Avoiding gender and sexuality 'norms'

That's fine, Mayaness - I really respect your parenting. It's different to mine in some ways, but different isn't bad.

I think we have many similarities, only differing reasons behind them. I hope we have similarities, I think you sound like you have a good approach and one that I'd like to have! Evolutionary differences don't make sense to me, but hormonal ones do, and tbh it amounts to the same thing. I don't believe you can raise a boy to be a girl or a girl to be a boy, but you can raise them without fear or prejudice and let them be who they are. Yes, I'm making DS aware that, as a man, I expect him to look out for and look after women (and no doubt his wife will apreciate it, she wouldn't marry him if she didn't), but that doesn't belittle women, as we find it rather difficult to ask for help as a rule. Other than that he can do as he wishes. If he wants to be a house-husband that's fine. If he wants to be a train-driver, that's fine. If he wants to take over the world as an evil genius, that's only fine if I get an evil island paradise too LOL.

eta: Salsa, I agree, there's too much emphasis placed on the superficial and not the real. Although I am guilty of telling every baby, toddler and young child how gorgeous they are! Physical looks don't bring happiness anyway, you're always worried that it will fail. At least learning and a personality you can build on! OK, so your body you can too, but who wants a plastic body?

Rosehip - I heard an interview on BBC1 radio years ago (steve wright in the afternoon). Vanessa Williams was the guest. (She was a pop singer back then, now shes an actress on Ugly Betty - just incase no one knows who she is ;) ).
The presenters in the studio all seemed awed by her very attractive features and asked he something along the lines of her being told as she grew up how beautiful looking she was. And she said that she never was. She said her parents never praised her on her looks, only on her practical and academic achievements.
As a teenager that really struck me. Especially probably because I knew that I was told alot growing up by my family that I was very pretty, but never really felt much emphasis was put into encouraging my personality or brains.
It was about 17 yrs ago that I heard the interview but this bits stuck in my memory all this time!
I remember it when I`m sometimes looking at my son and thinking 'what a good looking fella'. It reminds me not to mention that out loud as much as I think it - as he already hears from strangers all the time how 'pretty' (its the longhair lol) he is.

Hmmm. I don't think never praising is the answer either - when we get ready to go out, it's nice to know the effort is worth it. I was never praised on my looks - but then, I was told how dreadful I looked, I'd rather they be ignored really. But I do agree with praising intellect or *real* achievements rather than just what you're born with.

There's nothing wrong with being attractive (or being ugly) so we can't completely ignore how we look, but we need to all be told there should be more to us than our looks. One reason I love t'internet is because we deal with each other as people, rather than how we look.

To me the only true "inity" (femin or mascul) is there in the absence of the opposite sex. So much of modern "inity" is about how we respond to the OTHER sex. Men protect women? When there are no men around WOMEN protect women/themselves. Women nurture? When there are no women around men manage to feed and clothe themselves and will even *gasp* hug one another. XP manages to nurture DD during her time with him just great.

FOr DP and i (who do not yet live together full-time so you may all chug salt while you read this one ;)) so far we seem to do it on a best-qualified basis. If i'm struggling with the home wifi network DP deals with it - he's a software engineer. If DD is starving i deal with it - i know how to cook WAY better and more nutritious food than him (equally he has me learning java and i have him learning new recipes all the time). I have more practical skills, because of my life experiences, than him. So i do more of the practical things, but he earns enough that i won't have to work out of the home when we buy our house because he's so damn good at his job. Also he has a car and is the master of "making things easy" - he just sorts out whatever needs doing in such a way that you mention it once and then it's done. While i'm bathing DD he tidies the rest of her stuff away and does the dishes so we can just be together when she's in bed. I feel like a team-mate on a relatively well-run team.

If he is feeling low i am dominant and caring, if i am feeling low HE is dominant and caring. We try to meet the team needs together. We even talk about ourselves as a team! LOL.

