posted
Look, given present-day standards of dress I can step into a bar and know pretty well with a single look which of the people inside are ones I might want to get involved with. If clothing norms were uniform between the sexes, that would not be as easy.
There is also just the fact that people who have things in common like to dress similarly. Nerds dress like other nerds, bros dress like other bros, etc. I don't see anything problematic about this, nor about the observation that women have something in common that they don't share in common with men. The differences in dress norms are no more problematic than other differences in dress norms across different social categories.
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I'm around genderqueer and trans* presenting people all the time and I honestly would never expect that this would become a problem.
I mean, I know that people would have problems with it because they're legitimately afraid of the reduction of standardized gender roles and enforced presentation but it has literally never caused a problem, not even a remote one, for me
quote:There is also just the fact that people who have things in common like to dress similarly. Nerds dress like other nerds, bros dress like other bros, etc. I don't see anything problematic about this
Is it problematic if a bro decides he'd like to ditch the varsity shirt or the sleeveless t in place of some dress slacks and a plaid shirt that day, and then is brought in to the principal's office and told that it's really rather inappropriate of them to not dress like a bro is supposed to dress? That they need to dress more appropriately or they will receive further disciplinary action? The parallel does not quite work. What makes it problematic is not about choice, it's about when deviance from an artificial social expectation of dress (mainly by and for the comfort of men) becomes a socially prosecuted deviance.
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quote:it is, in its own way. It's abstract and ultimately absurd even to begin with, cordoning off entire color groups as 'for girls' colors.
More absurd than cordoning off braids as 'for girls'? If it doesn't harm or disadvantage anyone, who cares? [/QB]
It certainly harms families who would prefer their second child of a difference gender played with their first-born's toys.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: If clothing norms were uniform between the sexes, that would not be as easy.
Is that really a problem though? In other words, is the fact that people won't be able to make fast and superficial decisions about who they should hit on really a disadvantage for society or an advantage?
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quote:braids just for girls is also somewhat abstract and absurd!
I don't actually think it is. We need convenient ways of telling the genders apart, not least because the vast majority of us are only or primarily attracted to one gender. Gendered differences in hairstyles and clothing choices make this very easy. Without them, life and especially dating would be much more awkward.
Have you ever had hair that would go past your nipples? Serious question.
One of my former co-workers (a man in his early 30s) decided he wanted to go back to having long hair from his military buzz cut. This person had no qualms about wearing a "utilikilt", so I guess he felt less constrained by gender roles than most folk. At a certain point, he started wearing his hair in low pigtails, which was kind of weird, as a 30 year old guy. But, I realized that I've used the style as an adult when my hair was just too short for a single ponytail, but too long not to put back without it seriously annoying me.
Likewise, if your hair is long enough, and you are bad about getting the ends trimmed, you will find that braids are INCREDIBLY practical. And once it reaches a certain length, absolutely essential.
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I've been trying to imagine scenarios in which my requiring more than a cursory glance to determine the gender of everyone at a bar would be an actual issue, and haven't come up with a non-hilarious one yet.
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Actually, I'm trying to imagine a world or at least a society where one's choice of clothing and hairstyle was more (or even much more) fundamentally a reflection of themselves versus 'themselves in the framework of their gender socialization'. It's so far out of our experience that I can't, really, but still.
Would that girl in the bar you see who attracts your attention have a scarlet Mohawk if she hadn't been raised to think it was deeply objectionable? Would the dude you see decide it was past time to see what all the fuss was about makeup? Wouldn't that be interesting? Well truly I don't know. But I think it might be.
Now as for the utility of needing to discern genders at a glance-at-a-distance...erm. Well, let me pose your question back to you: what is the harm in not being able to tell if someone is a man or a woman from across a crowded room?
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quote:Is it problematic if a bro decides he'd like to ditch the varsity shirt or the sleeveless t in place of some dress slacks and a plaid shirt that day, and then is brought in to the principal's office and told that it's really rather inappropriate of them to not dress like a bro is supposed to dress? That they need to dress more appropriately or they will receive further disciplinary action? The parallel does not quite work. What makes it problematic is not about choice, it's about when deviance from an artificial social expectation of dress (mainly by and for the comfort of men) becomes a socially prosecuted deviance.
