Your earliest memories of sexism

[sandcastle010]

The stuff on here about sex and gender, biology and society, has got me thinking about memories of when I was younger.
I remember being called out of the playground age 6 to put my brothers clothes back on for him after PE every week (age 5)
Not sure if that would have happened if I was a boy.
Also girls played in the infants playground with the young ones to leave the junior playground for the boys to play football
Also we had a teacher in year 5 who used to say ‘girls can’t throw’ and therefore the boys would play rounders while all us girls stood in a kind of dismal line queueing up to practice throwing. We never graduated to playing rounders until we were the next year up with a different teacher!
I remember being kind of irritated by all of this at the time. Now I hope for better for my kids.
Does anyone else have similar memories?

Being told that the cubs went camping, but the brownies couldn't because they were girls.

I did not join the brownies.

Passing the 11+ but not getting a place at grammar school because there was only 1 girls grammar and all the rest were for boys-my score was probably fairly low down as i didn’t get into the girls school but still!

My dad telling me no man would marry me if I didn't know how to take care of a home... I was 15 🙄

At primary school, there was a Christmas party every year, and we were allowed to pick a present in advance to be handed over on the night.

For boys, the Blue Peter Annual, or a torch, or a toy vehicle.

For girls, the Blue Peter Annual, or one of those paper doll + clothes sets, or a purse.

I put my name down for a torch. The headmaster (of whom we were all in awe) made a special trip to my classroom (Yr 2) and ranted and raved at me in front of everyone. This would have been 1970.

I would much rather have had a torch too. Those paper doll sets were ten a penny and free on the back of Twinkle. And there was a never ending supply of beaded purses from birthday parties.

My mum tried to teach me how to see and knit with little success. She never bothered to teach my brother.

I liked playing football but wasn't allowed to at school. The boys said it was a boys sport. Same with cricket. My baby sitter had 2 boys and I played a lot of sport with them at their house so why couldn't I play at school?

I wanted to be a mechanic like Charlene from Neighbours. My family thought I was mixing up telly with reality.

I was about 14 and the careers advisor told all the girls to work in a bank and all the boys to go to university. It was 1995 and I thought she was stupid. I now run Tube stations for a living, supervising staff, including men. So fuck her.

Being told at family gatherings that girls always help clear up after dinner and having to tidy up while the men and boys stayed at the table. I was very resentful about that. Hearing people say "you do [something] like a girl" as an insult, hearing parents telling their sons not to squeal like a girl. Women on lots of TV shows in the 1970s were either dollybirds or battleaxes.

I actually loved wearing with pink, couldn't get enough of dolls, hated sport. So none of that stereotyping bothered me. But I did hate the Famous Five - I hated that Anne was so bloody wet and that George had to dress like a boy to be taken seriously. Why couldn't she be cool and tough and still have long hair and wear a skirt?

The TV show Bewitched was my first memory of WTF is this shit in terms of misogny. There was this man who married a fucking witch demanding she not be who she was just because he didn't like witchcraft. He talked to her in the most condescending manner and she would be creeping round trying to hide everything from him so as he wouldn't get mad and pull the world's most threatening cats bum mouth facial expression (Darrin number one in particular). Even as a child, I used to wonder why she didn't just kill the cunt with a nose twitch. I think that show turned me feminist, even though I was too young to know that's what it was called.

Age 4, Kinder.
The boys would monopolise all the toys, and the female teachers would let them. Those sex traitors taught me a lot of lessons. Mainly, not to give in to male demands and throw females under the bus for male demands. I guess that was the bright side.

Even as a child, I used to wonder why she didn't just kill the cunt with a nose twitch.

LOL, yes.
D1 and D2, both assholes supreme.

My mother telling me that it was lovely having a girl, but that there's something very very special about producing a son.

My name.

My dad wanted a boy, named after him.

He was disappointed to have another daughter, but decided it was better to give me the feminised version of his name than pick a new name for me.

Thus I grew up knowing that the minute I was born, my father was disappointed in me due to something I had no control over. My biological sex.

Watching a musical on the TV one sunday afternoon and a woman was backhand slapped by a man. My DM turned to me and explained that he'd done that because she had been 'leading him on' and 'playing with his affections'. I must have been about 6!
This was a theme throughout my childhood and teens....

c.1983, infant class, boys did football, girls did sewing. Me and my best friend offered to swap places as he's have rather done sewing, but were told no. I spent as much time as possible sewing the dead skin on my fingertips together.

I remember my mother saying to me after I’d done badly in a maths test ‘never mind, it’s not so important for you to do well as it is for your brother’. I think I was about 10 at the time, so late 1970s - my DM won’t admit she said it now!

It is really hard to pick out an earliest memory of this tbh. I was born in the early 70s and my family was pretty traditional. You just knew your place as a girl, you knew you'd be doing the homemaking, and everything in comedy and on tv and pretty much in schools too was a reinforcement of that.

It was a shabby time.

Oh God the PE knickers.

The worst for me was in English class aged about 13. We'd all been asked to pair up and prepare a performance of a pretty heavy scene from Julius Caesar (2 male characters). My friend and I had worked really hard at this, memorised it, put loads of feeling into it. All the boys performed theirs and then we did ours. The teacher, who I do looked up to, put his head on one side and said 'You know, it doesn't matter how well girls do it,it just sounds like housewives gossiping over the garden fence.' I was gutted.

So looked up to, not do

My earliest memory is around puberty when I started to develop breasts. Men would honk and scream out their car windows at me. It was this that made me feel like prey, like I was being hunted.

Not mine but DD's. Little boy about 5 walked up to her in a toy shop and, with learned contempt dripping from every word, said, "you're a girl, why are you playing with cars?". She was two.

She has also had to stand up with the girls in her kindergarten class to ask for a girls' time for the LEGO because the boys wouldn't let them near it.

And a group of boys ganging up on her repeatedly at school.

This shit is everywhere.

Everyone refusing to buy me connectables for my birthday present because they are boys toys...