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.

My mum did that. In the 80s (I think there was a lot of it going around). She did make me dresses and some quite feminine stuff, but it never occurred to her that a ten year old dressed in her brother's hand-me-downs might actually get some slightly funny looks. Because people did see it as 'boys' clothes' not just 'clothes'.

I think it is shifting, though - I noticed the other day that it seems purple has become a 'girl' colour along with pink, and one you can't dress boys in.

Re. the dancing - at my brother's wedding his new wife's entire German family materialized as skilled ballroom dancers, who wanted to invite each of us formally to dance with them while the bride and groom danced. My mum has a duff knee, but doesn't have enough German to explain this, and the rest of us are just, well, English. I'm still shuddering slightly.

No gender implications, just thought I'd get it out there. It was not a good memory.

I guess, then, according to your narrow definition of feminist, I'm not.

Because I 100% disagree with you.

Mine was actually the 90s, LRD. Isn't it scary that the 90s were 20 years ago?!?!

Is it pissing anyone else off that this thread is on two pages?! It's really fucking annoying.

Anyway. Yes, it is scary.

And forgive me for being slow, but I think you're not saying stuff a million miles apart. Yes, we all agree (right?) that dressing children in not-explicitly-'feminine' clothing shouldn't make everyone assume they are boys. But it does.

What is really shit is that we seem as a society to be getting more and more fussy about what counts as 'feminine'. So I have seen someone look at my niece - in an orange coat, long blonde hair, etc. etc., and decide she must be a boy because (I kid you not) she is kicking a ball around with me. She is less than three years old.

Ok, I am going to put something to you that I have been thinking about on and off quite a lot that kind of ties in with the 'cool' wife who's not fussed about her husband's inconsiderate behaviour and the 'gendered' dressing of children, and 'gendered' toys and married/non-married titled etc etc.

It is even more of an issue in German with its 3 personal article (der = male, die = female, das = neutral).

Do we as people not have much more in common that what seperates us? The patriarchy is a social, all pervading social construct, not a biologically inescapable reality (such as pregnancy and childbirth were with the best will in the world the most ardent male feminist cannot really do much about).
So, should we not thing less about gender roles, not more?
If men and women treated each other (and indeed men men and women women) with respect and civility and consideration, then all this 'he's an abuser' 'he gets paid more' 'he is listened to more' because he is a man would be less relevant.

The language thing comes into it because in German you are not 'a butcher' you are either 'a butler = man' or 'a butcheress = woman', baker/bakeress, doctor/doctoress. I think French and Italian are similar.
The professions are ALL the same, whoever does them, but the gendered suffix makes sure that it is v obvious what gender the relevant person has.

I know this is all v half-baked and I now that everyday sexism is ongoing, on tiny little personal levels and in huge political and world-wide contexts.

Re the husbands going out on pissed ups and the 'cool' wife not minding: yeuch. Just horrible.
The truly sexist bit is that most people would consider a woman who goes out, gets falling over drunk, does not turn up at home when she said she would without contacting home and who feels ill the following day, a completely irresponsible, despicable 'slag'. Whereas he is 'just having a good time'.

I think that's absolutely true.

Things don't need to be constantly categorised as either male or female. But I think it fosters an 'us and them' mentality that fits suspiciously well with how you oppress people in all contexts.

Oh, my childhood was hundreds of years ago .

And yes dressing children is a minefield.
I have gone out of my way to avoid combat coloured stuff for my boys but even that has not been easy at times. Boden sucked my in because they do nice primary coloured stuff for boys (some of which is such a good quality that DS4 is now wearing hand-me-downs from DS1 via DS2 and 3).

I would've struggled it I had had a 'girly' girl, not really being one myself.

Oh, yes, divide and conquer.

Get the men all het up about scary feminists, and the women all worried that they might be considered 'not cool' or 'not having a sense of fun' or lumped in with 'feminist who hate men and don't shave their legs' and we're all at loggerheads with each other.

