The Feminist Pub (continued).

[UptoapointLordCopper]

Been busy. Came back today to have a look but the Pub thread was full! Shall we continue here?

Third episode of Borgen on tonight.

DS2 got a right pasting on MineCraft today (not entirely unprovoked, I gather - like mother, like son ) and he was a sobbing, hiccupping wreck. I cannot say I liked the reaction I got, but thankfully have a thick skin although I am genuinely sorry that the topic I chose was obviously a bit triggering for some. And yes, I am grateful that MNHQ got rid of the whole sorry mess, but I am still glad that the site as such is not heavily moderated.

Thank you for all the advice everyone. And for being so kind to me.

I do love a rude typo, small things make me very happy.

Hope you are feeling a bit better Mildred. I hope I speak for those on the thread if I say we're all here for you.

On a feminist note, can I just rage about something? DD1 has been to two discos in the last week. For various reasons, I was present for one and around for part of the other. She is 4, oldest guest was about 6. Both bloody DJs played 'Blurred Lines'. FFS, in what world is that a suitable song.

I was also slightly disturbed by the level of 'sexy' dancing going on amongst the young girls. DD1 thankfully just kind of wiggles and throws herself about, but there was quite a bit of hands on hips, thrusting hip out at an angle, etc.

Glad to be of service

Oh, I hate discos for little children, boys or girls, hate them with a vengeance - too loud, lots of inappriate songs and encouraging 'sexy' dancing

And that song... [implodes]

So bloody loud. And dark. And at the school one they didn't even bring the lights up at the end so DD1 and I wandered round in the dark for nearly 5 minutes looking for each other. As did numerous other parent/child pairs. Gah. May have to have 'fun plans' the date of the next one.

Can I also moan about those "posh pocket puzzle" books, which till now I thought were quite cool?

They've done a "posh pocket girls' word search"

I didn't see one for boys, needless to say.

Grr. Aargh.

yeah this sexy dancing thing. How to unpick it?
Because pop is all about sex really. Ok you can point to about 1 in 100 songs that isn't, but....
if you play pop songs to children aren't you basically encouraging them to dance in sexy ways?

when I was a child my dad used to hate TOTP and say "what's this rubbish" because it was really apparent to him that it was all about people thrusting their hips about and referencing sex. I was barely allowed to watch it, dancing copying those moves was certainly not allowed.
I can remember when I was about 14 being put into a situation where you basically had to dance and being appalled and embarrassed because I couldn't. I literally had no idea what to do and had to fake illness. I wished that freestyle dancing had never happened and that we could all have been taught to foxtrot - or anything - instead. I had never learnt to dance and did not know what to do (don't worry I got there in the end)

I hated being so alien to everything and everyone and this is part of my laissez faire ness (that I am now bemoaning and regretting) about pop culture.

I honestly think it is a matter of familiarity, as much as of degree, whether it is the "disco dancing" that was au courant in my childhood but we are now so used to (but is actually very sexy), or the MTV sharp thrusting of today. They're all about "fuck me". and I don't want to be my dad all over again, disapproving of things my children don't understand, making them feel uncomfortable and not knowing why, and in the end socially disabling them.

(My dad actively disapproved of friendship. it's weird. not only did he not help us do anything to make friends, he seemed to really wish we didn't have any. perhaps because of things like this. or because no one was ever good enough, as all the people we ever met were English. I don't know.)

And yet - it's vile.

dd1 has never been invited to a disco.

I am grateful our school does not seem to do discos. I would be over to that DJ telling him/her to take that song off. It's one of the most vile pieces of noise I have ever heard. Never mind how you're suppose 'dance' to it.

I do not keep up with pop music. I leave that to my husband. But I play my son 80s music and he loves it.

Of course, he's 4.

Dh and I were watching Abba live in concert ?1976 or thereabouts, and they were fab. The fashion, the haircuts, the facial hair, the shoes, the makeup - all fantabulous .
And I enjoyed the music far more than I did first time round, including the lyrics.

You could argue all music is about being allowed to touch the opposite sex and a mating ritual, but it's just somewhat less obvious with some songs that others.

We had ballroom dancing lessons when we were 14 and I found it absolutely excruciating - I was nowhere near ready to have a boy that close to me, breathing at me and him having his hand in the small of my back. I can make a tit of myself freestyle with the best of them, but proper couple dancing still makes me really uncomfortable.
So, mildred, the foxtrot was not the answer for me.

