were going to go see a play together and be very romantic, but we ended up arguing about Nietzsche with three other people instead. We’ve actually never been on a date.

    The committed couples I know arose out of friendships and shared activities; the non-committed couples hook up but don’t date.

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62. I agree with Lesbia’s Sparrow (above) — holding a door open for someone is more about not wanting to let is swing shut in their face as I pass through. It is just common courtesy, at least in my case.

    I realize that I’m reading a bit into what he’s saying, but to me the nutmeat of Mikey’s concerns are the consequences straying from the “standard” gender roles will have on his children vis a vis the restrictions imposed by adhering to them. After all, the problem isn’t that we have some concept of traditional gender roles, specifically, but that those roles are designed to limit those who adhere to them and stigmatize those who don’t.

    Maybe I’m missing the point, but I think it’d be the best of both worlds if we could have some kind of traditions to use as guidelines while also maintaining the tolerance to accept people finding their own interperations.

63. Medicine Man —

    I was talking not just about that little push when you’ve already gone through the door so it won’t smack someone — I consider that basic human decency required of anyone — but the full-fledged holding the door open and standing aside for someone else to go through. It’s amazing how few people do that; I make it a point whenever I enter somewhere with one person or a small group. Other people my age smile and say thank you, and grown women do the same, but men out of their college years tend to be affronted and insulted to see a “little girl” holding the door for them.

    It’s pretty hilarious.

64. This is to Moira,

    Is your name in reference to “the handmaid’s tale?” I read the postings here often and every time I notice your name I wonder about it.

65. As for dates and the traditional masculinity of dating — no one I know dates. Period. This is from 13 years of co-ed private school and a year of the “Gay Ivy,” and no one dates. People hang out together, sometimes even one-on-one, but nobody goes on dates. There simply isn’t a culture of dating. – Lesbia’s Sparrow

    If anybody’s still ’round here, perhaps I should clarify the “dating culture” where I went to school. Nobody dated as my parents, e.g., knew dating — where you’d go out on dates with almost anybody who asked you (or whomever would accept your invite) and then at some point you’d “go steady”, etc. Instead, people, from my parents’ point of view, did it backward — they’d get to know each other in larger social situations (well enough to have some idea of compatibility but not well enough that they’d be “stuck in the friend zone”), then a guy would ask a girl out, and they’d skip to what my parents would call “going steady” before dating.

    It may have looked to some like a “hook-up culture” rather than a “dating culture”, but the dynamic had little to do with hooking up, as you went straight to a rather committed relationship. The lack of dating reflected a bias of upbringing — many of my dorm-mates/classmates came from cultures that viewed Western-style dating with suspicion: “to date is to marry” was the watchward of many of their parents.

    So what went on, while it may have appeared to grown-ups all too ready to get the vapors about “what are the kids doing these days” as “hooking up”, was actually quite traditional — within a social grouping, boys would court/woo girls. And the difference between “that creep”, “my boyfriend” and “I would have gone out with you, ya know” was not, in any discernable way how the girl responded to the courtship (if her body language was different to “my boyfriend” and “I would have gone out with you” vs. “that creep”, the difference was extremely subtle) — it was that she liked “my boyfriend” and she like “I would have gone out with you”, but she didn’t like “that creep” while “my boyfriend” and “that creep” interpreted her coyness as interest whereas “I would have gone out with you” felt that coyness as a lack of interest.

    Of course, the kind of guy that would optimistically interpret coyness was not necessarily a good boyfriend and the kind of gal who was so coy was not necessarily a good girlfriend (although complaining about significant others seemed to be for many of my dorm-mates a social ritual and one of the benefits of having a significant other): e.g., many of my lady friends would complain about how obsessed with games their boyfriends were even though, the way they “dated” (or didn’t date), only a guy with the kind of personality to obsessively play games would have been able to woo someone that coy.

    But even if what happened was not dating as my parents knew it and looked like hooking up, it was, if anything, more based on traditional sex roles (the man persuing the woman and the woman being completely coy) than the dating of my parents’ generation was.

66. I’m just not sure how to give them that freedom in a world where baby girl clothes are pink and flowery and boy clothes are blue and transportation-oriented

    There’s always green, yellow, orange and purple, which has the added benefit of confusing other people, who get very antsy when the sex of a child is not advertised by its clothing.

