thing I won't be writing, take 2 or 3 or 12 or whatever

[mrissa]

I was thinking in the Brain Stimulation Box (known to most mortals as a "shower"), and my brain circled back to the meme that was going around ages ago, where writers would tell you what kinds of book they would never, ever write. And I came to a conclusion: I will never, ever write a book where I make up an imaginary setting where women are widely believed to be only good for their marriageability. "Pretty bird in a gilded cage": nope. Not me. Generally I am done with that one. I'm bored of it. Other elements in a book can make me enjoy a book that has that element, but writing a book where someone is the spunky First Girl Who -- meh. As Tamora Pierce managed to notice and write interestingly about, sometimes it's at least as interesting to have the Second Girl Who. Or to do something that's not just interesting because of the configuration of your bits. Or to do something with gender roles and relations other than "men don't want to let her/girl triumphs," if you're seriously interested in gender.

I'm not trying to forbid anyone else this general class of imaginary societies in their work. I have just spotted it as not interesting to me.

I wonder how much of this is generational. I think women of my mother's generation and older were flat-out told "girls can't _____" a lot more often than I was, growing up. Even the person who tried to get me not to be a physics major didn't try to tell me that girls couldn't, just that I would, in her estimate, be a lot more comfortable in a field with more women. (Showing pretty clearly that she knew me not at all, but never mind that part.) And I can see where if you'd heard that girls can't this and girls can't that, exorcising it in your work might have a great deal more appeal than if obstacles were subtler. Anybody care to be a data point with their own age and attitudes (and, if it seems relevant, gender) in this regard?

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Probably some good chunk varies by generation. I'm older than you, but about ten years behind some big changes. I know women just ten years older than me who were smart enough to go to Caltech, but couldn't because at that time, Caltech didn't accept women. I'm still a bit gobsmacked that such a time is as close to me as it is.

Then again, I have a bit of that experience myself -- when I was an undergrad I worked for a while as a messenger and process server for a law firm. As I found out later, I was the first woman hired to that job there, and based on me, others came after. At the time, though, I didn't realize it was a thing.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

>Anybody care to be a data point with their own age and attitudes (and, if it seems relevant, gender) in this regard?

I (24) can't remember ever being told I couldn't do something because I was/am a girl. I can't remember it ever really even being implied. The first time I ever felt discriminated against on that basis was when I was working footwear at REI (so I was 22-23) and would occasionally run into a (middle-aged) man who very clearly didn't want my help.

That may have been an age thing as well; I was the youngest in the department by a few years, and those guys generally seemed to want the help of an older (60+, I think) gentleman who worked in the department. But I think it was not _just_ an age thing.

But other than those instances, which were few and far between, and similar, yah, no one ever seemed overly concerned.

I did love some of those First Girl books when I was littler, though.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I tend to feel the same way about such stories, and I don't remember ever hearing "girls can't do X" when I was growing up.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I got told it a lot, along with "young ladies can't", class and gender all in one handy package. I'm 42, but I was brought up by my grandparents.

I think any inverted cliche becomes just as much of a cliche. At this point it would be more interesting to write about the girl who does want to sew. I've been having terrible trouble recently with having a character, female, 1st person, be interested in clothes. This is not because I'm not interested in clothes -- though you can't be much less interested in clothes than me without being a nudist. However, she's also interested in cars, and I'm even less interested in cars, but I have no problem signalling her interest in cars and getting it in. The clothes thing though... it's so hard to have a female character in a relatively modern setting interested in clothes but not a bad person or even a shallow person.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

"The clothes thing though... it's so hard to have a female character in a relatively modern setting interested in clothes but not a bad person or even a shallow person."

Really? But you know women who are interested in clothes without being bad or shallow. Can't you use them as models?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Combination of time, generation of adults involved, and especially geography: when I got told that "young ladies don't," it was something like "sit with their knees around their ears while wearing a skirt." And I can more or less get on board with that sort of thing: I am not as opposed to my bra strap occasionally showing as women of my grandmother's generation are, but I really do think it's best not to put my underpants on general public display. I am not willing to make infinite concessions to other people's modesty, but that's one I can happily consider my gift to the community at large: nobody should be shown my skivvies unwilling. (Large numbers of the potentially willing are also not invited, but that's another issue.)

I'm sure there were other things that people my parents' age and approximate location told their daughters as "young lady" stuff, but for me it was almost always in the category "mannerly young person" and not a gender thing at all. "Young ladies don't run in church," but neither do young gentlemen. I feel confident that if my mother was given charge of a 6-year-old of mixed gender under relevant circumstances, she would tell them that young honorable herms do not run in church. (Mom reads Bujold.)