The only place i'm submissive rather than equal is in the bedroom. That is at MY request and works great for us (probably because i'm equal/dominant everywhere else). To me that's such an individual dynamic, it's not really about gender roles at all.

Bx

I agree, its fine to compliment someone on their appearance.
As I said though, an interesting comment from her in regards to her upbringing. Food for thought for myself I guess...

I just wanted to say that my head hurts (because my eldest son has been embracing the traditionally feminine art of sqealing and screaming), so I won't attempt anything intelligent, but I'm really enjoying this conversation. :)

Bec, I'm capable of looking after myself. I can set up a wifi network. I can cook, clean, do all the girly and boy-y things. DH can look after himself too. I just CHOOSE not to - I don't like being dominant. I can be, but I don't have to be and I like that. Sometimes I do have to take charge of DH but that's when he and DS are trying to out-toddler each other.

Some people would say the way I manage DH means that I am in charge, but I tend to see it as a power behind the throne - DH is in charge, I just make everything run smoothly and we both don't do things we really don't want to. There's the odd compromise, but very few and far between.

Hoobley... yep, I have to concede that my DH does have his strengths (despite being fragile when it comes to wildlife, blood, anti-social behaviour etc) ...he is very capable as a bread winner. He is a kick-arse banker and negotiator. Aspects of life that I am inept. He has nerves of steel behind the wheel of a car (he doesn't lose his nerve if the car goes into a tail-spin) whereas I don't drive largely through nervousness. So yes, we are each other's support and I relate to your team reference. However... it does kind of plague me that if society ever crumbled (anyone who knows me well knows that i spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about this scenario) I worry that he would be next to useless. He can't handle the cold... he can't handle being sick... he can't handle not having creature comforts... he is useless if he has to function without his morning shower... he is just so damn delicate when it comes to the gritty side of life. I need to know that he will be strong enough to cope with adversity. I need to know that i'll have my hunter and warrior who is able to defend and protect us as a family. If something goes bump in the night it's bloody me that gets the torch to suss it out. He freaked out once because he heard a possum hiss! Arrrrggghhhh!!! A palm tree dropped a load of dead fronds onto our roof one night making a hell of a noise and he was too scared to go out and see what had fallen. This results in a significant lack of respect in him. Am I a product of warped gender expectations??? it is unfair of me to want a man to be stronger? Am I being selfish?

Regarding submission: I see the value in teaching my children that sometimes they have to trust me to issue instructions that don't make sense to them. To do this they do have to "accept" and put aside their own will. I guess this is submission. it's my hope that they will know me as being "firm but fair". I get what you are saying Ryn in that I also hope they will grow up to be "firm but fair" adults. Everyday i set boundaries that i expect them to acknowledge. Now when my boundaries are breached it is my role to role model patience BUT to reaffirm them in no uncertain terms. I think there are many people that struggle with setting boundaries. I'm no expert but i assume this is something that you learn from role models. My kids need to see me being firm... and to see me act with fair and just authority. It's my job to show them that just because I have authority doesn't mean that i can go around and abuse it like a Mummy Dearest Hitler. My 13yo DD spent 3 years watching me at work in her school as a teacher's assistant. It was an environment where i had to exert my authority on a fairly regular basis... if you don't the class runs amok. She saw me consistently adhere to "firm but fair" and she saw that my strategies worked. These days she's a leader amongst her peers. Her teachers are unanimous about that! She also has a lot of compassion and i'm pretty damn proud of this set of traits she has developed. She's a popular girl despite that fact that she also drives me nuts at times! Aaaanyhow... what i'm saying is that if submission is the product of trust then it's a good thing. if it's a product of fear then it's not so good. I set firm boundaries and I hope that this is teaching my children to set firm boundaries too. This for me transcends gender stereotypes though... well adjusted men and women should be able to, when appropriate, put aside their will as part of trust. A soldier must submit to his platoon leader... a nurse must submit to the doctor. Hopefully though an individual has the life skills to identify who is worthy of trust before submitting themselves to their leaders. Way OT... sorry!