Obviously I have a problem with social sanctions against deviance. But social sanctions are a distinct phenomenon from marketing and media portrayals. Note that there are also marketing and media portrayals reinforcing the prevailing styles of dress for bros. That works fine, because there aren't corresponding social sanctions for bros who break with the convention.
quote:Now as for the utility of needing to discern genders at a glance-at-a-distance...erm. Well, let me pose your question back to you: what is the harm in not being able to tell if someone is a man or a woman from across a crowded room?
I'll let this question stand in for similar ones from Tom and Mucus... it's just a question of minor convenience, in terms of knowing more easily who to approach or check out. Not a huge deal, but on the other hand I see no harm being done by the conventions to outweigh it.
quote:Have you ever had hair that would go past your nipples? Serious question.
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Careful, Destineer. I am starting to rethink my rethinking of my opinion that you are shallow!
Social sanctions are not at all distinct from marketing and media portrayals. Marketing and media are a big part of how we determine what is and what is quite often translates to how things should be.
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quote:I'll let this question stand in for similar ones from Tom and Mucus... it's just a question of minor convenience, in terms of knowing more easily who to approach or check out. Not a huge deal, but on the other hand I see no harm being done by the conventions to outweigh it.
Your objection to criticisms of gendered marketing of color choices was 'what's the harm if girls are taught to like pink?' It was pointed out that this is hardly the only thing that's ever done. It more or less is universally accompanied by other gendered marketing characteristics. Don't see any pink GI Joes for example, and I can't recall any camouflage My Little Ponies.
That seems like a shade past 'minor inconvenience', but it was not enough to make a valid criticism in your eyes. So...how then is the 'inconvenience' of not being able to tell at a glance even if you're near-sighted whether someone is male or female from a distance a valid justification?
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Well, it's pretty inconvenient when going to a singles party and trying to determine if there are enough ladies in the room to justify mingling or if one should bounce. Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Social sanctions are not at all distinct from marketing and media portrayals. Marketing and media are a big part of how we determine what is and what is quite often translates to how things should be.
Marketing doesn't by itself serve to punish people who don't succumb to the marketing. That's what I meant when I said marketing is not the same as social sanctions. I can tell you how things should be all I want, but it becomes much more problematic if I set down bad consequences for you if you don't act the way I say you should.
quote:Your objection to criticisms of gendered marketing of color choices was 'what's the harm if girls are taught to like pink?'
That was my initial more flippant point, yes, and at that time I was literally only talking about complaints about pink. Since then I've raised a couple of other more serious objections, including the chicken and the egg objection and (in response to Sam) pointing out that demographic marketing is not so problematic if it's not accompanied by social punishment for those who don't conform. The problem isn't the marketing, or the fact that there are norms. It's the fact that the norms are commonly treated as things to be enforced, unlike the norms about how nerdy people dress.
quote:That seems like a shade past 'minor inconvenience', but it was not enough to make a valid criticism in your eyes. So...how then is the 'inconvenience' of not being able to tell at a glance even if you're near-sighted whether someone is male or female from a distance a valid justification?
I don't think it's justified, it's mostly just arbitrary. It wouldn't be bad if it were different. I'm just saying that the way it is now isn't bad either, and serves at least some minor useful functions.
Anyway, it would be well on its way to being a valid criticism if someone could actually show that the marketing plays a major role in socializing people, as opposed to being a scheme to make money off kids who have already internalized gender norms through other channels.
I think the blaming of gendered marketing for the unfortunate expectations placed on girls and women is exactly the sort of poorly supported pop psych that Sam and I were talking about earlier.
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I also think there's a question of artistic expression in the neighborhood of what we're discussing.
