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I feel the article is tainted with the idea that we need to resocialize children away from any gender differences.
Good point, Scott. Although I *do* think we should be more forgiving of boys who want to play with "girl" toys, I also do *not* think we should be teaching our boys to *be* girls. We should be teaching them to be whatever the hell they want to be, and not to be ashamed to be masculine.
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This issue was a subject of ABC’s 20/20 on Wednesday evening. I happened to turn it on and saw most of it. I think there was a bit of the idea about doing away with gender differences but the piece focused mostly on, believe it or not, DOUBLE STANDARDS TOWARD BOYS. IMO the piece was overall positive. Maybe our willingness to see boys as restricted will bleed over into a willingness to see it for males in general.
Pollack was on saying the same things he always says, a position that I am lukewarm toward. But to me the bottom line is that a major network did a prime time story on double standards toward boys. That’s positive.
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I suspect that society doesn't have much faith in men's ability to naturally grow into the kind of men that society "needs" us to be - and so there's a perceived need to police the behavior of male children at the youngest of ages to ensure that they're developing in the right path. It makes you wonder - do we, as a society, really believe that masculinity is a natural virtue of males, or simply a mode of behavior that has to be taught to us? I mean, are males really such lumps of clay? Can't we turn into "real" men on our own?
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I am firmly convinced that masculine behavior is, in at least some ways, hard-wired, biological. Consider this: I am the father of three, two girls, numbers 1 and 2, and a boy, number 3. When my son was born, we had no "boy" toys in the house. My daughters had a stroller in which they carried their baby dolls. My son played with the stroller, too. First he turned it upside down and spun the wheels around, and then he took it apart. (I had to help him put it back together.)He wanted very little to do with the dolls. We had no toy weapons in the house, but he made weapons out of Legos. My son is, in my opinion, quite masculine in his choices. He is this way without much in the way of "masculinity coaching" from me.
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My son played with the stroller, too. First he turned it upside down and spun the wheels around, and then he took it apart.
:-D
(Sorry, as a techie myself who used to love taking things apart as a child, I found frank's comments incredibly entertaining, so I had to share my grin.)
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Yes, it made me grin too. I thought it was just me who felt compelled to dismantle all my toys when I was a boy. Interesting thing is, nobody taught me to do that or gave me that example to follow. I was just facinated by the internal workings of things. Maybe this is something innately masculine.
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Recalling similar childhood fascinations that didn't sit well with my parents, as well as reading Nightmist and Uberganger's posts, I'm thinking that maybe there's a common problem of misunderstanding why boys gravitate toward certain activities. It's too easy to conclude that boys take things apart because they are simply destructive, and like playing with toy weapons because they want to kill people.
The problem (of misunderstanding our behavior) doesn't seem to get better as we grow up, either.
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Actually, I think the reason boys appear to be destructive comes from the fact that sometimes, something they want to take apart is so tightly assembled that they cannot take it apart without breaking it.
Maybe we ought to honor their desire to investigate and help them take things apart in a less destructuve manner. I have given my son things that he can investigate and inadvertently destroy in the process, and I think it's kept him from breaking too many things of value.
On the other hand, I've known of kids who were absolutely fascinated by gravity, and the noise things make as they smash against the floor.
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