Help me to help my three year old realise that girls aren't shit!

good or bad .. it's his father.
he certainly prefers to have a bad father rathen than being an orphan.

and by the way, are we sure the mother is so much better ? a hardcore feminist trying to dress his son in pink clothes and giving him dolls ? what's next ? the baby will rebel and he will get to hate his mama, no matter if the mama's doing all this for love.

just let you son behave as a man does.
and don't worry, life will teach him many lessons if he goes overboard, and there's no shortage of fellow kids willing to smack his face if he starts bullying around.

Not interested in the bunfight, but OP, I really wouldn't worry about it. Your son is going to be repeating at a very base level what other children around him are saying at the moment. In short, it's a phase they go through, and while it might be socially constructed, unless you want to whisk him away to live in the mountains it's just something that is out of our power to change, at least before your DS grows out of the age that it's related to. (For future generations, we can still hold hope!)

I think that what is more important is the role models he's picking up around him, and yes, his Dad might be a negative one in that sense, but you're providing him with a wonderful thing in an alternative view. I bet in a few years he will be completely different :)

Always makes me laugh when they pretend to be women yet display such glaring male privilege, whilst denying their privilege exists.
Extra points for the Big Reveal though, very dramatic.
Meanwhile the FS carries on regardless...

heh, I was lurking on this thread thinking "is it half term?" and now I see that it probably is.

Well, it's easier knowing when you can conserve your efforts for those who are interested in real discussion.

Well, something that sadly quite a few men and women share is a loathing of women.

hahaha !

MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN !

get a life !

i'm a MAN.

"if girls want to change the world they better grow up some balls.."
says it all really.

So women who are involved in large open source projects aren't "serious"?? Are you dismissing the whole Linux community which as a strong female menbership? What about women like myself who manage large data systems? Are we not worthy of the "serious" label either? What about all of these?

Get a grip Blitz. I have to agree with KRITIQ, you seem to have a very low opinion of women and their abilities.

Jocelyn Burnell?

For pity sake Blitz, I've worked in many fields where there are a higher proportion of women leaders than in other sectors. In my last job, I was generally the only senior women within decision making groups of nearly all white, middle aged, middle class men. Know what? Both men and women leaders can be excellent or crap, both can be insightful and profoundly dense, some got to the top based on drive, skill and intelligence. Others got there because they didn't rock the boat and "got elevated" by stealth, so were actually "over-promoted." Both men and women leaders can be backstabbing and snipey or encouraging and supportive of colleagues and juniors.

I'm getting a strong sense from your posts that you have very little regard for women, which is sad as you do appear to be a woman yourself and perhaps have responsibility for the care of girls or young women as well. In my experience, sometimes women feel compelled to behave in ways they think will make them "appear" more like a man because they think that will put them at an advantage in the workplace. One easy way to show off those "manly" credentials is to diss other women, to distance yourselves from them, to try and paint yourself as an "honourary man," and hope maybe they won't notice the lack of bulge in the trouser department. Sometimes in some situations it works. Problem is, the minute you slip up in any way, all that hard work can be undone when someone again "notices" that look, it's a woman, of course she screwed up. And, if you've bought into the misogynist crap, in fact promoted it for your own benefit, then it's rather hard to argue back.

Maybe that's not how you see yourself. That's fine. It's just an observation I've made from a long life, encountering lots of men and women at different levels in many different workplaces and the tactics they use to do what they think they need to do. Bit of a game really I suppose.

@kritiq : no, i'm just the living example that to succeed in your job it's all up to your brain and not up to your gender, my work is 100% technical and intellectual, either it works or it doesn't, no escape, no excuses, no dirty tricks.

if girls want to change the world they better grow up some balls and get a brain instead of endlessly whining like in this forum.

i see and learn daily from my male colleagues and i admire them, especially considering our jobs are often treatened by the competition in india and china and there's no security about that, we can be the best and being fired tomorrow because we're too expensive and management couldn't give a rat's ass about us, including female managers who see us as a "cost" and not as a "resource", they've no problems whatsoever destroying families and careers in order to get their millionaire bonuses.

i see this shit everyday, what do you think i should think about women in positions of power ? that they can be more evil than men, and they do, and if this is a feminist progress we should seriously rethink it all.

lovecat : it depends, there's a huge number of women in chemistry and medicine for example, but very very few in math, physics, mechanical and electronic engineering.

how can we explain it ? i don't know but talking with other tech girls it seems they simply don't like these fields, i never heard comments like "mechanical eng is for boys" or whatever, they're just not at all attracted by engines, pistons, wheels, and screwdrivers, as simple as that ...

then you wonder why airplanes, trains, oil rigs, military devices, guns, cars, trucks, are all made by men ... women are just "scared" by all this, it's not part of their "dimension" and how could it be after all ? i certainly couldn't see me working in an oil rig or designing a new rifle or a SUV ... to each his own and i don't blame girls for preferring other fields like chemistry or teaching math.

and talking about money, i can't see any female banker around, or female speculator or stock trader, what about this despite there's an overwhelming number of females graduating in business economy ?

last i heard 50% of the economy grads were girls, so where are all these entrepreneurs and CEOs ? the few ones in the IT industry have been a total disaster so far, see Carly Fiorina (HP) for instance or Carol Bartz (Yahoo), i guess they've been hired for the novelty of for desperation.

the only successful one that comes to my mind is Meg Whitman (eBAY), now recently appointed CEO of HP, we'll see if she ends up like Fiorina, i almost lost my ex job because of Fiorina !

how can it be racist to say WiPro's quality standards are appalling ? and we're not the only company moving out of india and taking the jobs back to europe where they belong.

on the other side we're moving many other jobs to china, and for good reasons, price but especially quality ! then there's a communication issue as their english isn't as good as the indians but you can't have one's cake and eat it too.

i don't care if their product is made by female engineers or not, all i can say is that i can't remeber a single female working in their development teams.

it's nothing new actually, in all my career at both university and multinationals i was almost always the only tech girl around, i come to accept it and i like it, and that's how i found my lovely husband.

