blargblog

Hey Kevin,

Much congrats on your son. He is indeed very cute in his new suit. Nice fire engine red shoes.

If you want to talk gender socialization, just compare these pictures with the pictures of Matt and Kim's baby daughter Sidney. Actually, those ones aren't as strikingly girl clothes as many of her outfits, but still...

Please promise me that five years down the line, you will never ever say that the degree to which Owen acts boyish has convinced you that gender is innate. :)

Thanks, Chaz!

As for clothing: It's funny. Jenn and I go through Target, Babys R Us and other venues looking for clothes. They're all damn cute. And I keep things in mind like "Is that too boyish? Is there too much blue?" That sort of thing. Yet I love the jumpers with trains, because I have always had a thing for trains. And construction themed patterns with dump trucks and bulldozers and tools are so incredibly adorable.

Of course, when I wander over to the girl's section, I don't find those things. And I know if I had had a daughter, I would avoid the frilly, girly stuff as much as I could. She'd get the dinosaurs and the rocket ships and the dump trucks and the fire engines. Yet I can't see dressing up Owen in pink dresses or whatever. I think it's cuz I tend not to like women's clothing in general—even though part of me is jealous that women have more opportunities to glam it up if they choose.

But no, I would never tell you that gender, per se, is innate. Whatever contribution biology makes to gender is miniscule and overwhelmed by history and society. At best, I think there is a general tendency of our human race to codify distinctions of sex with manners of dress and decoration. One century, men wear wigs, stockings, corsettes and gobs of make-up. Another century, they sport buzzcuts, starchy white shirts and narrow ties. Me, I like t-shirts, jeans and maybe a sweater when it gets cold. Pretty unisex, that.

We're lol'ing here, what a handsome guy! Jenn looks great too, glad to see she's looking healthy and happy after the c-section!

At any rate, check your email mistah!

Also pfft to you and Charles, Sydney likes pink! She's also got lots of sporty clothes! She wears blue too! Damn pink-o-phobes.

Sydney is beautiful in whatever she's wearing. And pink seems to suit her. I merely express my own personal dislike of the color, not pass judgement on anyone who dresses their daughter up in it. I know Jenn would overrule me and put our (hypothetical) daughter in all sorts of girly stuff, cuz she likes that sort of thing.

As for gender codification via color, I go back and forth between thinking its an insidious plot by the patriarchy and thinking its a silly issue altogether. Why our culture breaks boys and girls down into pinks and blues remains a mystery to me. There are people who think such divisions are essential to defining fundamental identities of sex. That's silly. Color is color. By the same token, however, how much harm is really done to a little girl wearing pink so long as her parents raise her to be a thoughtful, caring and independent individual? Same goes for boys wearing blue, yo. I could butch my son up like a coal miner, but I'll be damned if he isn't literate, educated, politicized and kind to all creatures great and small.

(And yes, I saw the email. Will check calendar & with Jenn's itinerary and get back to you soon.)

Yep, actually we had a conversation about this thread and it ended up spawning into a homeschooling conversation. Matt and I are pretty much decided that Sydney will be homeschooled if possible, but I'm sure it will end up being quite a challenge.

I am not a pinkophobe! Besides being a pinko, I also wear pink. I know Sidney wears things besides pink, (although her clothes do tend to run to the pastely), and I know that just because you don't dress Owen in frilly pink smocks doesn't mean you won't raise him to eventually understand gender as a social construct (and one that he is allowed to construct for himself). I know that you understand that gender is some unknowable mix of biology and social construction, with social construction running strongest. I have simply known too many people who have fallen under the sway of the dark side (believing in the innateness of gender) after watching the effects of their gender modelling and molding, without ever recognizing what it was they were doing.

When Kim and I were chatting about this the other night, she brought up a study in which 1 year olds could be distinguished between boys and girls with a very high succes rate by placing them behind a gate. Boy 1 year olds overwhelmingly attacked the gate, while girls overwhelmingly did not. To me, this immediately leads me to think that boy babies are generally rough housed much more than girl babies, and that boy babies are much more likely to be tolerated if they strike out at things around them.

If a year from now, Owen strikes out at the gate, and Sydney doesn't, remeber that even in the hands of progressives with a sophisticated understanding of gender, these differences in upbringing are almost certainly still going on (although Matt is an ardent rough houser, so we'll see how that influences Sidney's upgringing).

Well we could run an experiment next November :) Wouldn't it be funny if Owen cried at the gate and Sydney attacked. Even better if they were dressed in red overalls and a yellow t-shirt and had little speech bubbles miraculously appear over their heads, cursing us for our very exhistence and refusing to play our little game!

... I think I've watched too much Family Guy.

...remeber that even in the hands of progressives with a sophisticated understanding of gender, these differences in upbringing are almost certainly still going on...

Indeed. I roughhouse the boy already. Oddly, many months ago when I suspected we would have a girl (demonstrating Jenn's better intuition, she guessed boy), I thought our daughter would be tom-boyish. Just like her mama. And owing to the fact that her papa recoils at the sight of overly feminine things, at least of the "frail, weak, retiring lily" variety. There are other conceptions of "feminine", of course—like "compassionate, respectful, attentive, constructive yet no less strong willed"—but the most culturally current one is disempowering. Weakness may be the key fear here for me. In my son, such a quality would be worrisome for me, but in my daughter, even more so, because the world is so horribly hard on women. In sum, were Owen my daughter, I'd probably roughhouse a bit, too. Maybe not as much, but still enough to put a fire in her belly. ;)

(Note: In the above, the gender mediations that occur for members of the Trans community has, at least to my mind, been bracketed. For them a rather more complicated and nuanced range of associations applies. Not to say that non-trans folk like myself don't have a complex field of gender identity to negotiate, but that it is of a lesser degree owing to history, social construct, yaddy yaddy yadda. Still on first cuppa joe, so forgive my likely incoherence.)