Can't we all be friends?

As soon as I am Empress of the World I shall decree that we will all get on

Do not get me started on the new can only have pages policy. It gives me THE RAGE!

I'll comment further on the rest once I'm not standing in the cold waiting for the school bus!

Tee - I agree with a lot of what you said about personality. I don't really mind the posts that say "It wouldn't bother me " so much. I agree that it is wrong to assume that misogynistic conditioning has forced people not to mind. But what really gets me is that very few posts are like that. They are more "FFS, it's a party, let him go out and have fun, you're being a nasty nag". The OP made it clear that she minded, that it didn't accord with the expectations of respectful behaviour in her relationship, that there were serious other reasons why it was a particular concern. And still she got told she was being unreasonable for being pissed off. I defend anyone's right not to be pissed off, but the constant lecturing that one must be cool with everything or you're just a nagging bitch are what wear me out.

I also agree with mildred regarding the conditioning. There are a lot of people out there who have been taught to expect very little of their partners and believe that that is how it is. Not even how it should be, just how it is. Like rain is wet. So if you want a partner, you accept that rain is wet and you don't expect it to ever be otherwise. If you fight against the behaviour, well you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Mildred - I know what you mean. I am very clear with myself that I don't attack 'girly' things around my girls, for all the reasons you describe. However, I do try and point out things like that that princess bag is very flimsy and will probably fall apart (why is it that, so often, this stuff is poorly made compared to the 'boy' or 'neutral' alternative). I also try and encourage a wide range of interests. Not forcing 'boy' things on them, but just giving them the opportunity to choose from the full menu as it were. Particularly my younger daughter (2.5) has some real stereotypical 'girly' obsessions, but also some 'boy' ones, and i think that's nice. It shows she's choosing herself I feel. I think i'd find it more certain to feel that if everything she chose was 'gender appropriate' because so few people conform totally and utterly so naturally, but thankfully I don't have to wrestle with that too much.

I kind of agree with both of you on the gendering thing. I agree that, in teh world we live in, it's not necessarily helpful or productive to try and create a neutral child. They will be assumed to be male. And whilst I don't agree that you have changed their gender, you have changed the perception of their gender and have probably made life difficult for them as a result. I'm not sure I get to force my children to fight my battles, or the feminist battle, for me before they choose to do so themselves. But at the same time, I agree with Mildred that I refuse to put my kids in a narrow box labelled 'girl' just because people expect me to.

I do try and limit the use of sex as a defining characteristic. The number of times i have consciously said "Let this child go ahead of you on the slide" or whatever to one of the DD's and a helpful parent has jumped in with "She's a girl". Well, yes, I had guessed that, I just didn't think it was that relevant to queuing for play equipment! I also try and avoid the use of 'girl' in instructions/praise/telling off (good girl, you're being a naughty girl, etc), because again sex is not relevant. DH does it though and can't see why not, so I am a bit of a lone voice on that one.

Honestly, I don't really see why not either.

She is a girl. That's a fact.

I personally believe that deliberately not calling her a girl could potentially be as limiting as pushing her towards "girlie" things. Is it not sending the message that being a girl is somehow not a good thing to be?

I have no daughters, so can only speak to my nieces and their parents, who live in Berekley California, so very aware if this sort of thing. They do not point away from "girlie" things but encourage interest in everything. As it happens they both like "girlie" things but they also like "non-girlie" things.

It's an impossible choice IMO, which is why I get angry about it. You cannot get it right. I'm sure that is true for lots of parenting choices, but maybe especially this one?

My mum did various things that implied being 'girlie' was either disgusting or less good than being a tomboy - she absolutely hates cosmetics and shaving your legs and so on. And that is difficult when you are wanting to fit in with people.

