Rehashed
I'm unemployed! Hurrah! I kicked off my unemployment by getting my teeth cleaned yesterday morning.* Hurrah! The kids have two more weeks of school, and then we're all summer all the time.
Now on to today's topic: gender! I've written here about gender and school socializing before, but it's always in the back of my mind, so I'll probably write about it a hundred more times before I'm through. I continue to be irritated by the way that every single teacher Duchess has had has embraced the same system, in which the Responsible Girls are tapped to help the teacher with chores. Duchess started out by escorting feckless classmates to the bathroom in kindergarten, and it's been all chores ever since. She LIKES the chores, of course, because they come with teacher approval and a thrilling sense of maturity and independence, and this is just the way the system works throughout school. But it really pisses me off. Boys are not expected to be Responsible. Girls who are Responsible are normal, just meeting the expectations of Girlhood, and boys are almost never even asked to do Responsible things like cleaning up the classroom unsupervised while everybody else is out at recess. Girls do extra work because they are Responsible. Boys do whatever they want, get in minor trouble (A reprimand! Sent to the office where nothing bad happens and they get to miss some class!), and never clean up. Even when everybody is supposed to be cleaning up together, guess who's doing most of the work? I was just reading somewhere** the theory that this socialization makes boys learn that failure isn't actually that big a deal - they experience first-hand, early in life, that the consequences of doing something wrong, or breaking the rules, aren't actually that bad. This leads to more risk-taking behavior in life and in work.** Girls often never get the chance to try breaking the rules, because they're steered so hard away from it, and if they DO break the rules, the social (and sometimes the disciplinary) ramifications are more unpleasant, because they're breaking social expectations as well as school rules. So they learn to follow the rules all the time, and the perceived risk of breaking them, or of failing to live up to expectations, just gets bigger and bigger in their minds. Boys can be careless, self-centered, irresponsible, and disruptive, without suffering serious immediate consequences. Girls have a lot less wiggle room. I asked Duchess what would happen if she said "No, I don't want to clean up the classroom. I want to go out to recess," and she said (understandably) that she just could not say that. She's nine, and she's already stuck not only cleaning up the classroom, but also feeling like a failure when she doesn't get 20 out of 20 on her spelling test.*** And we wonder why women don't become CEOs. (Or rather, only become CEOs when there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.)
I understand why teachers lean so hard on the Responsible Girl model. They have a lot of shit to do, and very little time, and it probably doesn't occur to most of them that there's any problem with the time-honored Responsible Girl tradition. There aren't any administrators I know of out there who are interested in doing the heavy culture-changing lifting it would take to break that model and try a model in which boys and girls are given the same expectations.
On a related note, Cook alerted me to this amazing piece of news: people take hurricanes with female names less seriously than hurricanes with male names. More people get killed by storms with female names than by those with male names because they can't be bothered to evacuate for a frivolous girly storm. This is disturbing in a lot of ways.
I feel overwhelmed by the way the world just beats down girls. And don't even give me the statistics about how girls are over-represented in college. Whatever - that's just an advanced education in Being a Responsible Girl. (Also, being Responsible Girl means being diligent in avoiding being raped. Because that's your job, just like keeping the classroom clean and getting good grades.) What matters is all the rest of life, and I don't see any progress happening there.
And yes, there are many Responsible Boys and Men**** out there, and Irresponsible Girls and Women, too. And this is all pretty much just anecdotal. So there are all kinds of caveats on my repetitive ranting. But it feels very real to to me, and when I see Skipper busily picking up trash off the floor of her preschool classroom while the boys are coloring, my heart sinks a little more.
*I have had a crummy six months of dental visits, in which I've gotten a ton of fillings, including several along the gumline, which is extra-awful because the drilling for these, unlike the sort of top-down fillings to which I had been accustomed, somehow feels like it's rattling your ENTIRE SKULL. So just getting my teeth cleaned seemed like a cheerful fun adventure.
** And no, I can't be bothered tracking it down at the moment. I'm busy being unemployed!
*** Last week a boy in her class pointed at her 19 out of 20 score and said mockingly "Wow, Duchess, looks like you need to get a new brain." She cried.
**** I'm married to a Responsible Man! So there's just no way that our kids are going to avoid being excessively responsible, given their genetics.
