For real. My 5 y/o stepdaughter loves rockets, and she made her own robot costume out of boxes we had around the house after Christmas.

They're both stiff and erect?

I'm so happy that parents like you are talking to their kids about these issues - even though it sucks that you have to in the first place, and that it's so prevalent/ingrained in our society that they pick it up.

This reminds me of something similar with those little play cell phones. When I worked as a cashier, they had tons of them as impulse items at the checkouts. There was a little boy who really wanted the Princess Ariel phone. It wasn't pink, it was pastel blue and green. His mother absolutely refused to let him have that one. Instead she handed him the Disney Cars phone, which she had me ring up after sometime since the little boy kept putting the Cars one back for the princess one. In the end, the boy did put back the Cars one and left the store with his Princess Ariel phone.

That is so enraging! Nice story of my SO's family.

7yo nephew rides his bike "dangerously" around the driveway - skidding, wheelies - gets rounds of "whoa!" "cool!" and, you know "all boy". The 4yo niece on her little motorized jeep drives around, trying to copy/impress her older brother skids to a(what I thought amazing) stop, fishtailing it to where it just barely misses their picnic table. She gets no round of applause, but "HA HA HA - look, she's already a woman driver!". I had to walk away, apparently I actually had steam coming from my ears.

Oh, and just seeing scrapbooking supplies makes me feel twitchy.

i scrapbook vicariously through my mother and that crap pisses me off as well.

i try to explain things to people based on age/maturity and personality type. my oldest is your typical outgoing, precocious 4yo. my youngest is much more cautious and sensitive and not even two, so he's going to cry more, and want to be with his mama *gawd forbid.* introverts often get the short end of the stick, especially boys.

Michael's is overpriced, anyway. If you have A.C. Moore or Hobby Lobby, try there.

I work with a Pathfinders group (the level after Girl Guides, here in Canada), and we do a scrapbook page every couple meetings, because for one thing, it fulfills a badge, and for another, it's a good way to give the girls some kind of photographic keepsake at the end of the year, since it's usually the leaders who have the camera.

Last night, we did a page for the five-night backcountry camp we did last summer - not a small accomplishment for a batch of 12-14 year old girls, and two adult women. You have no idea how hard I had to search for scrapbooking sticker sets about camping that didn't include the words "Manly!" and "With the Boys!". I finally managed a gender-neutral set from the sale bin, with just campfires and tents, without any words at all. I asked about its position in the sales bin, and was informed that it had been discontinued.

So I guess next time I try to do a camping page with the girls, like maybe for the 10-night hike we're planning next summer, it'll be even harder to find stickers.

I've never heard the phrase "all boy" used in that context before. It seemed to me roughly the equivalent of "girls only" -- kids enjoy their gender exclusivity.

OT: I was told that when I was a kid, my grandma took me to a christian store and told me I could pick out an angel to have. Instead of the cuddly angel dolls, I went straight to a statue of St. Michael slaying the devil. I told her I wanted him because he looked like He-Man. So the saying 'our little angel' in our family is now kind of a joke!

I was hoping I wasn't the only one who saw "sweet cheeks." Now I'm kinda creeped out that there are people who call girls that. I always saw that as a sexual nickname, something I might call my spouse. Maybe I'm just in the wrong circles.

"Sweet cheeks" reminds me of a Powerpuff Girls episode (yes, I did watch that occasionally at one point). As I recall, they're trying to figure out who committed some crime, and Ms. Bellum says, "He called me... Sweet Cheeks!" The girls know only one person would use such an offensive term, so they find him and kick his ass.

Don't really know why that came up...

Yeah, because with our silly little woman-brains, we only have room enough for one issue at a time!

I'm sure that with your superior intellect and life experience you realize that the way children are socialized, and the rhetoric that is employed concerning them, has nothing to do with their self-conceptions, choices, and attitudes toward themselves later in life. Hurray for you, awesome, smug, superior you.

