I Enjoy Being A Girl (And Eight)
Jan. 29th, 2004 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantryslutI am delighted -- and surprised -- at all the serious attention folks brought to my flippant post on the question "am I a girl, or am I eight?" Seriously. It was really cool. I clearly have gathered the right sorts of friends about me.
Some further comments:
1) I guess I really am a good writer. I don't know my own strength sometimes. I think I made the originating incident sound much stronger than it actually was. It was just an excuse to be playful, really.
2) I know that eight and girl are not mutually exclusive. It was an intentionally false binary, a deliberate absurdity on my part. Linking it to model-building was a further silliness on my part.
In other words, I was engaging in that horrible postmodern irony that is so out of fashion -- consciously recapitulating an arbitrary construct in order to make fun of it and examine its origin at the same time. I know some of you got that, and ran with it -- and I love you for it.
3) I loved discovering the girly crossover in regard to painting little model cars with nail polish. Now I want to accomplish a pearlescent blue triceratops with white cheetah spots. Yeah. (see also #4, below.)
4) You should have seen the look on the hobby store guy's face when my Mom, my thirteen-year-old sister, and I came up to the counter with Steven's submarine model kit in tow. After Christmas, I might add, so there was no immediate excuse. I wish I could have captured the mix of incredulity and awe.
5) Models are boy toys simply because of their subject matter -- trains, jets, cars, subs. The skills they utilise, though, are not. Fine motor skills tasks tend to be strongly gendered female: sewing, knitting, calligraphy, etc.
Poor boys.
6) It is, in fact, the fine motor skill aspect of things that is one reason why model-building doesn't appeal to me. I've never been big on such things (except collage and sometimes sculpture). Not even -- maybe especially not -- fussy cooking techniques. (Fine cooking is complicated genderwise, too. Chefs are supposed to be male. But ever notice the pastry chefs?) I seem to prefer bigger muscle movements as a whole.
Which is funny, because as a very small child, my teachers worried about my "large motor development." I'm not kidding; I've seen the evaluation. There's a famous story in my family about my father (a social worker for the state) chewing out my teachers for implying that if I wasn't made to run around more, I was being "neglected." (Call me a late bloomer.)
I guess I am just an intellectual, a creature of the mind, the practical details of life are beyond my ken, la la la...
...and we all know that intellectuals have transcended the false dichotomy of gender. Right? Snrk.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed.
Some further comments:
1) I guess I really am a good writer. I don't know my own strength sometimes. I think I made the originating incident sound much stronger than it actually was. It was just an excuse to be playful, really.
2) I know that eight and girl are not mutually exclusive. It was an intentionally false binary, a deliberate absurdity on my part. Linking it to model-building was a further silliness on my part.
In other words, I was engaging in that horrible postmodern irony that is so out of fashion -- consciously recapitulating an arbitrary construct in order to make fun of it and examine its origin at the same time. I know some of you got that, and ran with it -- and I love you for it.
3) I loved discovering the girly crossover in regard to painting little model cars with nail polish. Now I want to accomplish a pearlescent blue triceratops with white cheetah spots. Yeah. (see also #4, below.)
4) You should have seen the look on the hobby store guy's face when my Mom, my thirteen-year-old sister, and I came up to the counter with Steven's submarine model kit in tow. After Christmas, I might add, so there was no immediate excuse. I wish I could have captured the mix of incredulity and awe.
5) Models are boy toys simply because of their subject matter -- trains, jets, cars, subs. The skills they utilise, though, are not. Fine motor skills tasks tend to be strongly gendered female: sewing, knitting, calligraphy, etc.
Poor boys.
6) It is, in fact, the fine motor skill aspect of things that is one reason why model-building doesn't appeal to me. I've never been big on such things (except collage and sometimes sculpture). Not even -- maybe especially not -- fussy cooking techniques. (Fine cooking is complicated genderwise, too. Chefs are supposed to be male. But ever notice the pastry chefs?) I seem to prefer bigger muscle movements as a whole.
Which is funny, because as a very small child, my teachers worried about my "large motor development." I'm not kidding; I've seen the evaluation. There's a famous story in my family about my father (a social worker for the state) chewing out my teachers for implying that if I wasn't made to run around more, I was being "neglected." (Call me a late bloomer.)
I guess I am just an intellectual, a creature of the mind, the practical details of life are beyond my ken, la la la...
...and we all know that intellectuals have transcended the false dichotomy of gender. Right? Snrk.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed.