Did Clockwork Orange have morally problematic effects when it was made? Yes it did, there were several copycat crimes. Does that make it bad that the movie exists? Does it mean that the movie shouldn't have been made or that it was bad of Kubrick to make it? No, it was a great artistic achievement. And even if it wasn't so great, it's still important for artists to be able to follow their vision without being shouted down or silenced by social pressure.
Now, not all marketing involves what I'd call art, but some certainly does. The TV shows used to market toys like My Little Pony, Transformers and GI Joe, for example, are absolutely in the domain of art and should be accorded the same basic regard as Clockwork Orange--even if they have problematic consequences. In my opinion, at least.
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quote:I think the blaming of gendered marketing for the unfortunate expectations placed on girls and women is exactly the sort of poorly supported pop psych that Sam and I were talking about earlier.
The statement and general theory observing how gendered marketing is a significant force in socially determining 'appropriate' or approved non-deviant gender determinant roles in a society is very far from pop psych. It's been studied in very interesting detail, down to figuring out what general word associations exist across items and literature marketed to girls and boys. For instance, products marketed to girls is vastly more likely to involve the message, direct or implicit, that you buy things to make yourself pretty, but vastly less likely to involve the message that it is fun do design, build, or innovate things.
Gender marketing pigeonholes our children into specific roles and behaviors. We know this. Since marketing is a very prominent and pervasive force in a capitalistic society, obviously, it becomes a prominent and pervasive force that socializes kids to know what is 'for' their gender.
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My Little Ponies right now aren't quite as relevant to what I was saying. Though I should note that a single example ever (and privately created deviantart stuff hardly counts) doesn't really challenge.
As for GI Joes...well. One of them was a woman. I'm honestly not sure if this is just funning around or what.
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quote:It's been studied in very interesting detail, down to figuring out what general word associations exist across items and literature marketed to girls and boys. For instance, products marketed to girls is vastly more likely to involve the message, direct or implicit, that you buy things to make yourself pretty, but vastly less likely to involve the message that it is fun do design, build, or innovate things.
I agree that those associations are there in the media, absolutely. What I think remains poorly understood is what effects the associations have on the people who consume the media.
Just noting that media portrays the home as the place for women will not by itself tell you whether this media portrayal causes women to stay in the home, or whether it's being portrayed that way because women are caused to stay in the home for other reasons. Like for example whatever reasons kept women in the home before there was mass marketing, or even before there was such a thing as contemporary capitalism.
quote:Gender marketing pigeonholes our children into specific roles and behaviors. We know this. Since marketing is a very prominent and pervasive force in a capitalistic society, obviously, it becomes a prominent and pervasive force that socializes kids to know what is 'for' their gender.
If life imitates marketing, media and toys to the extent you suggest, there should be all sorts of correlations that just don't exist. For example, kids who play with toy guns at an early age should be more violent. Turns out they aren't. (Even if they were, that wouldn't by itself show causation, but it's interesting that there's not even a correlation.)
So why should we necessarily expect that (for example) playing with baby dolls causes girls to become stereotypically motherly?
It's possible that it does, but I just don't see why we should assume it does without specific evidence of causation.
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Destineer, it isn't poorly understood. There are whole departments in most universities that study exactly the effects media has on people. We give advanced degrees on that very thing. Of course, individuals can have a poor understanding of such things but that isn't because the information isn't out there.
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quote:Commentators often point toward media influence when they try to explain contemporary gender inequality. Theories of media alert us that we must always consider reciprocal causal processes. While any individual may appear only to be the object of media influence, the content and impact of media depend greatly on the existing culture and social structure. The relationship of the media to the collective market effect of consumers may be compared to the relationship between elected public officials and voters. Also, consumers have considerable freedom to choose which media outlets to give their attention and people selectively interpret and judge the media to which they are exposed. All of this makes the relationship between what is portrayed in the media and what occur in the "real" world rather complex.
In sum, it is poorly understood.
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I don't get "poorly understood" from that quote at all.
I read it as saying the following:
People blame the media for gender equality, but our theories make us ask if people have an effect on the media. It looks like any one person is just influenced by what the media says, but what the media says depends on the culture that makes it. Analogy: people influence the media like they influence politics by voting. They can also change the channel. They also judge what they see. Therefore it's complicated.