Now on to today's topic: gender! I've written here about gender and school socializing before, but it's always in the back of my mind, so I'll probably write about it a hundred more times before I'm through. I continue to be irritated by the way that every single teacher Duchess has had has embraced the same system, in which the Responsible Girls are tapped to help the teacher with chores. Duchess started out by escorting feckless classmates to the bathroom in kindergarten, and it's been all chores ever since. She LIKES the chores, of course, because they come with teacher approval and a thrilling sense of maturity and independence, and this is just the way the system works throughout school. But it really pisses me off. Boys are not expected to be Responsible. Girls who are Responsible are normal, just meeting the expectations of Girlhood, and boys are almost never even asked to do Responsible things like cleaning up the classroom unsupervised while everybody else is out at recess. Girls do extra work because they are Responsible. Boys do whatever they want, get in minor trouble (A reprimand! Sent to the office where nothing bad happens and they get to miss some class!), and never clean up. Even when everybody is supposed to be cleaning up together, guess who's doing most of the work? I was just reading somewhere** the theory that this socialization makes boys learn that failure isn't actually that big a deal - they experience first-hand, early in life, that the consequences of doing something wrong, or breaking the rules, aren't actually that bad. This leads to more risk-taking behavior in life and in work.** Girls often never get the chance to try breaking the rules, because they're steered so hard away from it, and if they DO break the rules, the social (and sometimes the disciplinary) ramifications are more unpleasant, because they're breaking social expectations as well as school rules. So they learn to follow the rules all the time, and the perceived risk of breaking them, or of failing to live up to expectations, just gets bigger and bigger in their minds. Boys can be careless, self-centered, irresponsible, and disruptive, without suffering serious immediate consequences. Girls have a lot less wiggle room. I asked Duchess what would happen if she said "No, I don't want to clean up the classroom. I want to go out to recess," and she said (understandably) that she just could not say that. She's nine, and she's already stuck not only cleaning up the classroom, but also feeling like a failure when she doesn't get 20 out of 20 on her spelling test.*** And we wonder why women don't become CEOs. (Or rather, only become CEOs when there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.)
I understand why teachers lean so hard on the Responsible Girl model. They have a lot of shit to do, and very little time, and it probably doesn't occur to most of them that there's any problem with the time-honored Responsible Girl tradition. There aren't any administrators I know of out there who are interested in doing the heavy culture-changing lifting it would take to break that model and try a model in which boys and girls are given the same expectations.
On a related note, Cook alerted me to this amazing piece of news: people take hurricanes with female names less seriously than hurricanes with male names. More people get killed by storms with female names than by those with male names because they can't be bothered to evacuate for a frivolous girly storm. This is disturbing in a lot of ways.
I feel overwhelmed by the way the world just beats down girls. And don't even give me the statistics about how girls are over-represented in college. Whatever - that's just an advanced education in Being a Responsible Girl. (Also, being Responsible Girl means being diligent in avoiding being raped. Because that's your job, just like keeping the classroom clean and getting good grades.) What matters is all the rest of life, and I don't see any progress happening there.
And yes, there are many Responsible Boys and Men**** out there, and Irresponsible Girls and Women, too. And this is all pretty much just anecdotal. So there are all kinds of caveats on my repetitive ranting. But it feels very real to to me, and when I see Skipper busily picking up trash off the floor of her preschool classroom while the boys are coloring, my heart sinks a little more.
*I have had a crummy six months of dental visits, in which I've gotten a ton of fillings, including several along the gumline, which is extra-awful because the drilling for these, unlike the sort of top-down fillings to which I had been accustomed, somehow feels like it's rattling your ENTIRE SKULL. So just getting my teeth cleaned seemed like a cheerful fun adventure.
** And no, I can't be bothered tracking it down at the moment. I'm busy being unemployed!
*** Last week a boy in her class pointed at her 19 out of 20 score and said mockingly "Wow, Duchess, looks like you need to get a new brain." She cried.
**** I'm married to a Responsible Man! So there's just no way that our kids are going to avoid being excessively responsible, given their genetics.
Comments
I'm starting to feel like single sex education may be the real answer to not having my little females' spirits crushed.
love, CM
I feel like a broken record about this so often.