67. DAS:

    I would argue that, at least as of when I was growing up, we are so far from getting past patriarchal gender roles that boys, as a matter of survival, need to be able to comfortably adopt them in certain situations. It is amazing the degree to which, as a boy, you are told “be a man”, etc. — and a boy who transgresses these norms is a “sissy” (which is even “worse” according to a child’s peers than a girl being a “tomboy”, nu?).

    But every sissy knows that it’s worse to be a girl, all thanks to you’re uber masculinity hierarchy. Heaven forbid if some boy out there grows up as weak as a girl. [/sarcasm]

    And really, DAS, who gives a rat’s ass about your dating life?

    As for Mikey: Don’t have kids.

68. lyapo, it’s not from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s just my first name. Not so exciting, I’m afraid. 🙂

69. There’s always green, yellow, orange and purple, which has the added benefit of confusing other people, who get very antsy when the sex of a child is not advertised by its clothing.

    I purely hate the little pink stick-on bows or headbands that people put on newborns to advertise It’s A Girl Really! It’s an infant. How can it have gender yet?

70. Q Grrl: To be fair, DAS was responding to my point about changing patterns of dating, not spouting off out of the blue.

71. I was responding more to DAS’ insistence that unless rigid masculinity is embraced, one’s chances of getting laid are drastically reduced.

72. DAS, a lack of confidence will prevent almost anyone from getting laid, and there is no magical codex to reading gender performance that will fix that. “I would’ve dated you” guy didn’t have the backbone to ask the question.

    As for traditional gender presentation getting one laid, that … has not been my experience. People’s preferences cannot be simply assumed from their own gender performance, and can be surprisingly flexible.

73. This whole “Nice Guys Finish Last” concept has been floating around for quite a while, and I still don’t buy it. Especially since the concept is used by Nice Guys who bring it up whenever they feel they’re not getting enough sex. Male sexual frustration is still, it seems, the fault of the woman (and feminism).

74. There’s always green, yellow, orange and purple, which has the added benefit of confusing other people, who get very antsy when the sex of a child is not advertised by its clothing.

    Yes, of course. When we painted the room that we designated long ago as the room we would use for a nursery, we painted it bright yellow, and now that I get a chance to decorate it, I’m going to paint giant dots in many colors (including blue AND pink! or at least aqua and magenta…). Shapes and bright colors are supposed to be stimulating, so I don’t get the whole pastel thing anyway (also: I fucking hate all pastel colors).

    The clothing and decor thing was a silly example, but really my quandary regards how much my “nudging” makes it hard for my kid to be a part of the world, a world I consider in serious need of change. I have some ideas now, and I’m sure I’ll figure more things out when I have the actual kid and it starts exhibiting a personality to which I can be responsive. I guess, even though I think Mikey’s missing the point, that there is a valuable discussion to be had about teaching pro-all-human values in a world that is dehumanizing. I don’t want to put my kid in the same situation (albeit with the opposing outlook) as those fundy nutbar parents who home school their kids and inculcate in them an alternative universe of anti-evolution, anti-feminist, anti-critical-thinking world view that makes them completely unable to function as anything other than laughingstocks outside of their bubblicious cluster of other cultified folk. But I feel like my awareness of the pervasive hatred of women, the wildly punitive nature of straying from gender norms, would require a fairly radical approach. So how radical should I be? How radical can I be? These are my questions, and I’ll have to figure them out for myself. But it would be awesome to hear perspectives on this from people who have tried and get a sense as to what they felt they did well or not well.

75. My partner and I use “partner” and “spouse” as a matter of course. Nobody who knows me would call me a wife. Of course, the fact that we married at all is still an issue, but we do what we can.

    As for children, I refuse to reproduce for environmental reasons, but we often talked about little Jordan, whose biological sex would be a secret. It would be such a struggle, but imagine how the child could grow without those ridiculous gender expectations. You could do the same with an Erin.

76. TO THE MODS: OK, I wanted to email Feministe about this yesterday (but the email is gone, or at least I can’t find it) and since we’re talking about kids and appearances, and since I’m hoping one of the Feministe folks is reading this… can you make feministe clothing in kids’ sizes? Please? I would SO get them for my kids. i’d even buy some sort of cheesy “future feminist” or “feminist in training” ones. And I’d get them for my nieces and nephews too.

    (sorry to communicate through the moderation queue. You don’t need to approve the post, of course, as it’s a bit OT… is there a way to contact someone via email? I have another question as well)

77. Sailorman- The e-mail address is feministe -at – gmail -dot- com. (It’s in the individual blogger profiles.)

78. thx, kirsten!

79. test post (ignore this please)

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