Re girls only

Hi-Fy

rté 1

2 channels at once is a giddying prospect

If only I were on that side of the Atlantic.

2.15 am fuck that i'm throwing fifa on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEIQKczRPY

yeah babel is p boring and might send me to bed a lot sooner

babel? u playin as stuttgart or holland?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHaA1beOwrY&ob=av3e

i only started watching it because gael garcia bernal is in it and i find him v nonthreatening.

he is interesting but not annoying imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPGiLsdWZdo&feature=related

what are you doing

what is julie lagger at now, is this an avant-garde protest against refereeing calls

i only started watching it because gael garcia bernal is in it and i find him v nonthreatening.

― judith, Tuesday, December 27, 2011 8:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Permalink

haha also you have excellent taste

i just like well-dressed gennlemen debating feminism tbh

Clár faisnéise ceoil ina mbeidh Neil Young- TG4 fyi

gael garcia bernal is threateningly sexy

i just like well-dressed gennlemen debating feminism tbh

― i am mad cool cos i don't like coldpay (Julie Lagger),

fuck sake but christopher nolan is really struggling for plot at this stage

nolan's never met a lady so he doesn't count

gael garcia bernal is actually julia roberts side-project

no ladies in the "no ladies" thread

can't help but feel if anybody from Sailor is still alive they cd bring a decent copyright case against Franz Ferdinand

i have posted twice to the girls-only thread. i don't regret the first one (a link) at all, but the second post (today) was unnecessary shit-stirring directed at a male (though in reference to an earlier discussion on that thread).

at any rate, i like to think i am respectful of everyone, though i suppose it is just like a guy to barge in, no matter how respectfully. so, sorry about that.

and while i do think it's fair for gabbneb to be able to respond when shit is being talked about him, no matter the thread/board, i may have kind of started it on that thread. sorry about that too.

Ha, the only time I ~really~ wanted to post on the girls thread was when Amanda posted about vocal fry.

― jaymc, Tuesday, December 27, 2011 5:25 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark
haha!

Friend on fb (a grade school teacher) shared this recently.
http://togetherforjacksoncountykids.tumblr.com/post/14314184651/one-teachers-approach-to-preventing-gender-bullying-in

enjoyable anecdotage

No breast checks until post-menopause, though. Would sort of appreciate an exam because when I do a self-check I always feel like I have no idea what I'm looking for.

I took a women's health class in college in which we practiced breast exams on a fake breast that contained lumps. They were pretty clearly lumpy.

I don't get embarrassed very easily, but after the other two guys dropped, I was the only man in the class, so the breast exam day was kind of awkward, and the day we were each issued a clear acrylic speculum was pretty terrible.

Do you still have that?

I'm wearing it right now.

(no. i did not move it here from north carolina!)

x-posts while I've written this, sorry...

I didn't get to read that "gender bullying" blog when it was originally posted on the Girl Thread coz I was having Cornish broadband issues. I'm having pretty mixed feelings about it, and struggling to articulate why.

On the most immediate level, obviously it's great that this teacher is doing their best to combat gender bullying, and try to challenge the relentless gender stereotyping. I think the lessons that Tempel is teaching are v v important, and were taught in an accessible way.

But on another level, I think that I really kind of recoil from labels like "gender variance" in the first place. Because it gives that kind of relentless pinkification/commodification of childhood gender a kind of legitimacy which I really don't think it deserves. It's also the horrifying realisation that if I were a child today, I'd be labeled as "gender variant" instead of just being left to get on with mud and frogs. But is that the fault of the label itself, or the commodified bifurcation of childhood which really didn't exert the same kind of pressure when I was that age? Like, I definitely feel like it was more OK to just be a "tomboy" in the 70s when all kids wore dungarees in unisex colours? (Though, that said, young kids certainly found other things to bully me about in grade school - being an English person with a stupid accent in an American school being number one, what, are you going to call that "Accent Variance" now?)

But I often feel like a cranky old person when confronted with the exploding plethora of labels. Like, labels might be good if they give people a name for something they thought was abnormal or "I'm the only one" before - but at the same time, labels are, always, kind of limiting.

