I have 3 sons, 1 daughter. She is super girly without me having to encourage it in any way. There are plenty of toy trucks and building blocks around and she always makes things for the stuffed animals to sleep in. She's tucked her brother's ride-on airplane into bed and kissed it goodnight. She's rocked and sang to a firetruck. She prefers her stuffed animals and nurturing (like playing with a doctor kit and giving everyone bandaids and checkups) over "boy" play. She'll play with boy toys, just not in the same way they do. She's only 2-1/2 and since she only has brothers I can't say it's a specifically learned behavior.

Same as with my neighbors' kids.

And 2 and 1/2...Joyce Benenson finds the sex differences in very young children, and Richard Wrangham and Sonya Kahlenberg find them in chimps.

Reminds me of when the Iranians banned Barbies in favor of traditional dolls and one little girl that was interviewed bluntly said those traditional dolls were frumpy and fugly.

I liked those traditional dolls way better damnit.

People in general are very good at ignoring things they disagree with.

Sometimes I think that violence, sex, and inconsistency are our main traits.

To be fair there is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature in general that underlies feminist socialist thinking.

These people also think economically that supply drives demand, and not the other way around.

Hilarious, Ppen. Had to go find a link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2089392/Ban-Barbie-Police-Iran-shut-toy-shops-selling-U-S-doll-crackdown-Western-culture.html

Feminists at heart are socialists or marxists.

They'll never understand the value of a market based economy until they've stood in very long bread lines because the command and control economy can't figure out how to make enough bread to go around.

I'll be honest, my wife and I both kinda wanted a tomboy. Our soon-to-be three-year-old daughter had different ideas. We never bought her any pink clothes, but we were given plenty, and those are all her favorite. While she does enjoy some boyish activities, she much prefers playing with her baby dolls and watching girly cartoons.
All in all, I'm glad I gave up on my dreams of a tomboy rather quickly. I wouldn't have her any other way than how she is.
What bugs me is how I have friends who are often going on about how toy companies "Perpetuate Thoughts and Ideas" that are harmful to kids. I do my best to just roll my eyes and then give my daughter a hug.

This is highly amusing because my mom tried to keep me from having toy weapons at all, and my relatives largely complied (I was the first boy on my mother's side out of the cousins). Then, suddenly, a rolling pin became a sword or a gun, a stick a spear, and so on and so forth. She gave up by the time I hit 6.

Trouble is, as I heard, Barbie was based on a German sex doll (yes, they existed more than half a century ago), so it shouldn't be surprising that even women and mothers who don't know that aren't happy with the impossible proportions Barbie has.

From the HuffPost:

"If Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5'9" tall, have a 39" bust, an 18" waist, 33" hips and a size 3 shoe."

(Granted, another source said she'd be six feet tall - but either way, it's a painfully unrealistic image to live up to. Another source says her waist is no bigger than her thigh - something I only see in cartoon characters such as Daisy Mae from "L'il Abner"! In DM's case, her waist is SMALLER than that.)

And regarding giving tools as presents - since tools, per se, are not toys anyway, it would seem that the way to get uninterested kids interested is to have them use those tools WITH their parents on regular jobs. If the parents don't use hammers and such every week or so, why would uninterested kids think of it as fun? (Same goes for cooking meals from scratch with careful measurements - if parents don't enjoy doing that regularly, neither will kids.)

At the same time, though, since housework isn't as tiring as it was a century ago, reluctant girls definitely need to be pushed to play outdoors, if only to get exercise. (Boys need that too, if there are any tempting video games in the house!) Not to mention a long list of things that girls of all ages might think they shouldn't have to learn - but they do. (House repairs, changing the oil, money management, etc.)

Finally, one has to remember that a girl's female friends can influence her in ways that the friends might think are good - but often are not. From a Deborah Tannen (author of "You Just Don't Understand") 1990 interview:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=8437883

Q: Egalitarian sounds so good. What's the dark side to the way young girls relate?

A: It's that if a girl does something the other girls don't like, she'll be criticized, or even ostracized. That's why when I talk about this, some men say to me: Well, obviously the boys' way is better than the others. Goodwin has two examples of girls who got ostracized--one because she was wearing clothes that were better than the other girls', the other because she skipped a grade of school and she boasted about it. I mean, really--no wonder people talk about women's fear of success!

Q: So you're saying the female mode prevents excellence?

A: It prevents displaying it.

Q: That wouldn't seem to bode well for women's prospects in male-dominated fields like business or politics.