ETA: just an extra thought: regarding boundaries: i think it is MY job to also respect my children's boundaries. I get what Maya is saying too in that many adults are dismissive of the boundaries of children. I know my parents were. A good example is that i would never force my child to kiss the cheek of a visiting adult to be 'polite'. If the child seems in anyway uncomfortable you have to respect that. If you don't then this often results in that bad kind of submission we all would dread; that which would make our child vulnerable to predators :(

Oh, how interesting this conversation is getting...
ROFL at DH and DS out-toddlering each other.
I have to say, I agree with many of you. I also think that girls and boys should grow up eing told that they can do whatever they want. A boy can become a florist, a girl can become a mechanic, if that's where their passions lie. Hugging and kissing and general tenderness and compassion is something I would want to instill into both boys and girls.

My DH - as much as I love him - can be very childish, too. And to be honest, sometimes it bugs me that I always have to be the adult in our relationship. I'm the one who deals with money (and trust me, with his maths skills, I wouldn't want him to do it). I'm the one who usually wears the pants. And you know what, I wish I didn't have to. It has nothing to do with spiders. He usually deals with them as I'm not familiar with Australian spiders. But it has to do with general responsibilities.

On the subject of women going backwards in some respect. I actually agree. We seem to manage to further and hinder ourselves at the same time. Yes, we do have more choices these days. With these choices come a lot more responsibilities, too. But at the same time, we seem to be quite efficient in reducing each other and ourselves to very superficial values. We don't seem to value our intellect and are more worried about physical appearance and status symbols (present company excluded, of course).
I have myself given the subject of commenting on my daughter's looks a lot of thought. She is absolutely gorgeous, of course. But I don't want her to ever think that being beautiful is important. So I try to limit the comments I make about her looks. Of course, in appropriate moments, I will say: "don't you look gorgeous with that hairclip (or with green marker all over your face ;))!" But I am very aware of not making too big a deal of her looks. They are merely passing comments, I wouldn't even call it praise. To me praise is something you can earn. But your looks are not something you have achieved, they are pure luck. I also make sure that I do praise her for her accomplishments all the time. I make a much bigger deal out of that then out of her looks IYKWIM.

Saša

Well-said on submission, Bath.

I don't think any man handles being sick LOL. DH found it hilarious I made him get out of bed and see what the noise was when the peg bag fell off the table in the middle of the night, but I'd have been seething if I'd had to do it. I don't think it's unfair of you to want the hunter/warrior type - I think the main reason women are so down on men is because this is drummed out of them by people who insist girls and boys are EXACTLY the same rather than allowing differences as they grow up. Then the same people whinge that men don't protect and provide any more.

eta: Saša, I worry about my DS. He is SO gorgeous and I have people going absolutely mad over him, more than you'd expect. He's also very popular. And that's a huge worry! I don't exactly want him to be an ugly billy-no-mates but the challenges of an attractive popular child aren't challenges I've had to face for myself so I am very uncomfortable about it, with the what ifs - the wrong crowd, the drugs, the alcohol, the knives... and he's only 17m old now!

I agree with what most have said in that there simply are differences between males and females and there is little you can do to change that - influence yes, obliterate no. I don't believe its appropriate with children to enforce a way of thinking on them - my DD#1 plays with unisex toys and at my DH's parents' house there are only boy toys courtesy of 7 male cousins. She loves them all. I do get very annoyed when people automatically assume she is a boy if she's not dressed in pink from head to toe and I was once lectured by a woman in a store one day when she was wearing blue. Rude cow.

I think all children should believe they are beautiful - society does a lot of damage to young minds by only pointing out a limited few as beautiful, especially when those few are the incredibly skinny ones. A friend of mine's 14 year old daughter was recently institutionalised with suicidal thoughts and annorexia. That's tragic and even worse is that these doctors regularly treated children as young as 6!!!

