angry* Surviving IN SPACE.
* Surviving IN THE DESERT.
* Surviving BEING BITTEN BY VENOMOUS REPTILES.
* Surviving YOUR SUDDEN AND INEVITABLE POP STAR LIFE.
I...what?
A little context for you, because context is to my crankiness as the Great Pumpkin is to the Sacred Patch: yesterday was Wednesday, better known around these parts as "Seanan goes to the comic book store" day. We went to the comic book store. I picked up my books (new issues of The Boys and Hack/Slash, new trades of Chew and American Vampire), and prowled the shelves, looking to see what else had arrived.
In the "family friendly" section, I found two books I hadn't seen before: Boys Only How To Survive Anything, and its natural mate, Girls Only How To Survive Anything. They were, naturally, somewhat pink and blue, but I don't have a moral objection to pink, and if they were going to be all gendered about things, I supposed having "gender appropriate" colors made sense. I picked up Boys Only and flipped through it.
Surviving disasters, natural and man-made. Surviving conflicts and accidents and on the space shuttle and monsters. Surviving, you know, shit that can kill you. Works for me. I put down Boys Only and picked up Girls Only. Where I learned to survive...
Breakouts. Becoming a pop star (and the inevitable carpal tunnel from signing all those autographs). Saying I'm sorry (with homemade lip balm). Identifying a frenemy. Surviving, you know, shit that generally doesn't leave you dead.
Can you guess when I started seeing red?
Now look. I get that we're a culture that thinks boys and girls should always like different things, and that we start reinforcing that from a very early age. I get that to some degree, on average, boys and girls do like different things. It's by no means universal, but things like the Brony movement aside, you do have gendered majorities for many activities and interests. Fine. But you know where that breaks down? When we tell girls, through implication, that they shouldn't know how to survive in the desert. Knowing how to handle, gasp, pimples is so much more important.
Not every girl needs to know how to deal with venomous reptiles, just like not every boy needs to know how to base jump. Because of differing interests and activities, I could have believed as much as 40% deviation between the books. Teach the boys how to tie a tie, and the girls how to fix runs in the nylons, fine. It's cisgendered and assumes so much, but it makes societal sense, if you're dividing the books by gender (and I'm almost in favor of that, just so that they don't give all the action illustrations to boys, and all the pretty or panicked illustrations to girls). Understand that gendering is problematic and try to be reasonable.
But we are talking 95% deviation. The only activity they had in common? Escaping from a zombie. Because...fuck, I don't know. Because zombies are the only truly gender-neutral threat in the world, apparently. Deserts only fuck you up if you have a penis. Frenemies (how I hate that word) only endanger your reputation if you have tits. But zombies? Man, they will fuck you up, no matter what you've got.
I hate this increasing insistence that boys and girls are alien species, coming together only to do icky romance dances of ickiness, and make more boys and girls to never understand each other at all. Girls can like snakes. Boys can like looking nice for dates. And that doesn't mean a damn thing but "we are all individuals, we will all like and want and do different stuff."
At least we're all allowed to know how to fight zombies.
May 3 2012, 23:46:49 UTC 5 years ago
*cheer*
*conga line dance of extreme approval* <---- I think I should get Aeslin mice to do this one. It is very hard to conga alone.
"I hate this increasing insistence that boys and girls are alien species, coming together only to do icky romance dances of ickiness, and make more boys and girls to never understand each other at all."
I cannot like this statement enough. I have pretty strong feelings about "what we are taught to like" versus "what we will naturally gravitate towards," largely I expect due to being raised by a feminist who could knit and do macrame and such (that being my father) and a free-thinker who enjoyed manly and outdoorsey pursuits like fishing and hunting and mowing the lawn (that being my mother). Having been left largely to my own devices, I realized I like boy things (like giant robots and muscle cars) and girl things (like pink: I'm not sure I want a pink giant robot, but frankly if you will give a giant robot I don't really care what color it is).
This doesn't bother me but it drives me bonkers that it bothers other people, and in fact that people who otherwise love me occasionally grab me by the proverbial ear and instruct me in 'how to act like a lady.' I act like a perfectly fine lady; I just don't want to spend five hundred dollars on a pair of painful shoes but probably would spend it learning how to jump out of an airplane or how to more effectively wave a sword around, how does that make me not a lady? IT MAKES ME AN AWESOME LADY. SO THERE.
Clearly someone needs to swap the books covers in the interest of readjusting warped social expectations.
May 7 2012, 15:50:32 UTC 5 years ago
I'll tell you one thing, though---it's a whole lot easier to like things when they aren't pushed on you. I spent my teen years often being forced into dresses for certain occasions and hated it. Once I gained adulthood and the option to wear, say, pantsuits with my steel-toe construction boots, well, now all of a sudden it's a lot more tolerable to wear a skirt or dress and heels sometimes. Ditto cooking, which I resisted for several years because "you'll need to learn so you can cook for your husband," but on my own and with the addition of my tendency to make things explode, is fun.