A: Well, what's so depressing is that women are in a double bind. If we talk in ways expected of women, we're thought incompetent, yet if we talk in ways of men, we're called bitches. This doesn't leave a lot of options. And of course there are women who are succeeding, and we all succeed somewhat, but it is frustrating. But as more women get into these fields, things have got to get better...

You can see the full interview here (the other source was censored here and there):

http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/crcii/1_cc-6r.pdf

My biggest complaint with the feminism toy war has always been their belief that "boy things" are BETTER than "girl things." Why is it less to play with a hairdryer than build a skyscraper? Why is it less to sing to a doll than to bang stuff with a hammer? Why is it less to be a kindergarten teacher than to be an engineer?

Both.

There are innate preferences AND there are fashion trends.

Dolls are one thing. Making everything pink is another... We know pink is not innate, In other eras it was a boy color.

People do treat male and female babies differently, if I put my toddler in gender neutral clothes and dont do her hair folks assume she is a boy and treat her very differently than if she has a pigtail and a pink dress

I think the trick is to finding a balance. Letting kids like what they like without pushing them to get there

You know how many Elsa baby clothes there are? You know how many babies there are who know who she is? The marketing starts really early

Why is it less
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Because originally, at least, the vast majority of traditional women's professions paid less, and half a century ago, job discrimination against those women (and minorities) who wanted to get better-paying jobs was rampant. Not to mention the pressure of family and/or friends for women to have children when they probably never really wanted them.

It was said, once, that if you took a group of teen mothers, you'd find that a lot of them were the youngest children in their families, since the youngest child has never lived with a baby and doesn't understand how truly unromantic it is.

Which is not to say that girls should be put down for their choices, of course - just that they need to be constantly reminded to have back-up plans in general, throughout life, since it's foolish for a girl to expect someone to rescue her. I.e., "don't put all your eggs in one basket." (And some things just can't be allowed - such as ignoring it when girls fail their classes at ANY age either because they hate school and reading in general - like their lazy friends, maybe - or because they just want to be taken care of all their lives.)

"If Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5'9" tall, have a 39" bust, an 18" waist, 33" hips and a size 3 shoe."

In the aerospace industry, we used to have running jokes about what we called "Soviet engineering". This referred to the tendency of the government-controlled Soviet design bureaus to build something that worked well at a small scale, then scale it up say 1000x and assume it would work 1000x as well. It displayed a fundamental ignorance, on the part of the apparatchiks who oversaw the bureaus, of the nature of the physical universe -- there are just way too many physical phenomena that do not scale linearly over a large range.

What we have here is the opposite of that. Barbie is shaped the way she is because that's what is necessary for the eye to perceive that an 8" tall doll has the proportions of an adult woman. (Hint: If you take Ken's measurements and scale them up, they don't come out close to an average adult male either. His shoulders and arms are impossibly large compared to his torso.) The root issue that our eyes and brains are not as good at distinguishing details at small scales. If you took Barbie and gave her the precise proportions of an adult woman, even one with Amy's proportions, she'd look like an uncarved block of wood with a couple of dots for eyes. It doesn't scale linearly.

Somebody say Barbie isn't real? Look up Valeria Lukyanova...

"Trouble is, as I heard, Barbie was based on a German sex doll (yes, they existed more than half a century ago), so it shouldn't be surprising that even women and mothers who don't know that aren't happy with the impossible proportions Barbie has.

From the HuffPost:

"If Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5'9" tall, have a 39" bust, an 18" waist, 33" hips and a size 3 shoe."

Who cares? Lenona, when you figure out that every cotton picking thing under the sun, offends SOMEONE, your posts will get a lot shorter.

Freedom is a wonderful thing. If you don't like Barbies, no one is forcing you to buy one.

heh, CousinD hits an interesting nail on the head there about perceived proportions...

I'd have to go digging, but I remember a study about the perceptions of hip to waist ratios in women, and how we perceive fertility, and one of the interesting things was that we can figure out hip/waist ratio on the fly... meaning even if stoneage barbie is walking or running, we can tell fairly well if her hips are close to the right ratio.

That also means if she stops and becomes static, she might be on the hippier[sp?] end of proportions, but the waist ratio is still ok.

Dunno what they did on the male shoulder/waist ratios, but I'm guessin' similar...
Which makes sense within a population. I know a few astonishingly petite Asian women and their proportions are different but not, as CousinD says, just a scaledown.

FWIW Elizabeth Taylor, while shorter was very hourglass like barbie... 36-21-36...