Finally, a friend of mine is a forensic anthropologist (read CSI). She says that when she is speaking to the parents of deceased children, the father almost never wants to know anything beyond the fact that its his child who is dead. The mothers apparently want to know all the dreadful details of what happened to their baby - their reasoning being it couldn't possibly be worse than what they imagine. I think this just goes to demonstrate that men and women have different strengths. Neither is better than the other, they're just different.

Sorry - bit waffly but I've found this thread really interesting but DD#2 has just woken so will post now before its too late . . .

Ryn, I agree - different is not bad :)
Bath - I, too, like how you've nutted out 'submission'. In my mind, most ways I think about submission is along the lines of, but not synonymous with 'subservient'. The latter is far more odious to me, and submission still has negative connotations for the most part until you talk about submission with trust. That's also encapsulated by the times I have to yell out 'no' or 'stop' when DS is about to do something more risky than usual! I was also quite a defiant child and I wouldn't change that. My mum wouldn't either, even though it was her absolute bane many a time. I WILL raise my kids to 'question, question, question'. Except if they become firefighters, then they can question everything except most orders on the fireground ;)
Anyway, I also agree with the trend to assign labels based on superficial beauty on girl children. Pretty, beautiful, ugly etc. DS will know that he is more than a beautiful boy and that he must act with integrity before he relies on his looks for influence when he's older. Any girls I have will not hear from me things like "She's ugly", "she's pretty" etc. My mum was very free with her opinions on womens' looks, to the point where one day I said I thought a newsreader was pretty and she shot me down to say she was, in fact, ugly. For a long time after that, I assumed there was some criteria I was not privy to that meant some people were pretty and some were ugly and my mum knew which was which. But she started to cross the line and say women were ugly when I thought different. So, I've resolved not to entertain that sort of talk anymore.
Another way I counter gender stereotyping is that I don't define people as male or female. If he points out a man, that's ok, but I'm not going to talk about kids we know and say 'x is a girl' etc. They are people with lots to offer in their differences.
I can only do so much, as I do live in society. I thought about this long and hard during pregnancy, especially because we didn't find out what sex he would be and it created comment in our circles.
I'm really enjoying this thread, too, thanks chickies!!

LuluHB, I can't believe that woman. Where does she get off lecturing you about what your DD should be wearing? Even if you want to dress her in an astronauts outfit, it's your decision!

One thing I don't want my daughter to do is play the damsel in distress. I despise it when women do that. It's fine to ask for help, don't get me wrong. Women don't do it often enough. Let me try to explain: I don't think women should be trying to be men. I'm quite happy with lawn mowing being DHs job, but there's no problem with the roles being reversed either. But, I hate it when women abuse their looks or femininity. I'll give you an example: my sister in law. She's one of those people who gets hysterical just to get male attention. She's apparently scared of everything. We have a dog, a Labrador and whenever my brother is around, she jumps on a chair or into his arms and shrieks: "Baby, baby, help me!" the moment she sees the dog. But when my brother isn't looking, she not only pats the dog, but even takes him for a walk. It bugs me big time. I can't handle women like that. So I definitely don't want my DD to turn out like that. I want her to learn that she can do pretty much everything a man can do (except write her name in the snow with wee). But, she doesn't have to IYKWIM. It's alright to ask someone to change your tyre. But you shouldn't be afraid to give it a go yourself if there's noone else around.

Rosehip Fairy, I am not concerned about your son at all. He gets influenced by you and you seem to have your head screwed on and both feet on the ground, I don't think his beauty will go to his head. By the way, do you have German heritage? I'm just asking cause you refer to him as "Liebling" in your siggie.

Saša

I tell my children that they're beautiful all the time but I don't really mean in it in a physical sense (although of course they are lol). A person is beautiful if their soul is beautiful, if their maners are lovely and their conduct is kind and graceful. I'm pretty sure that they understand the context that I use it in and that their ideas of beauty aren't rooted in the physical.

I've had to start defining gender for Yasin lately because he calls everyone 'he' regardless of whether they are male or female. He told a check-out chick she was a good boy a few weeks ago lol.

