Jezebel 
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New York, 12:55 PM
Tue Dec 1
73 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/03/09
Social skills and interpersonal clues have never come naturally to me; I've had to learn them all on my own and still struggle with them. It makes it all worse that I'm of the gender for whom these ideas are supposedly encoded into our DNA. While guys who are socially inept have difficulties, too, for them, awkward can be occasionally seen as cute or endearing. This is never the case for girls. We're perceived as freaks, even developmentally-challenged, if interpersonal intelligence is not effortless to us. And all thanks to this bogus idea that all girls are social butterflies that people refuse to let go away!
Sorry, this one is just really touchy for me because it's negatively affected my life in so many ways, and still does today.
09/05/09
09/03/09
I am as feminist as they come. My son is now 13. I was the stay-at-home mom in a two-mom household. I recall very clearly going to play groups with my other feminist women neighbors and marvelling at the behavior differences we would see right in front of us ... the 1 year old girls sitting calmly in the living room, the boys destroying the kitchen and slamming the cabinets because, well, they could, and the sound was loud and funny. We all remarked constantly about how we wanted to parent without resorting to gender stereotypes but it was really hard to do when the children refused to cooperate and behaved so stereotypically!
Of course, I didn't do a bunch of research. I just have my own life experience.
09/03/09
09/03/09
Even someone who has spent a great deal of time with dozens of children (say a daycare worker) is only going to have seen a specific subset of children. No one is sitting around taking detailed notes for later statistical analysis so it is very easy for presumptions and trends to become facts.
Researchers on the other hand, often study hundreds of children. There are often multiple observers and regularized forms of operations.
Three moms can notice that Little Johnny and Little Timmy climb more than Little Susie and Little Mary, but that could easily be a temperament difference rather than a gender difference. Or perhaps the moms are primed to see Johnny and Timmy as more active because they've heard boys are more active. Or maybe Johnny and Tommy are a 2 weeks older and that is part of the difference. Or maybe Johnny and Timmy's parents are more encouraging of activity while Mary and Susie's parents are naturally more cautious (a trait they have passed on to their child). It could be a combination of dozens of things.
Meanwhile, a researcher looking in on this situation isn't just going to think about which kids are more active, they are going to video tape these kids and have a team assistants code each active behavior. These kids will then be added to a sample from different playgroups that will include information about age in weeks, gender, race, educational status of parents, economic status, marital status of parents and number of other children in the home.
You can't really compare the two. For me, the trick about all these gender comparisons is would they sounds offensive if you inserted the name of any ethnic or cultural group (preferably your own). "Jewish babies aren't nearly as active as Mexican babies, it must be biology!" (There are measureable cultural differences in the activities of young children, but I don't think anyone chalks them up to race- ex American babies self-feed more often than Latino babies and I think African babies walk sooner than other babies)
For what its worth, I'm not a mother but I spent a huge amount of time babysitting when I was younger. There are probably 20 families I spent more than 100 hours with over the years and I never noticed a gender trend in behavior. Interests yes, behavior no.
09/03/09
There are gender differences. The research is clear. Claiming that children are gender tabla rasas undermines the valid point that culture takes over at a very early age, and any differences that do not conform to the standard are discouraged.
Parents are not the only agents in this. As a parent, a feminist, a teacher, I was shocked at how early I "lost control" of my children, a boy and a girl. They go to school...they start to read..they have older friends who tell them how things are. Read "The Nurture Assumption" to get a glimpse of research that shows how parents are not the profound influences we think they are.
09/03/09
There is loads of research out there on gender, but it is not as though the problem has been solved and we know what is innate and what is socialized. Fairly recently they showed the difference in math ability between girls and boys directly correlated to female empowerment when you looked at the country level data. If boys and girls in Sweden do equally well in math, you can't say its gender even if boys and girls in the UK are miles apart.
No one is saying that parents are the reason children act the way they do, what the piece is saying is that so much of the world is gendered that kids pick up on it. You can despise pink, but if all your daughter's female classmates love it and every ad tells her girls wear pink, there is a good chance she will love pink. 100 years ago pink was a traditional color for boys so you can hardly argue its an innate feminine preference.
FYI- The Nurture Assumption has a very mixed response based on methodology. Its interesting, but not the be all end all.
09/05/09
Is it now. Still seems pretty controversial to me.
09/03/09
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09/03/09
For that matter, I'm pretty sure Colapinto didn't have a vagina. They took away his testes and gave him estrogen but I think Colapinto could see that physically he was different than other girls which had to have had an effect even before he knew about the surgery.
09/03/09
09/03/09
Since I had an older brother, I dressed a lot in boy clothes and played with Star Wars action figures. I wonder if I would have had different interests if I had a sister instead.
09/03/09
09/03/09
09/03/09
After 5 months of parenting I have to say I think I'm doing a pretty good job of treating the baby in a totally gender non-specific way. Today a stranger referred to him as "her" for a whole conversation and I didn't even bother to correct them. Of course, his current preference for toys is based solely on it's ability to fit in his mouth so no worries about trucks or dolls yet.
09/03/09
09/03/09
09/03/09
Some babies are very cranky- they don't sleep well, the have colic, they're easily upset- while other are just easy to be around.
What the article is saying is that even when the exact same baby is given to people, the boy is assumed to be angrier and the girl is assumed to be happier. The baby didn't change so it can't be innate temperament or gender, its just expectations. The fact that people have these expectations doesn't mean they are totally oblivious to temperament, just that a cranky baby will be consider more friendly when the baby is a girl (even if the evidence isn't there).
09/03/09
09/03/09
09/03/09
09/03/09
Bah! I nearly went ballistic. She knows how to use a purse - NOT because our ancestors were hunters and gatherers - but because YOU wear a purse, and YOUR MOTHER wears a purse, and YOUR FRIENDS wear purses, and WOMEN ON TV wear purses. KIDS ARE SMART!
/rant -- Sorry - but this sort of thing really bothers me, can you tell?
09/03/09
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09/03/09
As the oldest, I came up against a lot of my parents' boundary issues, and had tons of restrictions placed on me that my younger siblings (a sister and brother) never had to deal with.
09/03/09
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09/03/09
Weirdly enough, it turned out my sis hated having blue stuff, and since we were first allowed to decorate our own rooms mine have been blue and hers have looked like they belonged in Marie Antoinette's chambers.
09/03/09
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09/03/09
Guess who didn't have a girl?
09/04/09
Alas, she would probably only take home a lesson about making assumptions, rather than that gender doesn't fucking matter when you're buying baby clothes.