Oh god Pacific, I really had not thought that through, I could not have dealt with that either!

Maybe some, er, what do you call it, the type of dancing they do in Pride and Prejudice. Just the odd bit of hand holding.

Oh yes, historically, that was the purpose of music and dance. Mating. Approved and carefully chaperoned touching.

The issue is how young it starts these days!

I still can't do freestyle dancing. I don't understand the implicit rules and freeze like a frightened rodent.

Pride and Prejudice type dancing was so much better for gradually ramping up sexual tension that anything that exists now.

Country dancing or line dancing is the way forward. I've never seen any sexy moves in Line dancing and country dancing seems to be limited to handholding in the basic dances, with a bit of promenading being the closest you have to get.

The only type of 'couples' dancing I can do is Ceilidh dancing - 'tis fast and wild and vair exciting without too much need for excruciating attempts at coordination.

I've done 2 things with dd2 this weekend and I ended up getting annoyed at both of them.

We went to a 3yo girl's birthday party which was lovely. The bit I got annoyed with was that the mum of the only boy who was invited (because they go to the same cm) kept saying "he's being a boy and not joining in" whenever he disappeared off upstairs to play in one of the bedrooms (that was allowed, the party girl and her siblings kept taking children up to see their bedrooms), the "he's being a boy ..." about everything he did. He was behaving exactly the same as the little girls just at different times. He threw a strop, it was because "he's being a boy", dd2 threw a stop because she was tired. He went to play in a bedroom because he was "being a boy", dd2 went to play in a bedroom because "he's leading her astray" bollocks - she was just more interested in the toys in the bedroom than she was in the dancing in the living room. It really annoyed me that there was this constant justifying of his behaviour because he's a boy when really he was doing CHILD things, not boy things.

Then we went to a lovely farm park this afternoon to visit Santa. He doesn't give out presents that are already wrapped at this place, he hands out a token for the children to spend in the Elves Toyshop, which I love because at least then the children get something they want. The bit that annoyed me was that the girls in front of us wanted cars and dinosaurs but were talked out of it by their parents and ended up with a sparkly craft set and a doll, then the boys behind us wanted a doll and a soft toy but again were talked out of it by mum and ended up with a car and a gun. Why on earth did those parents not just let the children get what they had chosen? Ok so maybe those particular parents were guiding their children away from presents they may already be getting for Christmas, but I then looked around the play area afterwards and ALL the children seemed to have gender specific toys from Santa. So boys had tractors, cars, dinosaurs and guns, girls had dolls, soft toys, jewellery sets and craft kits. Dd2 chose a car, which surprised me because I'd have thought she'd want a dinosaur, but there's no way I would have talked her out of what she chose.

Party thing would make me mental AntiJam.

But the toy thing, well, if my son said he wanted a doll I would talk him into a car, because he likes the idea of dolls but doesn't actually play with them. As oppose to cars which lead to much imaginative play.

So, since you can't guess the parents motives, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not going to talk about dancing because I seriously do not know anything about dancing.

Antijam I'd get annoyed at both too. Of course I have my own ideas about what my kids would or would not play with, and generally I would say things like "You can choose this, but remember we have something like this which sat on the shelf for a long time, but then that was a while ago and you may like to play with this type of things now, or you can choose that which etc etc". In the end they make their own choices and live with it but we do discuss things to death. In short I'm a bloody nightmare at shops.

This is sort of a post about a lot of threads, but hopefully ok in the context and not a 'thread about a thread'.

Does anyone else find it dispiriting the competition that seems to be going on around here to be a 'cool wife', not bothered by anything, not holding their partner to any form of account for behaviour?

It started to grate after the 'he wants to go to the pub on Christmas day' thread last week or so (mentioned further up this thread) and it seems to be proliferating. There is one going at the moment about a wife who was worried sick because her husband, who she expected in around 2 based on previous form turned up after 6.30am and she was understandably pissed off that all childcare the following day was therefore her job as he was in no state. The number of people who have really resisted any sort of comment that this isn't a very respectful way to treat your partner, and co-parent of a young child. People seem to fall over themselves to say "Oh he was having fun, it's Christmas".

There have been lots of others as well.

I just don't get why it is considered ok to treat a partner with basic lack of manners and consideration. And why we all have to compete for us to be cool about that kind of behaviour.