I went through a stage when I was really cross with my mum, and I thought she was plain mean not to let me fit in more. And then the other day I was chatting to her and asked if I remembered about one of the mums of a girl in my class. This woman had constantly made comments like 'ooh, LRD, fuzzy legs there!' or 'ooh, girlies, LRD's wearing her brother's shoes'! Looking back I cannot believe I didn't pick up on the fact she was being a total, utter wanker and my mum must have felt really shit. At the time all I could tell was that she'd say these things and laugh and I felt bad but didn't quite realize she shouldn't have been saying them.

It amazes me, and it amazes me my mum had to remind me about it. So I end up wondering what she could have done. Ideally she'd have had it out with this woman for being nasty to a child. But it really made me aware how much these attitudes aren't actually about what a child wants, but about how other adults are reacting.

Sorry, probably stating the obvious.

To me, it is for the reasons Pacific explained earlier.

Yes, she's a girl. I'm not disputing that. And it's not like she doesn't know she's a girl. I'm not denying that part of her identity. And I would feel exactly the same about using 'boy' all the time, it's just that I currently have two daughters.

But I object to way sex has become the defining characteristic at all times and in all places. You don't hear people saying "You are being a silly blue-eyed child this morning" or "let this blond child go in front of you" (though you might hear 'blond girl' to distinguish her from another girl, which is still placing sex top of the list). Many other aspects of a child are just as (ir)relevant to throwing a tantrum in a shop or queuing for a slide- hair colour, eye colour, height, etc. Why is it we never reference them? Always girl/boy.

If she has dressed up in a party dress, I may well say "What a pretty girl, don't you look lovely", but it doesn't need to be the single biggest descriptor of all areas of her life. And god knows she spends enough time being defined by her sex without me helping.

YY, absolutely.

But it's also not as if 'girl' has a wide and rich range of connotations. It's really, really narrow.

Btw, have you seen this pile of shite? twitter.com/chloew1970/status/412223496781967360/photo/1

Hope I linked that right, I'm still new to twitter.

Cross post with you LRD. What an utterly horrid person to speak that way to child/teenager!

I agree, to some extent you can't win. On one level, I'd love to change the world in a generation, on the other (the side that wins) I won't force my child to fight my battles, or sacrifice her happiness to forcing her to be a misfit in the name of fighting gender stereotyping. Heaven knows, I shave my legs pretty frequently and love a good eyeliner. I don't think that there is anything wrong with those choices, but I like that I recognise that I didn't come to prefer those things in a cultural vacuum.

I very much encourage DD2 pretending to be a ballerina, etc. She loves it, it makes her laugh (quite frankly it makes me laugh as she's very petite but not exactly a delicate 2 year old!). I am very clear that there is nothing inherently 'wrong' with 'girly' things. But I also clamp down very hard on, for example, DD1 when she said in a shop the other day "These are the boys' cooking things and these ones are for girls" (display coded blue and pink for fucking whisks and jelly moulds, thanks for that John Lewis). I said to her "What do you mean, why are those for boys" and she said "they are blue", so I replied "Well in that case I think that they are for anyone who likes blue, whether they are a girl or a boy". She will probably roll her eyes at me more and more for stuff like that as she gets older, but I am determined to challenge 'boxes' as much as I can.

What an awful advert!

Well, quite, she was a horrible person but at the time I didn't realize how much she must also have been upsetting my mum, and I can sort of see her side of it more too now. I would be better at telling her to fuck off, but I have proper MN training.

I think the pink/blue thing is just financially worth clamping down on, isn't it?

Yes absolutely, but on the other hand if I buy a kid size whisk I'm buying one (whether or not bump turns out to be a boy), so in some ways it makes less difference there. On things like "oh, I can't use this pram, DC2 is a boy" it gives me the rage financially. tHere i's the assumption that DD1 saw which product was 'for her' even though she doesn't bloody like pink! DD2 goes mad for it, but DD1 would rather have any number of colours before either pink or blue, and is frequently frustrated by the choice on offer.