I agree re: beauty, Dach - some of the most beautiful women I know would never be supermodels/film stars, but that doesn't mean they're not beautiful. And I make sure I tell them they're wonderful and gorgeous.

Maya, IKWYM about beauty being in the eye of the beholder: my mother was so down on my looks growing up that I look at old pictures now and think how dreadful I look. Apparently she thinks I look pretty there - but only told me how dreadful I looked at the time. I really can't be arsed with the whole beauty nonsense any more. Fine, I'll put on mascara and lipstick most mornings, but that's to look female, not pretty.

Saša, DS's godmother (and my best friend) is Austrian, the name came because I wanted a nice name for bumpling that other people didn't already have.

We are trying to bring up our 3 sons gender neutral, basing their behaviour and attractions as personality as opposed to gender. All 3 have a very sensitive soft loving side but can be loud and play fight like 3 puppies when they feel the need. I have always steered away from 'boys' clothes as i find the colours bland and dark and the boys when younger and oscar now much preferred to shop in the 'girls' section to buy bright pinks and purples. As for toys we have always had dolls, slings, tea sets, kitchens, trains, cars, lego and playdough as our main attractions. My older boys are the first to object to a toy being sold as a 'girl' or 'boy' toy yelling SEXIST at the TV. I just celebrate their personalities and try not to pigeon hole their behaviour as one sex or another, they are just themselves. My middle son wore a nighty for about 4 years because he preferred it to pajamas, he rode a pink bike (he chose it) and wore pink most every day to kinder. My younger son loves the bright pinks, blues, purples and oranges in clothes so wears those most days. It is just a non event in our home, clothes and what they play with don't determine their sex of define who they are. they are just themselves and we love them.
I think society needs to be aware that by giving allowances based on the sex of the person such as "they are aggressive because they are boys" may send a message that they have an excuse for being aggressive and therefore are not accountable for the consequences. We all, male and females, need to be mindful of our behaviour and keep ourselves in check.
Anyway that's my 2 cents worth.
Beckles

Beckles, you are so right. I always cringe at comments like that. Especially when people say things like: "well, of course he cheated, he's a man after all."
We all are able to control our impulses, even men (I know, that is sexist ;)) It has nothing to do with gender but with compassion and respect for other creatures.
And I can understand that your boys like the colourful girls' clothes better. I have never really looked at it like that, but it is true, boys' clothes are very dark, gloomy and just too adult. Girls' stuff seems much more fun and child friendly.
But it does depend, sometimes I go into a shop and the girls' section greets me with a sea of pink and makes me want to vomit. So I sometimes shop in the boys' section just for something different.

Saša

Gosh, this is such an important question.

Since I fell pregnant and even moreso after giving birth to DD, it's really made me start to question what it means to me to be a woman, and what society expects of you as a woman. It starts straight away when all the newborn clothes are pink and blue and people assume your baby is of a particular gender just from the colour. I haven't worked out how to do it yet, because I want her to understand that her gender doesn't limit her in anyway (she can be a scientist, an engineer or a mechanic when she grows up if she wants), but to also have an appreciation for how special it is to be a woman and to have the ability to create life, to nurture, to raise a family and contribute strong, confident people to the world . . . Then I come back to "What if she doesn't want children?" and I feel confused all over again LOL! I guess I just have to help her come to an appreciate for what her body CAN do, if she wants it to. I also really want her to have understand that women do not have equal status in the world and as women, it's something we must constantly fight against. The plight of women all over the world is our business and we must be concerned. I hope I can show her the illusions of freedom and equality presented to us . . . I want her to be a feminist, for her to have an understanding of herself as a human being and a woman beyond what is expected of women.

Flick Ruby is an anarchist feminist who states "We are not asking men to attone for the sins of the forefathers, we are asking them to take responsibility for the masculinity of the future, we are not asking women to be perpetually aware of their opression but to emerge from it..."
I think she hits the nail on the head with this one!
beckles