Penguins, I am ashamed that I have probably been party in my past to buying into that sort of cool-girl bullshit. I am an introvert, don't need someone to hold my hand all the time, for a long time had no interest in cohabiting or children, and wildly extrapolated from this, under the influence of patriarchal media and general bullshit, that women who expected certain minimum standards from their partners were clingy saps. I am very sorry and I apologise for this, to womankind in general. (As I deserved I had two long relationships in which I was treated pretty badly by slack addicts, whom I didn't dare to pull up on their dicking me about in favour of their drugs of choice. I was very unhappy but didn't have the wherewithal to understand that they were treating me badly, because, you know, I was a cool girl, and had no knowledge of relationships as my family is weird and I went through long periods of having no friends)

I mistrust some of my impulses, as I know I did internalise some misogyny. I was a tomboy who turned into a logician who read a lot of old fashioned misogynist classic literature. In my childhood I was not pretty or allowed to have pretty things and the girls wouldn't have me. I wanted to join the boys' club because. well everyone needs someone, and I thought - under the influence of bullshit - that boys were harder, clearer, less claustrophobic, more accepting. In fact when I eventually met some, boys were extremely accepting of me relative to girls, but of course they all fancied me. As long as I did and said the right things.

This is why I doubt the part of me that screams inside over my dds, "AAAAAAAAAAARGH unicorn vomit, get it away from them". I feel that things like role play games, social-deity-play games with dolls, girly pop like Taylor Swift, are automatically derided because they code feminine, and that is in itself an injustice, a bullshit value system. Also I want my girls to be happier in their skin than I was, not having someone batting away all the things they want to do and insisting they do something else, more "quality" (= coding masculine) and also girls' sexuality in particular not being allowed (= not being able to dance when you are 14). I want them to have friends and be happy. And not end up acting out cool girl bullshit etc etc etc which is a needy response to not being good enough.

Penguins I think they are the same MNetters who get 'off' on competitive poverty and OTT parenting worries. What I think of as the '1 chicken for 1,000 people and OMG THERE MIGHT BE A BEE' brigade.

And also an aspect of wanting to be 'the cool girl', as mildred said.

However, I do think you can go too far the other way, as in all things. You can't assume that these women, or children, are this way because of misogynistic attitudes. They might just truly be okay with it in their lives. Because that's their personality. Yes yes, they've been bombarded with the message that they must be wife/whore/mother/gourmet cook but it may also be just the way they are. Ye olde nature versus nurture in it's classic way.

An example of gender non-bias backfiring: I went to university with a mature student, who was in the graduate programme (US University). She had three children, all girls. She was so determined to not gender bias them in anyway that she tried to dress them neutrally. Neutral clothes, neutral hair. Neutral everything.

Except people didn't say to her 'Oh what lovely children!'

People said to her 'Oh what lovely boys!'

So she hadn't removed their gender. She'd changed it. Because like it or not, that's the world we live in, even now (this was 20 plus years ago), the world where neutral = boy and pretty = girl. Not neutral = I have no clue so I won't assume either way.

And, I forgot to say, so many people don't actually know what manners and consideration is these days, whose to say these woman aren't just as bad as their partners in those areas? Just at a different time of day, so to speak.

Sorry to be pedantic but I have to take issue with this:

"So she hadn't removed their gender. She'd changed it. Because like it or not, that's the world we live in, even now (this was 20 plus years ago), the world where neutral = boy and pretty = girl. Not neutral = I have no clue so I won't assume either way."

no, she had not changed their gender. If she had dressed boys in dresses, she would not have changed their gender, even, but you are ascribing far too much power to the people who see neutral clothing as male.

By that logic, females would barely exist. I mean it may feel sometimes like they don't. But people always assume things are "he"- it doesn't mean that the "she" doesn't exist. I have had people say "what is his name?" about my daughter wearing a pink frilly babysuit - perhaps because, like many 4 months olds, she didn't have that much hair - but it is not the case that her gender is male just because eejits see a child and think "he".

I think it is important to note that

1 - people's gender is not determined by how other people respond to them, or seriously, we are all fucked, I mean people, come on

2 - at least in theory, even if a minority will get it, we should allow the existence of such a thing as gender neutral clothing. Children with shortish hair and babyish faces wearing green t-shirts - I think we, certainly we as feminists, need to say that that person is in a gender neutral get up, even if the rest of the world wants that child to wear pink bows to "count" as a potential female.

or are you a feminist, Tee? Or not?