www.pinkstinks.co.uk (http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk) is a great website.
It is a (sane and organised) group fighting to provide proper, decent role models for girls and take away the tyranny and small mindedness of 'the pink aisle'.
It is also running a website for girls called cool to be me (www.cooltobe.me/cooltobe.me/HOme.html (http://www.cooltobe.me/cooltobe.me/HOme.html))
The whole point is that girls can have more important things to think of then fluffy hair.
Cool.
(Gosh, what a waste of a post. But I really do agree that girls shouldn't have to be "pinkified" as they put it.)
Definitely awesome! I've always felt very lucky to have parents who didn't ever think I should have to wear pink dresses and play with barbies. ;D
A celebration of tomboys
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/27/tomboys-girls-family (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/27/tomboys-girls-family)
Awesome site, auto-barbie shopping should be banned either way.. Though, I don't see a 'bluebites' version popping up any time soon.
Also enjoyed the tomboy article - couple of things I can relate to there, but same as above; tomboy's seem to be more accepted than 'sissy's'. So really, no matter how it's boxed, pro's always have con's right across the table.
Wow I really love all of that! :)
When I was a little girl I used to exist rather firmly in the barbies, ballet, and pink party frocks sector - but I think that was really because of my physical anomilies. It was just my way of me fighting for my right to be female and over egging it a bit ;D
In the decades since SRS I have unashamedly always been the down to earth slightly tomboyish one! One of my very old friends kind of wryly remarked once, "you just had to have a sex change and become a girl in order to become able to be one of the boys, didn't you?" which I found highly amusing because I knew exactly what he meant. As a child I never was one of the boys, now I can be, and yet I wouldn't ever want to do it in a male body! - Yeah I know I'm messed up ;D
I can, and indeed do, occassionally enjoy also playing girly - but it's kind of best enjoyed in small doses... and most of the time I like to be on the "sensible, practical and down to earth" end of the female spectrum. Kind of tomboy without ever spilling over into butch territory!
Such is the life of a modern GGG. In fact I think it's most definitely a case of cooltobeme ;)
I have to say the confidence and happiness that radiate out of your posts make me smile.
no_id sort of lays out the next challenge, though. Perhaps the more crucial side of things is to open up practical and interesting "masculine" ideas and not force femininity on girls and women, but the greater difficulty is opening up practical and interesting "feminine" ideas and not force masculinity on boys and men. Without tearing down the roles for both females and males alike, people will continue to treat them differently, and it will unnecessarily complicate how they see TGs (since the male role will filter interpretation of the person at some point).
And while the wordplay is clever, the lines on the t-shirts are not answers. Successful people are not just "not princesses" or "role models." The former is simply an exclusion and really only draws attention to the idea of girls as princesses. And being a "role model" is a consequence of doing something noteworthy: positive examples may include becoming doctors, teachers, business executives, engineers, soldiers, activists, athletes, and entertainers. Granted, you don't want to get into forcing any kids into any specific career either, but there has to be a more neutral way to handle them until they are ready to take responsibility for their own expressions.
It just seems off. If one wants girls to enjoy the possibilities open to boys, it's not really enough to just show "girl power" and invert the traditional role. One has to show men and women seamlessly taking on responsibilities with regard to their own abilities and desires without fussing about gender. At some point one may have to acknowledge there will be prejudice, but the best way to break down roles is to actually break them down (rather than just edit or manipulate them).
Hey! I like pink!
(I like having choices also)
Kendall
Now you see I had absolutely no chance on this. :D
I come from a family where my grand mother would spend her time making useful gadgets and doing metal work in her shed whilst my grandfather cleaned the house. In the mid 1920's my maternal grandmother flew across the Andes in a Biplane, whilst her sister my great aunt Joyce was a single mother (and by all accounts quite possibly at very least a bisexual woman) who, to support her children, drove trucks for a living! (not exactly a common occupation for women back in the 1920s'). Joyce had lied about her age during the first world war and aged just 14 had served on the front line driving heavy ambulances!
My mother was a BBC engineer, who later became a producer. She could wire plugs and do DIY with the best of them whilst my father sewed, cooked, handmade all the curtains for our home, and was an expert at flower arranging.
Heck my great great aunt Charlotte Angas Scott (of Girton college) was technically in 1880 the first woman to sit the cambridge tripos exam and effectively graduate from Cambridge University. In 1885 she was only the second woman in the world to hold a doctorate in mathematics and at the age of 27 emigrated to become the first professor of Analytical Geometry at the newly formed Bryn Mawr college in Pennsylvania, meanwhile one of my great uncles was a cross dresser who killed himself because he couldn't cope with life as a man.
Needless to say I am writing a screenplay entitled "Great Scott" about the life of my great great aunt. You can read a short article about her here http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/scott.htm (http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/scott.htm)
So for like FOUR generations our family tree is literally littered with scores of both men and women who exhibited cross gender or gender binary non conforming behaviour and rejected the social norms of their time.