They are advertising for a class! That it can be taught, means someone has to understand it, or at least decide they are going to read and write papers on it.
Now, I didn't take the step of actually doing the course reading, but I disagree. But I don't think that the fact that people can choose to turn off the TV (or watch something other than Fox News) means that they are immune from hearing a message over and over, and eventually internalizing it, or judging parts of it doesn't mean that other things are subtly influencing them without their notice. That's why the Daily Show LOVES to rattle off clip after clip of Republican congressmen repeating the same line over and over in the media. Death panels! Death panels! Death panels!
I haven't read Speaker in a while, but there's a quote about questioning everything but what they truly believe.
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In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood. Also, the inclusion of the Dahlgren reading "Mass media: Introduction and schools of thought" on that syllabus suggests that there are competing theories about media influence and no clear front runner (I can't get access to the whole article, unfortunately). That's to be expected, it's true all over the place in sociology. Social science is very hard.
ETA:
quote: They are advertising for a class! That it can be taught, means someone has to understand it, or at least decide they are going to read and write papers on it.
People read and write papers about what might have caused the big bang, but no one knows the answer. There are competing hypotheses. My sense is that that's the case as well with the actual good science surrounding marketing and its causal relationship with culture.
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It really doesn't mean that. Complicated means complicated. It means that there is a lot to understand.
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The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
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quote:In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood.
No, in the social sciences themselves, "poorly understood" equates to poorly understood.
In layman interpretations of social sciences, however, "complicated" is made to mean any one of a number of things at the discretion of an individual's pre-existing confidence in social sciences as an institution.
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quote:Originally posted by Geraine: The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens? Well, maybe. But if that's the case, then frankly the experiment hasn't been run yet, whereas we've got an entire species constantly running a contrary experiment.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I will posit that women are underrepresented in marketing organizations. Apple would probably not have named their big product with a name similar to something women stick in their underwear if there were more women in upper level management.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood. Also, the inclusion of the Dahlgren reading "Mass media: Introduction and schools of thought" on that syllabus suggests that there are competing theories about media influence and no clear front runner (I can't get access to the whole article, unfortunately). That's to be expected, it's true all over the place in sociology. Social science is very hard.
ETA:
quote: They are advertising for a class! That it can be taught, means someone has to understand it, or at least decide they are going to read and write papers on it.
People read and write papers about what might have caused the big bang, but no one knows the answer. There are competing hypotheses. My sense is that that's the case as well with the actual good science surrounding marketing and its causal relationship with culture.
It's been years since I've taken a cosmology class but 1. I do not recall any alternative hypothesis to the Big Bang that was presented. 2. The reasoning behind the Big Bang is clearly motivated from the expansion of the universe. While everything that came before the Big Bang is not well known, what had to have happened INFINITESIMAL PIECES OF A SECOND after is well understood and model-able, such as how long it took it for atoms to form 3. Science is actually quite comfortable with not knowing the answer to things, but having an explanation that at least matches everything that people can see. 4. There are competing schools of how economics works too. Dos that mean it's completely incomprehensible at the level where no one can say anything concrete about the economy?
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quote:In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood.
No, in the social sciences themselves, "poorly understood" equates to poorly understood.
In layman interpretations of social sciences, however, "complicated" is made to mean any one of a number of things at the discretion of an individual's pre-existing confidence in social sciences as an institution.
This short review article, although relatively old (1997), also suggests that the evidence is mixed and in particular the arrow of cause and effect has not been well established.
quote:According to Van Evra, Repetti (1984) found no relationship between the amount of viewing time, and the amount of gender stereotyping in children. What Repetti did find, however, was that the amount of viewing was found to be negatively associated with stereotyping. Indeed, the more educational television watched, the lower the gender stereotype score tended to be. This could, however, be reflective of the parents who encourage their children to watch educational television. That is to say that in practice, their behaviours may be less gender stereotyped.
quote:Morgan's results were found to support the view that television does cultivate gender stereotypes, although he found the effects to be mainly in girls. The girls who watched greater amounts of television were found to be more likely to hold the opinion that women are less ambitious than men, and find their happiness among children. It was also reported that for girls, there existed a relationship between the amount of television watched and their subsequent educational aspirations. The ones who watched more television were the ones who, after the two year period, set their sights higher.
