boys vs. girls

This may be a long rant...just warning you.

In my Child Development class today we were talking about gender differences. A lot of the things we talked about made sense, but there is one area, which my prof mentioned briefly, which always makes me angry. The way we still have "boy toys" and "girl toys," and other things that are gender defined. I realize that no matter what we do, these types of gender disticntions are still going to exist, but the way we deal with them still bothers me.

What bothers me most is that generally it has become acceptable for girls to take part in "boy" activities and play with "boy toys" but the reverse is not true. Little girls can, luckily, play Little League, soccer and basketball. It is perfectly acceptable in our society for girls to wear boy colors and play with boy toys (I got tired of the quotation marks). Giving girls toy trains or cars or trucks for her birthday is no big deal. We have little to no problem allowing our daughters to do boy things or girl things.

However, we don't allow our boys these same options. For the most part little boys are not encouraged to take ballet. Boys wearing pink are almost unheard of. Giving a boy a doll to play with is highly rare. I know the father of two young kids, a boy and a girl, who cringes when anyone mentions buying his son a doll for his birthday, yet he has no qualms when his daughter is given Matchbox cars or building blocks. Why the hypocrisy?

This does not stop when children grow up. We generally tend to find it acceptable for adolescent girls to be tomboys, but sissy is a definite putdown for an adolescent male. Female professional athletes are praised (as they should be) but male ballet dancers or ice skaters are mocked or assumed to be gay. We expect our female politicians to embody male characteristics of strength, unemotionality and toughness. Yet we find emotional, sensitive male politicians to be soft and undesirable.

What really bothers me is that I feel that this signals a deeper problem. We continue to value the charcteristics we denote as male and put down those associated with females. I feel that these seemingly innocent facade is hiding the belief that it is OK for our females to act male, because male is the "favorable" position and their charcteristics are "better." Since women are "below" men it is all right for them to "raise" themselves to the higher position of men. However for a male to act "female" is unfavorable because the male is already in the higher position and should not lower himself to the level of the female.

While we have certainly come leaps and bounds by allowing females to choose traditionally male or female activities, we still have a ways to come to allow our males the same choices. Is anyone still reading? Sorry to go on and on and this is probably very rambly, but something just need to be said :) (P.S. I also wrote a reaction paper about this in my Diversity in Education class, which may be one reason I had so much to say :)