Sure, but your second point helps explain your first. The hypergendered, hypersegmented marketing that Justice typifies is new, only arising in the last 20-30 years. Tweens didn’t exist, Disney princesses didn’t exist as a unified marketing push, Scrabble didn’t come in girl-and-boy flavors, etc. And it’s not a coincidence that the intensification of gender differences in marketing tracked the heightened “natural” preferences of kids for these gendered items.
The reason it matters, in my opinion, is not because there’s anything inherently wrong with pink or dressup or princesses. It’s that boys and girls play significantly less with each other starting at very young ages than they used to, because (in part) the objects in their worlds simply divide them.
And yes, my 6-year old daughter is a card-carrying member of the pink-purple-princess mafia, too. (She actually refused to play with her best friend at daycare when she was 3 because she was wearing pants.) There’s only so much steering parents can do. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it, at which point I’m sure I’ll be tearing my hair out at the oversexualization of preteens.
Except that bows, like axes, were associated with the Amazons and bows were associated with actual Sauromatian warrior-womyn even before; so in the west bows never had the strong exclusive gender associations that swords still have.
Also bows allow more shots per minute than muzzle-loading firearms, and better accuracy [due to avoiding the Magnus effect] than old-style-smoothbore firearms, so that Wellesley wanted to reintroduce them during the Napoleonic Wars.
Why are all the girls in the action sports clips dressed totally normal, no pink in sight. Then the Rebelle girls are playing with horrible looking pink Nerf toys dressed like lost children raised by 80’s mall mannequins.
Can you actually cite any literature that says archery is a masculine art? Or are you just echoing stereotypes based on western interpretations of mass media? Perhaps you’re thinking of yabusame (horseback archery) rather than kyudo (traditional archery).
Of all the traditional sports I observed in Japan, kyudo had the most even gender makeup. Even the terminology of kyudo is interestingly inclusive: arrows are male (haya) and female (otoya), and they are both fired, one after the other. There is evidence that this style may have originated in the Yayoi period, when the culture was more egalitarian (Chinese texts suggest some areas of Japan were ruled by a woman during that period).
The fact that you try to masculinize Amaterasu demonstrates some exceedingly odd opinions about Japanese history and mythology. If you can provide me with citations from Japanese sources, I’d be very interested in reading them. I have never seen a single text authored by a Japanese person say anything about Amaterasu having masculine qualities, and I read extensively on the subject when I was studying at a university just outside Tokyo.
I think the main source of your confusion is your conflation of the western term “tomboy” with the japanese term “otenba.” In Japan, neither the term nor the idea is as strongly gendered as it is in the US. It translates as “untameable,” (derived from the dutch, but written in kanji.) Because it is often translated directly as “tomboy,” many westerners assume it has the same gender-related connotations, while the Japanese term is substantially more subtle. It’s common for westerners to assume one-to-one translations of terms, and otenba is especially confusing. Both terms describe similar sets of activities and traits - outspokenness, athleticism, temper - but while those actions have a strong masculine connotation in western culture, in Japanese the connotations are more strongly related to rebellion and non-conformity. It is super easy to map Western assumptions onto this and say “all nonconformity is obviously more about gender than anything else!” but the Japanese do not see it that way.
Before the introduction of Confucianism from China, Japan was fairly egalitarian. I recall reading a brilliant essay about how Amaterasu was the original ideal of pre-Confucian femininity in Japan, and the shifting of social norms to become more accepting of “otenba” was a return to traditional Japanese values, slowly shedding the Chinese influence that caused the massive cultural shifts in gender roles in ancient Japan.
Shintoism is seen as one of the strongest cultural forces Japan has that still carry forward its pre-Confucian historical ideals, and Miko and other practitioners of traditional Shinto-related activities are often upheld as ideals of femininity in Japan. I don’t understand where you would have gotten the opposite impression.
Bows may have been associated with the fictional Amazons and even actual Sauromation warriors, but it’s more appropriate to say that Amazons and Saurmations warriors were associated with bows.
Both as hunting tools and weapons of war, bows were chiefly associated with men, as most hunters and warriors in most civilizations were men. When the vast majority of warfare is carried out by men, the tools of war are far more closely associated with men than with women, and culturally speaking those women who do engage in warfare are seen as “masculine”.
As for the efficaciousness of bows, the problem with archery is that it takes great personal skill. If you’re a fuedal lord looking to raise an army quickly, you aren’t going to be able to field archers unless you hire veteran mercenaries, because they require years of practice.
In contrast, crossbows and early firearms required relatively little training. They fired slower, but they hit harder and you could field more of them because you don’t need skilled operators. Round up a batch of conscripts pressed into service, drill them for a bit on how to load, fire, and maintain formation, and boom - you’ve got an effective fighting force in about a month.
Meanwhile, your longbowmen are a precious commodity. If they get flanked by an unseen cavalry movement and you lose an entire regiment, you can’t replace them. If the same thing happens to a bunch of peasant conscripts, who cares? Draft up some more.
Not sure if you’re joking with this or not. I assume you are. But either way, you’ve provided me with a New Thought: is it even possible to be racist regarding beings that don’t actually exist? And if so, in this case wouldn’t it more accurately be considered species-ism? Since dwarves and elves and humans are so clearly different? I mean, in the context of the LOTR universe, I can’t see anyone saying that Elves and Dwarves are the same species. Sure, in D&D you’ve got half-elves, but not in LOTR i don’t think (?) But there’s another point here: in the context of LOTR, racism is okay, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t recall any wizards or halflings showing any love for orcs and trolls and kobolds or whatever: it’s perfectly okay for the “good” denizens of Middle Earth to hate and kill orcs and trolls and dragons whenever they like, and with impunity too.
Is it racist to say I wouldn’t want to work with Shelob, eat with Shelob, or let my brother marry Shelob?
See, if the French had refused engagement until their 15,000 Genoese mercenary crossbowmen had been given a day to recover from their forced march of six leagues (20 miles or 33 kilometers), they may very well have won the battle and the course of history might have been altered.
Agreed. Something that has been bugging me, along the same lines, is that many of the boys picked to model for Nerf packaging and advertising are clearly supposed to look like they are cool older dudes. Like, 17 – 19 year old guys. Or, as you put it, just super-aggro, super-douchey 16 year-olds, tops. It’s almost as weird as those catalogs for elderly people’s home health devices, where all the models are clearly around 40 years old, but wearing white wigs.
Now, I realize that boingboing might not be the place to cast aspersions on people who play with toys beyond the “normal” age range associated with them. Hell, I played with Lego – and played imaginative games – well into my early teens, myself (when most of my peers had moved on from such “baby” things, onto activities like sports or video games). That said, I would be amazed if your average 17 year old guy would be caught dead running around, scowling, and shooting his friends with Nerf guns. They are more likely to be getting laid, or at least lying about it.
In other words, there may be some pumping action involved, but they ain’t shootin’ foam missiles…
How about movies where the hero blithely walks away from his arrows? “Book Of Eli” was awful in this regard, in additiion to using an obvious prop bow that could be unstrung as easily as untying your shoe.
I reallllly wish I could reply with a pic of Tony Shaloub’s face cut/pasted onto a screenshot of Shelob’s body…but I recently switched to Ubuntu and I don’t know where the hell anything is…
Yeah, that’s what chest guards are for. And since interfering with the string interferes with arrow performance, most guys and gals in competitive archery wear them.