I think you make a good point about not realising. We can underestimate the desperate urge of children and teenagers to fit in. It's part of growing up. But there is definitely a balance between letting them fit in, and letting them find their true self. Now if only someone could find the dividing line for me...

Oh, sure, I wasn't criticising your whisk-buying choices!

And yes, if only we could find that line. But at least we're talking about it rather than not, which I think is positive.

No, I don't think that there is anything wrong with girlie or boyish thing either, except the label. Or the perceived need for a label.

That's what bothers me about calling a girl a 'tom boy' - so she likes climbing trees and does not like naice dresses, so bloody what? Or he likes to be quiet and alone and is quite musical which does not make him a 'sissy' or anything.
It makes me quite angry, it really does.

And as far as parenting goes, nobody can ever get it right. Because there is no ONE right, although there are many, many ways to get it wrong.
Oh my. Just thinking about it exhausts me.

I think I just carry on benign neglect.

It was quite interesting to my btw how my boys took the recent news that Tom Daly was gay. Ok, maybe it was not news to those in the know but his coming out was obviously talked about in school (not officially, but amongst the kids). And they were quite 'What's the big deal?' .

They still continue to use 'gay' as a derogatory swear word though and they don't see how that is offensive

Except we're raising the third, or maybe even fourth, generation of feminists, depending on how you count. My grandmother was not a feminist, my mother certainly was.

So they didn't do it in a generation. We aren't any further than we were. So how long is it going to take?

That's why I get so tired of it all and so het up by people accusing me of not being a feminist just because I don't agree with their view. We can't change it until the infighting stops.

Tee
"I guess, then, according to your narrow definition of feminist, I'm not."

I haven't defined feminism at all. I asked you if you were one. Stop putting words in my mouth - not the first time.
I am feeling really picked on here. Actually this is pissing me off.

Right I am going away after this post because I don't want to ruin the lovely pub atmosphere but this snippiness is just not fair.

I feel like everything I say you just wave away as some weird paranoia about gender roles. I thought we could be a bit more nuanced here but you are getting really shirty about it.

LRD

"I think you're not saying stuff a million miles apart. Yes, we all agree (right?) that dressing children in not-explicitly-'feminine' clothing shouldn't make everyone assume they are boys. But it does. "

Well Tee didn't say anything at all about what (s)he thinks should be happening. She said that by dressing a child in non-feminine clothes you make the child a "he". You change the gender. This to me is so, so wrong, and is a million miles from what I think. It is buying wholesale into one gender as a default, and the other as, well, other. It would have been completely different if she had said, "by dressing the children that way she made it pretty inevitable that everyone would assume they were boys." She didn't. This matters.

It matters to the conversation that we are having here, in the feminist pub, that we don't just accept "they are dressed as boys now they aren't wearing pink" however much we may agree that "most people will think they are boys now" (although as I say, this tells you nothing as most strangers think all babies are boys no matter what they wear).

Penguins:
"I agree with Mildred that I refuse to put my kids in a narrow box labelled 'girl' just because people expect me to. "
Well my girls do usually dress in a way that Tee would recognise as in girls' clothes, because they want to.
Sorry to go on but this is not about what my girls wear or what I think other girls should wear. it is about how we define who we are and I am annoyed if feminists, of all people, give up so much to the masculine = default.

Okay, be a martyr if you want.

But I'm still going to point out that you said (emphasis mine) "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."

And then said: "or are you a feminist, Tee? Or not?"

Which implies I must not be if I don't agree with you.

Also, your current post, with the (s)he is also implying that I can't possibly be a feminist if I'm a man.

Which I am not. I am a woman. Which I am pretty sure I've also said on thread.

And if I was a man, I could be a feminist.

You want to debate with me, let's debate. The rest of us seem to be doing just fine without slanging each other off or making wild accusations.

That is my point Mildred. They get to define who they are. They can pick things from society's narrow girl box if they want but I want the choice to have come from all options not because they think that that tiny box is the only one for them and the rest defaults to 'male'.