I think what this teacher did, for this child, and this class, was great. It's fantastic to teach kids to resist this kind of commodification of gender pressure, and early. But at the same time, it doesn't really get at the root issues. Like, *why* is gender bifurcation being pushed so much harder and so much earlier? Oh, that's right. Because you can sell twice as many toys if you manufacture one pink one and one blue one, instead of like it was back in the 70s, when my brother and I got one unisex toybox we had to share. What is driving this construction of gender - and gender (as opposed to sex) *is* a construct, it varies so much from culture to culture (which, to me, makes a mockery of the idea of "gender variance" - ALL gender varies) - but I know, just because gender is a Construct, that doesn't mean that Constructs don't have power. Like, *money* is a total Construct, but it's one of the most powerful things on earth (hell, even *power* is a total construct.)

For a supposed "feelgood" article, it's raising a lot more questions for me than it answers.

But I am a curmudgeon.

variating from what.

Yeah, that is precisely it.

What is this monolithic GENDER from which kids are supposed to be varying? Who made it up? And can I have a word with them?

And by "a word" I mean "a punch in the nose"?

:D

i dunno - i think there might have been a period in the 60s/70s that were more relaxed in terms of gendered toys for kids. I struggle to believe that things were better in that regard in the early 60s and prior.

I have thought about this article a fair amount since reading it, too.
I think that is a good thing.

As far as it raising more questions than it answers. It seems like the only way to get around accepted notions of gender stereotyping are to challenge them.

this is all classically foucauldian, that the response to any disruption of regimes of gender is to just keep producing new categories. "variant."

this is probably better than just straight up gender policing but yeah id definitely opens up a its own set of problems.

Not the sort of problems that mean you shouldn't talk about/explore it, though? Doesn't the discourse have to work through some levels to get closer to an "ideal" level?

I think it really depends where? Meaning, in what culture? And under what circumstances? And in which class? And when? (Remember that little boys were dressed in dresses for their early years until just over a century ago.) There were so many ways in which gender is coded differently. This idea of "gender variance" includes this idea of a unified gender construction which is just so manufactured itself.

x-posts to Sarahel

i think the idea behind "variant" isn't new categories, but referring to there being a spectrum or continuum of gender, with "variant" perhaps being a statistical reference to variations from the mean.

I have been experiencing a lot of trouble with "Gender" recently (LOL not Judith Butler) and just really... argh. I don't even know where to begin. But I think labels are part of the problem for me.

Variations from the mean? Who decides what the ~mean~ is, when it's all been made up? Mostly for maximising profit, these days?

while i feel that it is important and necessary to challenge these gender norms, i think it's also important to make kids aware of their existence. i think there's been a significant emphasis in the past 10? years in American education of teaching kids to fit in socially, but in an empowering way, as opposed to a "thou shalt not color outside the lines" way. And it's more, what you would call, holistic than when i was a kid, where as long as a kid was doing their work and not making or being involved in trouble, if they were weird and other kids disliked them, the teacher would generally ignore the issue. And in the spirit of "no child left behind," it tries to assimilate (in as neutral a way as possible) every kid, as opposed to writing off those on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

It seems to follow the trend, as i see it, of the school system doing the jobs of parents.

god bless them for it because the parents of the kids who bullied me incessantly throughout elementary + middle school certainly weren't doing the job

Yeah, I totally see the point of making kids *aware* of the existence of gender expectations (I think that expectations prob is a better word than norms) in order to challenge them - or in order to stop the bullying of kids who do not meet those expectations. I think this is a totally worthwhile thing to be doing.

And I don't know if the shifting of that role from "parents" onto "teachers" is such a bad thing either, because the nuclear family is such a recent invention itself that I'm not sure why "parents" got that role in the first place. (This is a whole nother kettle of fish.)

I guess my problem is with the translation of gender expectations into gender *norms* - I don't think it's just a semantic quibble, though I really lack the ability to adequately express why at the moment.

i'm not saying that shifting that role from parents onto teachers is a bad thing, however, that's a lot of responsibility to put on teachers, who have so much as it is, and don't get paid nearly enough. Also, there's only so much a teacher can do without the parent's cooperation/support.