ginmar: The dangerous book for boys

ginmar (

ginmar) wrote,
@ 2007-05-03 09:46:00

The dangerous book for boys
Yeah, so the hot new things is a book that teaches boys how to have fun: build paper sail boats, tree houses, pirate's hats, bows and arrows....and how to act around girls, like you know, we're a separate species who don't have any interest in any of those things.

So why am I so pissed off first thing in the morning?

What the hell are little girls going to be doing while the boys are out having all this fun? Why, the girls are going to be inside, reading insipid books about insipid heroines, having tea parties and playing dress up and learning how to appeal to and wait on boys and babies. What fun!

We're teaching little girls right off the bat that they're servants and baby factories and we're teaching boys that they get to have fun. Anybody see a teensy problem with that?

Their advice for boys to relate to boys is hysterical. Evidently not jeering at a girl 'who needs help' and being clean are terrible chores for guys, because they have to be told that. Here's a tip, kiddies: maybe the girls want to have the same kind of fun you do, instead of sitting around the house and learning how to be a servant. Maybe they're sick of the frickin' easy bake oven and want to go outside and run around and not get told to sit down nad be more ladylike. God, I know I did. Another irksome memory from my younger days: the way the teacher would say, "Raise your hands!" but let the boys get away with shouting out the answer, while suddenly remembering the rule only when a girl did it.

If they put together a dangerous book for girls, what do you bet it'll contain tips on makeup and fairy dresses and baking cupcakes?

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atdelphi
2007-05-03 03:24 pm UTC (link)

I just saw this book at the bookstore the other day, and I'm glad to see someone else commenting on it. It's things like this that made me actually hate being female when I was little - and how messed up is that? There's nothing wrong with finding tea parties and dress-up fun, no matter what gender you are, but for little girls who constantly see all the clothes they want to wear in the boys' section, and all the toys they want to play with shown on the commercials as being played with only by boys, and all the fun activities offered through Boy Scouts instead of Girl Guides, it sets up that self-loathing but good - especially when that girl hits puberty at nine and quickly discovers that "young women" can get away with even less boyishness than girls, and that well-developed girls who hang around with boys are, of course, sluts.

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	ginmar 2007-05-03 03:26 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, and when I saw this thing on the news today there was not a hint of realization that maybe you know GIRLS HAVE CHILDHOODS TOO! Jesus, that pissed me off. It's 2007, and girls are still supposed to be little housewives. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

	erinlin 2007-05-03 03:26 pm UTC (link)
	And be such a hideous shade of pink that those of us with sensitive eyes can't even read the damn thing? (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ginmar 2007-05-03 03:27 pm UTC (link)
	With sparkles. And it'll be all about tea parties and shit like that, like girls don't want to get in the dirt and have fun and stuff. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)(Expand)

	anne_jumps 2007-05-03 03:44 pm UTC (link)
	This book (I saw it in a Borders email) seems to me to be the latest edition of a longstanding (over a century) series of books about the same thing -- fun stuff for boys to get up to. Girls, naturally, do not want to get up to fun things. Oh, and girls can't do boy things because that means the boys get cooties, you know. (Reply to this)(Thread)(Expand)

	Best take on this jeric_synergy 2007-05-03 05:36 pm UTC (link)
	As usual, from the UK. (Reply to this)

	kalimeg 2007-05-03 05:38 pm UTC (link)
	The only sexist advantage I ever had as a girl was hearing nary a peep when I beat up a boy with his own baseball bat. :) (Reply to this)(Thread)(Expand)

	neintales 2007-05-03 07:18 pm UTC (link)
	Amusingly enough, I have somewhere around my house a little booklet from the 1950's based on some serial tv Western.. I forget the name without looking, I sort of want to think "Straight Arrow" or something like that. It's from the 50's and sounds less sexist, since in it, little girls and little boys were doing about the same fun "Make Injun Crafts!" stuff. (Reply to this)

	yo_onions 2007-05-04 12:16 am UTC (link)
	In the culture I come from boys and girls were treated almost exactly the same. The only difference is that boys received corporal punishment at times, whereas girls did not. Girls grew up to be tomboys, almost all of us, in this colonial culture. The western version of femininity still comes as a shock to me in many subtle ways. (Reply to this)

	boys and girls how to solve this dilemma (Anonymous) 2008-03-04 09:40 pm UTC (link)
	why not just have 1 unisex to solve all your problems of unfair views of woman every man gets girl body parts, and every woman gets male parts, and were all big one happy family of one sex, that would be quite dull. (Reply to this)(Thread)(Expand)