As for the Barbs/LEGO divide... my daughter could have played with legos from the word go, due to having an elder brother (5yrs) who was consumed with them [still is as an adult]... by consumed, I mean the kid has hundreds of sets. [You can always tell at a garage sale, that somebody has gone off to college, or has outgrown lego... you can often get whole sets for a few dollars.]
Meanwhile, daughter likes things with faces... and latches on to lego minifigs, and so would build them a house or whatnot, but then it's the minifigs that play inside. Sometimes even "The Barbs" would visit. They too, often came from garage sales, along with my little ponies. We had the wreck of the Barbie Ferrari, we had the plane... and once I taught her how to braid Barb hair, there was no more insanely frizzy hair you can't do a thing with.
Through it all, sometimes the legos and other of her brother's toys were used, but always in service to living a life, while her brother built things that were used in them selves. Technic, robot systems and many other things, he has created, because they seem interesting to him.

But as things in themselves, rather than things to inhabit and live lives in.

Even now, at 16, she makes things for people to inhabit in SIMS, and sims too, but it's important for the sim to live a life. #1son, hasn't been interested in sims, but he might use the software to build things, and never put a sim in it.

Anecdotes only, of course.
Likewise, daughter hates anything pink, and is more of a punkrock girl. [I bought her her fist combat boots...] Actually both son and daughter share the interest in the color black.

Serve your children by telling them how to find the beginning of things, rather than the ending limitation of things... and they may surprise you with what they like.

Life is always full of wonder, unless you are a control freak. Then, life is scary.

I have to point out that what seems like an impossibly small waist today would have been pretty normal just a few generations ago because women waist trained and wore corsets and other waist-trimming garments from the time they were really young. If I were to put on a "real" corset (with steel boning- not from a mall lingerie store) right now, I could get my waist down at least 5". If you wear one often enough, it modifies your body.

leona, I notice the woman you quoted failed to connect the dots in that the ONLY people holding women down were other women

Also, what would kens proportions be? What would Michelangelo’s David?

I thought Tannen implied, at least, that the ones calling women "incompetent" were men, and that it's OK, among women, to excel, so long as you're very modest about it. Of course, little girls, especially, don't necessarily make that distinction if they're jealous of a girl who did skip a grade and DIDN'T boast about it.

If you read the whole interview, it's clear that she's sympathetic to both sexes. (I've never heard anyone suggest she wasn't, back when she was a lot better known than she is now.)

Freedom is a wonderful thing. If you don't like Barbies, no one is forcing you to buy one.

Posted by: Isab at January 25, 2016 10:39 AM
______________________________________________

I never said anyone is; I have little sympathy for parents who can't tell their children "you want it, you pay for it."

Still, this can still be difficult to implement when, unlike the Frugal Zealot, Amy Dacyczyn, you actually have neighbors living close by. As Ellen Goodman said in 1991:

"Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a research associate at the Institute for American Values, found this out in interviews with middle-class parents. 'A common complaint I heard from parents was their sense of being overwhelmed by the culture. They felt their voice was a lot weaker. And they felt relatively more helpless than their parents.'

" 'Parents,' she notes, 'see themselves in a struggle for the hearts and minds of their own children.' It isn't that they can't say no. It's that there's so much more to say no to.

"Without wallowing in false nostalgia, there has been a fundamental shift. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition."

Barbie was modeled after Lilli, a doll made from a comic book character. She was made as an adult novelty gift. She was called a "sex doll" by feminists, as the comic book character was a high class call girl. The creator of Barbie removed the heavy make up and gave her a different facial expression, made the doll expressly for children.

Saying Barbie is wrong because her origin is a sex doll ( how many Americans know the Lilli doll?) is like saying Christmas is evil because it used to be Saturnalia. Lilli may have been the inspiration, but Barbie was never marketed in tobacco shops and liquor stores as an adult novelty. She was from the outset geared to children.

Another issue with doll design is the cloth thickness doesn't shrink. If Barbie was scaled up her clothes would be several inches thick. If instead you scale the cloth thickness down you end up with incredibly fragile film clothes that tear the moment a kid picks the doll up.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be offended about when you scale a hammer up to human sized proportions. Is the hammer so skinny the clothes fall off? Was the hammer a baby, so it is already correctly proportioned? I would be offended if you used your baby's head to pound a nail into a wall.

This stuff drives me nuts. I am as non-girly as they come. I tried playing mommy once when I was maybe 3 (I have a ridiculously good memory of early childhood) and after tucking in the "baby" couldn't figure out what to do next. So, the whole round of make-belive lasted maybe five minutes.

My daughter likes nail polish and such. No TV here, I don't wear it. So... kinda gonna go with innate.