This is somewhat surprising given that the majority of women presented on television often tend to be seen in traditional women's occupations. It is possible that the heavy viewers, seeing the fairly limited roles of women, are more encouraged to want better for themselves. However, this is purely speculative, and more information needs to be available.
quote:This study has been criticised for failing to clarify the causal relationship between the amounts of television watched, and its effects. Childrens' television viewing has been found, in other studies, to increase with age, and McGhee and Frueh's study has also demonstrated that with age children tend to develop greater gender role beliefs.
The sources cited are all from good university presses.
As you should know from our previous discussions, I'm not dismissive of social science. I do think its conclusions have been misrepresented as univocal about these sorts of issues, when they are not. Activists who write about this stuff tend to cite one or two studies, leaving out the ones that don't fit their pet theories quite so well.
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quote:4. There are competing schools of how economics works too. Dos that mean it's completely incomprehensible at the level where no one can say anything concrete about the economy?
I think there are many areas of economics where, because of the mixed evidence and competing theories, we don't know much about the best way to set economic policy. That said, it also seems like some of the disagreement in economics is because of unresponsiveness to evidence; the Chicago School guys don't seem interested in empirical data that falsifies some aspects of their approach.
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quote:I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens?
Lest this be mistaken for my view, I would say no, it's not something that just happens. Almost certainly it's socially conditioned by some factors or other. I would just say that it's entirely possible that marketing plays an insignificant role in bringing about this socialization, changing how products are marketed would not fix the problem, and one would have to change other things about the culture in order to fix it.
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I stopped after the second time I read the word "God". Then I remembered why I don't visit Cosmology sites that are .coms. Sorry.
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That didn't take long. He'll probably still win his seat. The knuckleheads who elected him apparently believe raising the debt limit was Cantor's gross capitulation to Obama.
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I stopped after the second time I read the word "God". Then I remembered why I don't visit Cosmology sites that are .coms. Sorry.
The article was written by Sean Carroll, a Caltech physics prof who is an atheist. That section is just about new theories of cosmological origins.
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quote:Originally posted by Geraine: The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens? Well, maybe. But if that's the case, then frankly the experiment hasn't been run yet, whereas we've got an entire species constantly running a contrary experiment.
I'm not sure I agree with your example. In the past (I'd say) 15-20 years, men have become more and more concerned with how they look. During that time, marketing for men's clothing has also increased. 30-40 years ago, men wore Polo shirts, jeans, and suits. That was basically it.
I don't agree with the thought that "gender socialization" is some sort of way to indoctrinate or brain-wash people.
What would you suggest? Have every commercial for dresses show a man and a woman wearing a dress? Have a version of Barbie commercials that show a bunch of little boys playing with life size Barbie and wearing her dress and putting on make up?
Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls. Blaming it on society saying that they were brainwashed into thinking that way just doesn't make sense. I know there will always be exceptions, but making blanket statements just doesn't make sense.
The whole gender socialization mindset is why I think school age boys are so over diagnosed for ADHD. There is no such thing as "boys are more hyper," or "boys will be boys!" anymore. Now we treat it as a disorder and think we have to medicate.
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Men also didn't buy their own clothing 15-20 years ago. Their mothers did. Then their wives did. My mom buys all my dad's stuff. My older's sister husband wanted to know if my little sister's new job would get him a discount at J. Crew. Hence not a lot of marketing.
Guidos and the late 18th century (dandy) are two fantastic examples of straight men peacocking it up when their society lets them.
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If anything, schools were more strict, not less strict back in the day. ... teachers also could hit kids who were out of line. Not advocating that, but I don't think the requirements for good behavior in school have become more stringent.
