Ladedah

so yesterday during thanksgiving my nephew was kinda being a little shit in the way that it is totally normal for kids to be shits 

i.e. griping about his mom not letting him get cool clothes (skinny jeans) or highlights in his hair, and pausing every so often to bust on his siblings for various things

and you know, i was just sitting there occasionally throwing out a comment like hey you can make whatever you wear cool tho, you don’t have to follow fashion bc you’re the cool kid you’re the one who makes it fashionable and chastising him a little when he’d bust on his siblings if it was warranted like if he got out of hand and was just being cruel or rude with it

and just like all of that was fine but at some point the rest of the family i guess started busting on him i guess as a way to deter how he was treating his mother and his siblings, which i don’t really think is the proper approach in the first place

but the thing i really couldn’t handle is that all of the approach to discouraging from this behavior was really just gender policing. instead of discouraging him from the actually negative behavior, the consensus became making fun of his interest in fashionable choices by implying he’d start wanting to wear his sister’s stylish boots, or play with barbies. 

and just.

how is that okay?

how am i the only adult in the room that understood how that was just bullying? a bunch of adults picking on a little boy? how is that right?

i couldn’t say anything, bc it was thanksgiving, and it’s not my side of the family, so i’d just be ruining the mood, or telling someone how to raise their kid. i had to go upstairs bc i was going to end up saying something if i stayed and i knew i couldn’t do that.

i just feel so tiny. i know that what i saw was just what he’s going to encounter in the world no matter what. if it didn’t happen in that room it would happen in a classroom, or at a friend’s house. but i want so much to help him feel loved, and accepted, and able to do things he wants to do without feeling like he needs to bring anyone else down in the process. but all he sees is adults using abusive tactics to make their point, and encouraging negative associations with women that will further encourage the negative treatment of his sister. 

i just

feel

so

tiny

justagoose:

Gender roles.

Are horrible.

The end.

perfect blog post everyone else go home

(Source: saminalcrackers)

i get so mad every time i see a genderbend of a female character as a male

oh really? there’s finally a really awesome female character and your reaction is let’s make them a male?

because clearly fucking no one’s tired of awesome male characters

let’s have more of those.

Hey. I have a question about gender.

justagoose:

So like. What is it? I’m really confused, and just trying to get information. It has nothing to do with our bodies, and really not much to do with sexuality. Assuming no personality traits are associated with either binary gender, what really are the differences between identifying male or female?

It seems to me that we’re all the same, neutral gender, but I probably just really don’t get it, and would like to be enlightened on how some people feel they identify differently, when I would say we’re all people. Anyone?

Well I’m no expert here but I’ll give this a go.

Gender is a social construct — it’s a collection of skills, behaviors, preferences, and physical/emotional traits that society deems as a separate collective entity. In American culture, we have “man/masculine” and “woman/feminine” as those collective entities, and these entities are predetermined for us at birth by society as a whole. It means that, upon recognition of our physical sex, we are assigned our specific collection of information which in turn, predetermines what our role in society is expected to be. 

The reason why gender conversations are important is that concept of “separate collective entity”. A person’s actual collection of skills/behaviors/etc/so forth is, in our culture, seldom allowed to intersect or overlap with the “separate collective entity” that consists of the opposite gender identity’s role without consequences of some kind. Society punishes those who do not fit into their assigned gender role, though all punishments are not equal. A female trades a modicum of perceived attractiveness should she ascribe to masculine traits such as assertiveness, aggression, or even wearing masculine clothes that are not tailored to her figure in the traditional feminine manner. A male trades a good deal of respect and power by ascribing to “feminine” traits such as an interest in fashion, a preference for small cute dogs instead of larger ones, or emotional sensitivity. 

In short, it’s not really that people are naturally “neutral gender”, but more that individuals are more complex than the simple bisection our society forces upon us. Gender isn’t even a spectrum in the traditional sense of how our society presents it. There are cultures where their are three or more genders — a specturm isn’t an appropriate analogy for what gender actually is, because of that. Gender is simply an abstraction that was created for the express purpose of identifying a person before getting to know them. It’s a method of stereotyping.

That doesn’t make gender as a concept necessarily bad, by the way. A stereotype is only damaging when it is considered truth, and evidence to the latter is considered a freakish outlier to the norm, causing opinions based off of stereotypes become immutable as a result. Stereotypes as a concept are not inherently bad. It’s the ignorance of what people do based off of what is meant to be a shortcut for communication — things like cutting off communication, outright violence, erasing individual experiences, among other possibilities — that is bad.

So yeah, I hope that helps. 

(Source: saminalcrackers)