And seriously, mona, have you ever appreciated or agreed with anything you've ever seen on feministing? Every comment I've seen from you has been negative, snarky, and condescending. It leads me to wonder why you spend so much time here, since we're so ignorant and misguided in your view. Maybe your ego just needs the little boost you get from hanging out with people who are always so terribly wrong in order to ridicule and demean them. Kinda like the kids who hang out with the special-ed kids at recess in order to feel better about themselves. I encourage you to check out other blogs on your google machine, as you might find a blog that suits you better, since feminist critiques of pop culture clearly isn't your thing.

Girls get sexualized when they are in diapers anyway, making them "little women" by default. Unfortunately, some adult women are referred to as "girls," infantalizing them.

My stepdaughter and her friends were telling me about how the police officers came to visit their preschool class. Her friend said "there was one policeman and one girl who was also a police." Yep, the female officer wasn't even a woman. So I had this big talk with them on the drive homw about why we say "police officer" and "firefighter" instead of the old gendered terminology. We go so far as to say "snowperson" and "gingerbread person" in our house, 'cause we're geeks like that.

I think it's because the term "woman" implies that menses has begun. I do hear "little lady" a lot, but maybe that's just a southern thing.

I do call my son "little man", but I also called my daughter "little lady". "Little woman" wouldn't work because that's what creepy men call their wives.

But I like the kin-keeping!

I started scrapbooking after my parent's divorce. My mom got "custody" of the pictures which were, like most of ours, in aging, yellowed albums, random boxes and highly disorganized. I took them, organized them, and started making albums for all of us - a "dad and girls," "Dad vanity," "Mom Vanity," "sisters," etc. It was very therapeutic for me and the only chance I had at Keeping kin, since what was left of it was broken. Now, the family photos are in the proper "custody" (Dad with is, mom with hers, sister and I with the ones of each , all four of us with me) with an understanding that if one parent wants nights and weekends, they can have it (gotta have fun with the situation!)

I also like a handwritten letter from my mother or friends. Someday, those will be even more precious to me than they already are. Who saves all of their e-mails? It would be nice if the menfolk wrote nice letters today, too, since the love letters between my grandparents from WWII are like jewels to me.

That's just what I logged on to say. Even the fonts make me want to hurl.

That's just what I logged on to say. Even the fonts make me want to hurl.

How would you do that without having it be anti-pink, girl-stuff is bad, tomboys are better than girly-girls? Ruffles and camo?(Devil's advocate.)

I think it is a slippery slope, but anything new would be welcomed. I would definitely watch your spot on the Today show when you get rich and famous from it!

Oh right, of course. :D

And in her vocabulary, personal attacks and ad hominems are the same as "perspective."

Of course. They can't help but be. They, too, were gendered from toddlerhood (or earlier) on. We talk about "society" but we ourselves ARE society, and there is little escaping ourselves.

Here's the best prescription I can offer well-meaning socialization-deniers to experience that "a-ha!" realization that gender (and ethnic)essentialism is social construction, not Nature: Live for at least three or four months in a country with a society that differs deeply from yours in at least a few fundamental ways (different foods and folk dances and languages are not enough).

They will learn, slowly, that-- "My God! As strongly as I believe women's greater instinct to chat and empathize is biological/instinctual, these people believe the exact opposite: that men are the ones who are instinctually more social and chatty and women are the "naturally" more taciturn, emotionally-reserved ones. And the men in this country/tribe really are 'naturally' chatty and emotional and the women really are reserved and emotionally cautious. I wonder..."

Once you have seen with your own eyes that everything you believed to be true of men and women or "Blacks" or "Whites" as you have constructed them is, in fact, not true of men and women in Cambodia or "Blacks" in Senegal, you begin to question the "Nature" and "Instinct" you once swore were biological and hard-wired.

For me, growing up simultaneously, in both the U.S. and my own non-Western "worlds," I never had this option (curse?) of socialization-blindness. It was apparent to me since very young girlhood that the Western adults in my life behaved, ostensibly "instinctively," very differently the non-Western ones, and that, since they were all of the same species, nothing could satisfactorily explain the vast differences but for the cultural, the social element.