I am the way I am because quite literally it is deeply ingained in my blood and very genetics to be so. The other inevitable consequence of that is that I am exceptionally proud of my non conforming ancestry, and indeed when I did what I did they were not just accepting but I think actually positively proud of me too. :)
I do love reading your posts Jenny, they always make me smile.
Wow, Jenny, that's quite some ancestry! :o Wish mine was that interesting!
Regarding Pinkstinks, it puzzles me that while tomboyism is pretty widely accepted in young girls, still in every clothes shop there is the Pink Section where all the girls' clothes are. And, lo and behold, there is not a single item of clothing there that is not pink. What are the marketing people trying to do? Do they think that girls will not want clothes that are (le gasp) a different colour!? I dunno, I just assumed that seeing as tomboyism is fairly common and accepted, shops would cater for that. Apparently not. So it's wonderful that an organised group like Pinkstinks are actually campaigning to do something about it! Even if their t-shirts are naff (no child should be given a t-shirt proclaiming 'future role model'! What pressure!). :)
But in general, though their clothes come in a range of colours (except pink), I do think that at this point in history boys are more limited in how they can act than girls. A girl can act like a total boy and no-one will bat an eyelid, but if a boy so much as wears a skirt, there's OBVIOUSLY something wrong with him. Unfortunately, that's just the way society is at the moment. I do believe its getting better (for example, a boy in a pink shirt now does not cause that much of an uproar) but still, that will be the real battle because it is more deep-rooted. In the case of girls, opinions have already been changed and it just remains for the market to follow suit, but for boys...
And yes, for true freedom from gender stereotypical constraints, I think it is unwise to fight for the liberation of one without the other. Unfortunately, we will probably have to wait a few years before that becomes possible.
I saw a slightly more advanced version of this on the TV this afternoon. For those of you who don't live in the uk, we're running up to a general election...possibly the most hotly contested in decades, so it's all over the news. cue this advert...a vague montage of symbols connected with the election, which then cuts to a picture of the cover of heat magazine (trashy gossip thing, not worth lining your pet hamsters cage with let alone reading) and a voice over that uttered the words "Forget all the boring stuff...posh and becks exclusive, only in this weeks heat"
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGH!!!!!
That's awesome, definitely going to check those sites out.
Jenny, I think I may be your mirror image :) One of the things I've noticed since I began coming out is that I'm becoming increasingly comfortable with "feminine" things, at least around people who see me as male. I actually even kind of like (certain shades of light) pink. My five-year-old self is screaming at me for saying that, but he knows it's true.
And I hear you about having awesome women in the family. Both my grandmothers (actually all four of my grandparents) served in the Canadian military in WWII. And my mother's a mathematician who graduated from MIT in 1972. My female cousins are all in male-dominated careers where they excel.
Our men were always pretty gender-conforming though - they're the very straight, white, conservative-looking, hockey-playing, Scots-Canadian blue-collar men. But they befriend mostly gay men, marry military women, and raise daughters to be pilots and military officers and mathematicians and scientists.
Where do I fit in? I'm not sure - I got the "girl" treatment (that is, I was expected to be brilliant and talented and eccentric) but identified with the "boy" personality much more (that is, I'm not terribly eccentric, I'm really pretty boring, and while I might be good at some stuff I prefer not to make it terribly obvious).
Quote from: kyril on April 14, 2010, 03:26:57 PM
Jenny, I think I may be your mirror image :) One of the things I've noticed since I began coming out is that I'm becoming increasingly comfortable with "feminine" things, at least around people who see me as male. I actually even kind of like (certain shades of light) pink. My five-year-old self is screaming at me for saying that, but he knows it's true.
And I hear you about having awesome women in the family. Both my grandmothers (actually all four of my grandparents) served in the Canadian military in WWII. And my mother's a mathematician who graduated from MIT in 1972. My female cousins are all in male-dominated careers where they excel.
Our men were always pretty gender-conforming though - they're the very straight, white, conservative-looking, hockey-playing, Scots-Canadian blue-collar men. But they befriend mostly gay men, marry military women, and raise daughters to be pilots and military officers and mathematicians and scientists.
Where do I fit in? I'm not sure - I got the "girl" treatment (that is, I was expected to be brilliant and talented and eccentric) but identified with the "boy" personality much more (that is, I'm not terribly eccentric, I'm really pretty boring, and while I might be good at some stuff I prefer not to make it terribly obvious).
Yeah funnily enough Kyril I was thinking pretty much the same when I was "replying" to your post in the Male Privileges lost thread.
You realise that post of yours has a lot to answer for don't you? It was while I was replying that it struck home to me to just how great an extent I was somehow managing to enjoy the best of both worlds. Since my SRS 26 years ago I seem to have managed to enjoy all the male privileges that I would ever have cared about - and the few that I have been denied are ones that I never wanted anyway! So in a very real way you've made an androgyne of me!
Cheers mate! (I guess?) ;D
LOL! Cheers :)