And if you think 6 year old girls don't like to run around in circles like maniacs the very second they have nothing to do, you have never been to visit a Brownie troop.
quote:Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls.
What do you mean, "generally speaking?" Do you think this accounts for things like the ratio of men to women in mathematics or engineering? ADDITIONAL to answering that question, what DO you think women's 'different wiring' represents itself as?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:I'm not sure I agree with your example. In the past (I'd say) 15-20 years, men have become more and more concerned with how they look. During that time, marketing for men's clothing has also increased. 30-40 years ago, men wore Polo shirts, jeans, and suits. That was basically it.
Is this anywhere even remotely close to the focus women place on clothing (are taught, marketed to, and discouraged from not)? Of course it's not. Strangely, though, clothing focus on the genders has started to move more towards equivalence...with the gradual shifting of gender roles. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but the timing is peculiar.
I'm also not saying I think this is some heinous injustice, either. I'm just remarking on something that is peculiar-we all wear clothes.
quote:I don't agree with the thought that "gender socialization" is some sort of way to indoctrinate or brain-wash people.
You can disagree all you like, but gender socialization is unquestionably a form of indoctrination. It's just that word has some negative connotations.
quote:What would you suggest? Have every commercial for dresses show a man and a woman wearing a dress? Have a version of Barbie commercials that show a bunch of little boys playing with life size Barbie and wearing her dress and putting on make up?
Because absolutely what I was discussing was an argument for an immediate and absurd shift right this moment, Geraine. C'mon.
quote:Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls. Blaming it on society saying that they were brainwashed into thinking that way just doesn't make sense. I know there will always be exceptions, but making blanket statements just doesn't make sense.
You lose a little something from your argument when you use a blanket statement such as 'generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls' to attack a blanket statement, Geraine. Anyway, I have really no doubt that there are many behaviors and ways of thinking that are, intrinsically, more likely in one gender than another. We see that in more or less all animals (in fact I don't know of any that don't, but then that doesn't mean much), so why should humans be any different?
But it's hard to take seriously a statement casually dismissing the role socialization plays when as a society and throughout history we have spent a great deal of effort, sacrifice, time, and money in not only continuing such socialization (that supposedly is just innate, right?) but often times in quite ruthlessly suppressing those who step outside them. How long was it before women could vote, own property, have a right before the law not to be raped or sold, so on and so forth? On the other hand, to get very modern, how much longer will it be before no one sneers at a man who stays home and raises the family's children?
If we are simply wired differently, what's with all the effort into reinforcing this stuff?
quote:The whole gender socialization mindset is why I think school age boys are so over diagnosed for ADHD. There is no such thing as "boys are more hyper," or "boys will be boys!" anymore. Now we treat it as a disorder and think we have to medicate.
Is this a serious statement? Because I don't think either of us are anywhere near well informed enough at all to be talking credibly about if and why ADHD is overdiagnosed among anyone, much less a particular gender.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
not to mention that "boys will be boys" is a classic example of an awful and fully gendered excuse for behavior, and part of the continued cycle of excusing or permitting aggressive and unacceptable behavior in boys from an early age
when a parent is saying "boys will be boys" they're essentially saying "he gets to do that because he's a boy."
kids on both sides understand that lesson all too well, and that's the problem.
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Yeah, even supposing that to some extent aggression or bad behavior comes naturally, that's no reason to accommodate it (indeed, no reason not to treat it like a disorder if medication will help--cancer comes naturally too).
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Most of the times I've heard "boys will be boys" my first response was too interpret it as an insult, as a child or adult.
It clearly can be applicable to what Sam is saying, and I think its a dumb thing to ever say. But I think there are examples where its communicating something less harmful.
You can read it as "Look, this isnt the first time this has ever happened with him/them--it wont be the last. It's a problem. But if I get too frustrated with it now, I'm going to want to kill myself later."
Basically a gendered version of "shit happens" I'm being a little meticulous but i think thats different.
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The article was written by Sean Carroll, a Caltech physics prof who is an atheist. That section is just about new theories of cosmological origins.
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