Girls TEND toward nurture, but it's fine if they don't. Boys tend toward weapons/trucks, but it's fine if they don't. Can we move on yet? Please??
(the later part was aimed at the general masses, not anyone here)

What Shannon said: the existence of a mean does not imply that there are no outliers. And the existence of outliers does not invalidate the mean.

One other things: I am sick and tired of this "women can't be assertive without being called bitches" meme lately. It's a meme that is particularly popular among women who are, frankly, bitches (and other women call them out on it just as much as men do). It is absolutely possible for a woman to be assertive without being called a bitch. It is not possible for a woman to be aggressive and demeaning without being called a bitch. (A man doing the same thing will get labeled as an asshole, and worse.) I think there are a fair number of women who do not understand the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness.

Since we were discussing dancing, I got this thrown in my face recently in a discussion of dance-floor mashers. The metaphorical conversation goes like this:

Me, to female dancer: "If you dislike these guys so much, why do you dance with them? Why don't you say no when they ask?"

Female dancer: "I don't want to get a reputation of being a bitch by saying no."

Me: "But you say no to polite guys all the time. You've said no to me before."

FD: "But I know you're polite and you won't hassle me or go around calling me names. With the pushy guys, it's easier to just give them what they want."

Me: "But that means you're rewarding guys for being pushy. That's the exact opposite of what you claim you want. Don't you think you have to be more assertive?"

FD: "No, I'm a woman and I don't have to do anything. You're a male so you are responsible for their behavior. It's up to you to stop them from being pushy."

Me: "So I'm supposed to police your dance partners, and run the risk of getting in a fight or getting arrested... what's in this deal for me?"

FD: "It doesn't matter what's in it for you. Since you are male, it's your responsibility to society. You owe women for all the trouble that men cause in the world."

This is sadly typical among a certain subset of female dancers. Not all of them, less than half, but a considerable number. (Mostly younger ones, I will add.)

That certainly isn't limited to dancers CD. And it is a major red flag to me. Once I see it I quietly disengage and disassociate. Be it dating or elsewhere. As she made clear, there is nothing in it for you. Every interaction has only downside and no upside. Twenty years later she will be bitching about how men are all jerks and complaining that no one wants to marry her.

"Deborah Rhode recounts a telling anecdote: "One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep.(Rhode,"

Ha! This reminds me of stories of little boys being given dolls and using them in swordfights.

Luj,

"leona, I notice the woman you quoted failed to connect the dots in that the ONLY people holding women down were other women"

Thus the need to find a way to blame men for it.

Fink-Nottle,
"My biggest complaint with the feminism toy war has always been their belief that "boy things" are BETTER than "girl things."

Ah, the misogynist androcentrism of feminism!

Dave, so the problem is that they're scared.

Maybe they shouldn't go places without a date or something.

Or, at Smith we had the "Loser Dance" if you wanted to get rid of a guy, you did this dance move that was a code that sent a message to the other Smithies that you needed rescuing. Someone would come up to you and if they didn't know you they would pretend to, and they'd help you dance away or otherwise escape without a confrontation.

Maybe your friends need something like that.

http://mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/last_time_i_promise_full.jpg

Nail Polish is not innately female.

What IS innate, is a desire to follow current trends.

It is totally normal when you're three to rigidly adhere to gender roles and to have black and white rules about them.

"Dave, so the problem is that they're scared."

They're not scared. They have an entitlement attitude; it's borderline-personality behavior. They are the sort who label civilized men as "boring"; they actually don't mind dancing with the mashers because they get off on the power struggle aspect of dancing with them. For the same reason, they won't complain to management, because if those guys were actually banned, there would be nothing but boring polite men left to dance with. What fun would that be? Fortunately, in the places where I do most of my dancing, I don't see many of these types of women. Dance studios don't usually attract the bar crowd, thankfully.

Experienced partner dancers can usually spot mashers, and woo-girls, as soon as they walk in the door. For a while there was a couple coming to our studio. They were both married and stepping out on their spouses, although no one knew it at the time. I was always leery of her, although I could not put my finger on why; she just seemed like the woo-girl type, manipulative and looking for opportunities to get other people into trouble. One evening she came up to me and asked me for a dance, which was very unusual; I had never known her to ask a guy for a dance. We danced, and in the process she made it a point to rub her rather sizable breasts all over me. I realized quickly that she and her boyfriend had had an argument and she was only dancing with me to make him jealous. That was the first and last time I ever danced with her.

Heterophobes. The word is heterophobes.

HETEROPHOBES.

Adopt this word and use it. Heterophobes.