It usually doesn’t have much to do with actual gender.
For instance, masculinity, virility, testosterone, prostate, testicles and beard are all ‘feminine’ words. It has nothing to do with being womanly or manly.
Too late, Superintendent Parrot already tried the Crunchy Frog, and a few others. There might have been spiders.
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I’ll just leave this here.
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I am not endorsing the notion boys shouldn’t wear pink, but the notion it USED to be the boys’ color is a urban myth. It never was an exclusively or predominantly male color. At most, pink and blue were used interchangeably for boys and girls. The debate was started in 1987 by Jo B. Paoletti’s article Clothing and Gender in America: Children’s Fashions, 1890-1920, which was able to unearth only four references to support the conclusion. From the linked Discover Magazine article: “…according to Google NGram, a searchable database of over 5 million books, there are lots of instances of the terms “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” going back to 1890, but none for the reverse at any time point.”
http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_2012_reversal_pink-blue_asb.pdf
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/11/30/did-boys-use-to-wear-pink/
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However, little boys did wear dresses.
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Hush now. If we pay attention to silly things like history or anthropology, it could reduce our faith in Evolutionary Psychology.
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Those were girl books??
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Funny you should mention that. I remember a whole lot of gendering in the toy department when I was a kid in the 70s, at least in the doll/action figure departments. My sister had a Barbie or two, I had Big Jim stuff. But for the most part I remember books being about as gendered as Frisbees and croquet sets. We both read all the Judy Blume books we could get. In fact, my sister had a boxed set of her paperbacks, which included both Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as well as Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, and if ever there were kids’ books that I would have thought would have been kept separate fairly strictly by gender, it would have been those two. But we both read The Phantom Tollbooth and the Misty of Chincoteague books and countless others, including several of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books.
I guess gender-marketing kids’ books must be a relatively recent development. Or maybe I was sheltered in an oddly idealistic reading community, which sounds utterly absurd on its face to me. Still, I never witnessed anyone getting bullied or demeaned for something he or she was reading, so maybe that’s just another way in which my childhood was more idyllic than I realized.
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I remember reading basically everything I found when I was a kid, being something of a book tramp. Having a sister, that included a lot of books ‘for girls’ including the Ramona & Beezus books (which I liked). Sweet Valley Sugar High, not so much.
I might have caught some grief from other kids about my book choices, though the town I grew up in the grief was more about my choice to read books than the actual content. Content related bullying requires some actual knowledge of said content.
My 3 year old likes pink and wears it on occasion. His older brother simply won’t - though he did when he was 3. Classmates are an issue, and a desire not to stand out or be the butt of jokes. It sucks and I do what I can to counteract it, but there is only so much possible. I also DO NOT want my kid to suffer for my views (I think it doesn’t matter what people think, he thinks it does). I am hoping in time he won’t worry about the assholes, but that could take 30 years.
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As I was making a slushy with our Snoopy Sno-Cone machine tonight, my 4 year old son told me he wanted to have Lucy’s hair style.
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Now you mention it, I’d have wanted Lucy’s hair myself, far more than either Charlie Brown’s squiggle or Linus’ bad combover.
Come to think of it, Lucy’s the only one with a hairstyle I remotely like. Your kid has excellent taste.
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What about this He-Man?
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I think that’s very laudable of you. It’s a pretty tough dilemma as a parent. It’s a fine line to walk between guiding children towards what we’ve experienced as- and feel is- right and outright expecting them to fight battles on our behalf.
I was always thankful for the way my mother handled things when I was ostracized at school. She was extremely sympathetic to the fact that going against the flow and being singled out totally sucks (she had had a bad time in school herself) and that it was a natural reaction to want to fit in. But she also communicated that if one starts to compromise his/her own self just for others’ acceptance, bit by bit, one can wake up one day and no longer be anywhere like who he/she wanted to be in the first place. There was no pressure from her yet she managed to express the importance of making that important choice for myself.
My mother would probably say she had no idea what she was doing. But I think that what she did was being totally honest and supportive, and it worked out very well. I hope I can manage it as well when the time comes.
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Kudos to your mom - it is harder than you think. A few times I’ve stumbled when I expect one of the kids to live up to expectations that I still struggle to meet myself.
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I thought the same thing. I grew up reading Beverly Clearly books; Ribsy was my gateway drug. But the adventures of Henry Huggins led me, without ever thinking twice, to stories of Beezus and Ramona. When Ramona Quimby Age 8 came out and the book truck came around I bought a copy. The fact that it was about a girl a few years younger than I never bothered me.
La bite. 'nuf said
I was
The only book gendering that I remember from growing up was that the Hardy Boys were for boys and Nancy Drew was for girls. They were like the He-Man and She-Ra of childrens detective/adventure literature.
As I grew into a teenager there were more books that were clearly aimed at girls (Babysitter Diaries, Sweet Valley High, etc…), but by that point I was reading a lot of SF that didn’t care what kind of person you were and didn’t have interest in those books anyway.
I tried Nancy Drew, my issue was that the mysteries just weren’t as interesting to me. One involved a theft of charge plates, which took me forever to figure out they meant credit cards.
Of course, a the same could be said about many of the Hardy Boys, but the ratio of interesting ones was just higher.
You’re right; I’d forgotten about those. We had a great-aunt who gave us a few of each series, and sure enough, my sister got the Nancys and I got the Hardys.
But we both read them both.
