Dressing Up?

You go Eddie!

I can so relate to this because when I was a girl trousers were really meant for men. I wore ski pants and had short hair and so I got called "son" occasionally. Girls were really meant to wear dresses and have long hair, which I quite liked some of the time but dresses are rubbish for climbing trees.

And now women can wear trousers but men are not supposed to wear skirts. Unless they're kilts. The logic of this is, well actually there is no logic in it.

The article where I found this talks about "non-cisgendered men" wearing dresses but I don't see why anyone has to be labelled according to the clothes they sometimes like to wear. When I was a girl I didn't want to wear trousers because I wanted to be a man, I wore trousers (and still do) because I like trousers. In the same way, why on earth can't men wear skirts and dresses and sparklies without being labelled? Maybe they just like them. Sometimes I like wearing them too.

Books For Boys And Girls

People pressurising bookshops to stop labelling books as "for girls" or "for boys" just don't understand: gendered children's books are easier to sell than non-gendered ones.

So that's all right then.

What women have been waiting for

Do you sometimes write with a pen? Maybe not your novel, screenplay, blog post or
pornmagazine article, but perhaps a shopping list or love letter?

Up till now, women have had to struggle with heavy, clunky pens made for men's tough, calloused hands. But no longer! Say hello to the BIC for her pen, made specially for a woman's - Agh! Sorry. I can only stand so much of this drivel, even if it is me writing it.

Do go and look at the pens on amazon, though. The reviews, as always, are hysterical. And thank you to Sociological Images for drawing my attention to it. Their article has more examples (some NSFW) of unnecessary gendering in advertising.

Chicks in Science

I'm all for getting more women into science and for busting gender-boundaries in general, but I'm not sure that Chicks in Science is the best way to do it. It's a hugely popular scheme that gets girls interested in science by offering them pink hard hats to wear, cookery books with recipes "that Einstein might have cooked", and nail varnish*. Yup. No quarks or protons here, but get your pinny on, dear, if you want to be a scientist.

Or is it good because it's popular? What do you think?

*The nail varnish changes colour in the sun. But still.

Making girls into boys

Photo from Sociological Images

Did you know that in Afghanistan if you don't have any sons you can designate one of your daughters as a boy? You see, girls can't go out in public without a chaperone or work outside the home, but a girl that's classed as a boy can, and what's more she can chaperone her sisters so that they can go out and run errands. I read about it here and it's an article worth reading.

I don't quite know what to make of it. I think it shows that the status quo can be so embedded that challenging it feels impossible. The families don't let girls do the forbidden things, they have to create a 'boy' instead. It also tells me that people will perform any kind of mental gymnastics to enable them to support the way things are.

What I can't help wondering is if girls can do those things when classed as boys why can't they all be allowed to chop off their hair and dress as boys with all the freedoms that allows.

Sexual stereotypes strike again

I'm always amused when someone makes wild statements about men's or women's capabilities and then they're shown to be wrong.

Rob Thurman is a woman who writes from a male Point Of View. She guest posted over at Talk in the Shadows and wrote:

I even once received a fan mail that said ‘thank God, finally a man writes a male pov. Women can’t do it.’

Of course they can't.

It's so lovely to see the stereotype being proved wrong.

Men are from Mars... aren't they?

Actually, no. For an interesting insight into how much "research" goes into gender stereotyping, I recommend this Mind Hacks article.

It seems the secret to finding differences between the sexes is to ignore any actual evidence. Oh, and don't be put off from relating human behaviour to animal brain structures that humans don't actually have. No one will know the difference anyway.

Did you know that:

testosterone drives the "Man Trance"-- that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts (from the article by Louann Brizendene)

No? Maybe Mind Hacks can explain.

Are there any scientific studies on whether hooter staring is related to testosterone levels? (Sadly) No.

The trouble with these sort of articles is that they have a spurious authenticity and soon the "testostone makes you look at breasts" meme will be all over the internet.

I agree with Mind Hacks.

Please make it stop.
 

Gender in the virtual world

When you're online, you can be free from the constraints of age and gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, young or old, everyone relates to you according to your words and not your physical being.

Well, that's what I thought when I first started using the internet but I found out that it isn't that simple.

In the past, a lot of people assumed that fairy hedgehog was the name for a gay man. There was one particular man who was amazed when he found out that I was female. He said, "You're too logical to be a woman." He was never as friendly to me after that which I regretted.

More recently, I've found out that someone online is not the gender that I thought they were and it affects how I relate to them. It made me realise how differently I respond to men and women even when gender doesn't matter. It's not something I'm proud of but it's the way it is.

Given that people respond to us differently according to the gender they believe us to be, and that if we don't reveal our gender people will make assumptions about it, do you think it's our responsiblity to correct those sort of assumptions, or not?

Does sex matter?

I'm just finishing Sunstroke by Jesse Kellerman. Now, living in the UK I'm used to the name "Jessie" being a girl's name and I don't know anyone who has the name "Jesse". So I read it as though the author was a woman, not a man.

When I came to a sex scene I thought: "I don't really believe sex can be like that for a woman". I checked the author's name, and sure enough, it was "Jesse" - a female name. I thought: "Hey, what about that! It's a woman writing it so maybe that's how it is for her. Oh well, you live and learn."

Later on, when I looked at the name again, I realised that it is a guy writing it. There was a clue on the back cover:

The author is the son of mega-selling thriller writers Faye Kellerman and Jonathan Kellerman

so really I should have known. When I realised it was written by a man, I went back to thinking that he really wasn't any good at writing sex from the female point of view.

So I wondered if you notice the gender of the person writing the book you're reading. And if you do, does it matter?

Getting critiques

My science fiction opening chapter is up for review at Critique Circle and I'm realising how hard it is to avoid an info dump and yet to convey information. No one has realised that my Main Character is female and everyone makes the assumption that she is male. Clearly that says a lot about the default setting in our society but sadly it also tells me that my writing skills are not as honed as I'd hoped for. How do I keep the first person voice, but tell the world that I'm a she? In real life I don't often find the need to do that.

Back to the drawing board. I do like getting critiques, though. It matters a lot to me to know how my writing comes across to an audience.