To be annoyed my boys were told to 'scream like a girl' in an emergency?

[Kitsandkids]

My 2 boys went on a visit to a fire station this week with their Beaver group. Twice since then I have heard them talking about 'screaming like a girl' and then giggling about it.

This morning my 7 year old said that if there's a fire you have to scream like a girl. I asked him who had told him that, thinking it might have come from one of the other children, but he was adamant that a fireman told the group this. That if there's an emergency they should scream like a girl to attract someone's attention.

This has annoyed me a fair bit but I don't know if I'm over thinking it. To me it seems to be degrading to girls. Apart from anything else, my 2 scream a lot themselves - I'm always telling them not to scream if they see a bee, or get to the top of a climbing frame and can't work out how to get down. So it annoyed me a bit that they have been giggling over having to scream 'like a girl' when they probably scream more than lots of girls!

AIBU or would it annoy you to have your kids told this? I do understand that the fireman had to keep the attention of lots of excited kids but I think he could have worded it better.

vvega if you went to a safety talk at work and the male instructor advised the group of you to "scream like a woman" if in trouble, would you not even think that was a little bit of an odd comment?

I also don't think it's on to tell other people what they may and may not be offended by, what they may or may not like.

For example, I used to work in a job where the men sometimes openly talked about visiting strip clubs. I found this inappropriate, kind of weirdly embarrassing (I was young) and I didn't like it. Quite a few of the women I worked with said they didn't have any problem with this conversation at all. There isn't a "right" or "wrong" there. They didn't mind it, I did. And that's fine. They don't, however, get to tell me I am wrong and it's all just a bit of fun and banter, because how I feel is down to me.

Of course women do get told that things are just a bit of fun and to not make a fuss all the time. As here, when a male instructor tells a bunch of young boys to "scream like a girl" to get a bit of a laugh. He could have said "scream as loud as you can" or "make as much noise as you can" or "scream and shout and bang things if you can" but no he said "scream like a girl" and the boys were still giggling about it days later.

having been on several of these trips with guiding and scouting I suspect that there is more to this than you have been told.

om our tours the firefighter usually gets the kids having a screaming competition a v b or girls v boys. ime girls always win and perhaps this is the case for your beaver group and the person doing the talk said scream like the girls

"Scream like you're on fire" - really? I think they'd have a few complaints if they suggested that. It's about fire safety, not frightening the kids to death.

What's wrong with "scream as loudly as you possibly can"?"

"Scream like you're on fire" - really? I think they'd have a few complaints if they suggested that.

Probably not as many as saying "like a girl"

Thanks again for all the responses. I wasn't expecting this many!

I don't know why some people have assumed I haven't got anything else to worry/think about. I assure you I definitely have. However, this came up this week, I thought 'hmm, it would be good to get a Mumsnet perspective on this' so I started a thread. Surely we're allowed to start threads over whatever we want - not just life changing dilemmas?

Just to clarify for the people wondering if girls were present; this Beaver group currently only has boys in so there were no females other than the 3 group leaders.

Just as a side note - as far as I'm aware girls and boys of this age do not have naturally differently pitched voices. I work in a department alongside both drama specialists and linguists, and one of the more striking insights I've come across in voice work is that the physical differences in length and thickness of vocal 'gear' only kick in after large and consistent differences in pitch, timbre, intonation, etc, are already in evidence.

In other words, boys and girls are socialised and trained to 'scream like a girl' or 'shout like a 'boy' before they have any physiological need to sound different to each other. Boys may indeed often use their vocal equipment differently, but that's not 'nature', it's due to the policing of their voices along gendered lines by adults in their lives (not just parents but teachers, broader society, etc.)