Slug, i'm talking about serious engineering, not geeks.

Ada Lovelace, ok, anybody else ?

I didn't see the OP as being about gender-stereotyped toys at all, more about disparaging remarks made about 'girls' and the view of girls being as weak and not brave. Obviously not met my two then, though I do notice how unconfortable many men are when my girls climb to the top of really high towers and high-wire down and their poor boys don't want to, or when my daughter went on the bumper cars and bumped this boy lots of time and his dad nearly died of embarassment, so there are lots of men out there who feel their boys need to look brave and daring at all times and get quite upset when they show normal emotions or girls do things they think are stereotypically boyish (I don't give a monkey's whether they climb up or not, I have just noticed that some dads seem to have real issues about making their boys into men, even when they are aged 5 and don't like heights or whatever).

It's a shame Blitzmum wasn't around in the 1800's to tell Ada Lovelace that she should just have sucked it up... I bet she was only holding Charles Babbage back, the selfish bitch...

If money is the only measure of success then yes, there's no Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but a quick google and a look at WIKI has brought up shedloads of women making advances and claiming firsts in computing.

For someone who thinks it would be 'racist' (?!) towards their male colleagues to be "praised" for being the only woman in the team, you've thrown in some pretty racist comments about India yourself.

But back to the OP... having raised DD in a relatively even-handed manner wrt toys and pastimes, I found as soon as she started school peer pressure kicked in and the whole 'that's for boys' thing started. I do of course gently suggest to her that she can do whatever she wants and nothing is 'for boys', but it's depressing that this whole thing is sooo much more prevalent now than it was growing up in the late 60's/70's.

And I LOVED lego, as did my sister. Neither of us appear to have turned into lesbians...

there's NO EVIDENCE blitzmum.

Do you want to continue believing your version anyway? Why? not logical is it - oh, wait. Women don't 'do' logic. Cos of the cavemen, presumably

Try picking up Cordelia Fine. If you can bear to open your mind a bit, you'll see one, that the playing field isn't as level as you seem to believe it is between the genders and two, that there is no reliable science to show that men are biologically predisposed to success say on the stock market and technology nor women at caring and menial labour.

You've misrepresented most of what I've said in your "summary," but others will clearly see that. Maybe that's because you have been so strongly influenced by dominant cultural, societal, political and economic "norms" that you are genuinely unable to see that some people benefit from unearned privilege due to their gender, class, ethnicity, gender, lack of disability, sexual orientation, etc. Or, it could be like the flat earthers, you simply refuse to engage with any evidence that threatens your unshakable beliefs about what is right and wrong.

Blitz, there's a whole community of female developers out there. Can I suggest this as a starting point?

Kritiq, find me a woman working on the developer team of Photoshop for instance, or of Microsoft Windows, or Apple's IOS5 or OSX .. i can tell you ... there isn't ANY and you're free to check it by yourself.

so much for the "50% of graduates are female in india" and bla bla bla, yes like if getting a degree in Calcutta is going to give you a job as kernel developer at Oracle or IBM ? i talk by experience, indian companies like WiPro are seen as the joke of the IT/ICT, instead i could praise the development centers in Beijing but guess what they're mostly male geeks with a few exceptions.

and sorry, so far there's no female "bill gates" or "steve jobs" despite the free market and free enterprise and yadda yadda.

i've the impression you all see the world with rosy glasses.

@Kritiq : what's unjust ? that females don't have a penis ? and therefore they should have more "godgiven" rights ?

thanks god in my work i'm valued and praised for what i produce and not because i'm the only woman in our team, that would be embarassing and frankly sexist if not racist toward my male colleagues.

you probably advocate a world designed and customized for female needs and skill, well sorry it's not gonna happen and i can't see why it's so important for many mums here this "race" against the men, unless you hate men of course and unless you have problems accepting your female identity.

men go on the moon, so what ?
women make babies, including the ones going to the moon.

to each his own.

Hahaha! Your arguments are hilarious Blitz!

I played with lego, Star Wars characters, Action Men when I was a little girl and shock horror grew up to get married and have kids. My brothers played with identical toys (twins) and one is gay and one is straight.

DS1 is always playing with dolls, kitchens, pushchairs, etc. It means nothing except he is copying what he sees with his straight dad who pushes a pushchair, changes a baby, cuddles him, puts him to sleep, etc.

The ignorance utterly astounds me . . .

Oh Blitz, it's pretty clear you already know that there are certain people in society already granted heaps of privileges because they were born wealthy, male, non-disabled and/or white. You seem to be unhappy about those who wish to challenge those socially-dictated entitlements by giving others more of a fair chance. It's not about blame. It's about accountability and justice. But of course, those who benefit from the exploitation of others might not be cock a hoop at the idea of that nice arrangement being challenged.

Gender roles are as miggsie says, entirely social constructs. She has given several examples of this. There is no science that backs up your arguments. Biological determinism, when it comes to gender "destiny," as been repeatedly shown up as a pile of cack.

Miggsie, strange as i work in engineering and i can't remember a single indian female working for our business partners unless we talka about call centers.

where are the female software engineers ? where are the mechanical engineers ? the are the software architects ? tell me a single developmente language invented by a girl ?

i mean, i was one of the few graduating in computer scences and i'm still one of the few females "cranking code" in my multinational, i'm surrounded by men and the only females i see are either secretaries or working in sales & marketing (where they outnumber men).

my 2 cents.