Umm. I'm thinking about my Finnish novels, and one of the important bits is that magic is always worked into concrete objects. So one of the most common ways to make a light, portable, useful magical item is to knit, sew, or embroider it. Characters of both sexes do this, and also carve and paint and cook and brew and construct vacuum-tube machines and so on. I did not mean that to be a reaction to the Girl Who Doesn't Want To Sew, but I suppose it could look like one if you squinted at it. I don't mind.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I'm 38, and I not only heard "girls can't do ______" when I was younger, I heard "girls don't do ______."

Having a dad who (among other things) taught me to field-strip firearms and put them back together in less than five minutes* made me a bit of a confounder of this sort of crap.

*Typical scene: 12-yo Jill sitting on her bed, reading. Dad walks in and places pistol on bed, stating, "Timing you - starting NOW."

[kaffrithe.livejournal.com]

I'm 51, and was born & raised in Alaska (in Anchorage, not out in the Bush). My mother always told me I could do/be anything I wanted, as long as I didn't hurt anyone else in the process. As the oldest child, I helped my father build (Heathkit, for those who remember them) our stereo, as well as cast bullets. I learned how to shoot a gun, butcher moose and halibut, and change my own tires by the age of 16. I also sewed most of my own clothes. I honestly don't remember ever hearing, at home or school or anywhere else, that my gender restricted me in any way from my desired pursuits.

on the other hand, Alaska is it's own animal culturally...

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I'm 35 (and in the US, which is probably as relevant as age) and was absolutely one of those people who grew up thinking there was no need for feminism because we'd already won. No one ever said "Girls can't--" or even "Girls don't--" or, importantly, "You can't because girls--" to me that I remember. But what I realize in my late teens and early twenties was that a lot of people were thinking it, whether they said it or not. I was able to point to at least two teachers (one male, one female, roughly the same generation, which is to say, about my parents', one in math and one in physics) in my high school whose behavior only made sense if you factored in an unquestioned, ineradicable predisposition to believe that boys were better at math than girls. They didn't say, "Girls can't do math," but they clearly believed it. I suspect they didn't even realize they believed it, but it was horribly obvious in retrospect.

In fact, I felt like I'd been tricked into believing that gender really did not affect things - not just limiting girls' options and resources, but any effect at all - when it was clearly (once I learned how to think) not true, and I could only assume that other people knew it wasn't true, because probably not everyone was as dense as I'd been about it.

At the same time, even though that was a hectically stimulating time of life for me, my grade school assumptions are wired into my brain at a level that's difficult to challenge, so even though I've been shaped by people's assumptions that "girls can't--" or "girls don't--," I still find articulations of it weird and artificial-sounding, so that I, too, am not a fan of The First Girl Who stories.

What I find particularly weird are fantasy stories which mimic European history up to a point - for instance, women's dress and the nature of femininity - but then provide equality for women a la late 20th century in other things, e.g., jobs. The first example of this is Hambly's Antryg books. I love 'em, but I still think it's weird and implausible, because the chocolate-box-sampler attitude toward gender roles seems to flagrantly ignore the causes and ramifications of oppression.

Also, I do know that not everyone got the same upbringing I had, even of my age and in my region. The first self-defense/martial arts teacher I had told a story about when his daughter, some years younger than I am, was about four, and a little boy she was playing with hit her and she hit him back. The boy was shocked and said, "Girls don't hit back!" And then, upon finding that this didn't sway her, he collected his other (male) friend and left, refusing to play with a girl who didn't know she wasn't supposed to hit back.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I would not claim that no one was surprised by me doing physics, for example, just that they would not have dreamed of telling me outright that I couldn't or that no girls did.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If there's meant to be a comment here, it didn't post.

Sex/gender roles

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

I think/feel we're not going to have true equality until it's every bit as natural for a guy to work as a secretary (or medical transcriptionist, or office manager) as for a woman to be a physicist. I'd also really, really like to see more woman lead guitar players on the commercial band circuit, and have nobody be particularly surprised. Yeah, Emily Salier of the Indigo Girls plays excellent acoustic lead; and, though when my sociopathic first wife turned out to be a brilliant bass player a lot of people simply couldn't cope with it, four years later when I put together the Runestone band with Kara Dalkey, people took it far more for granted. I'd still like to see more woman musicians, and not just ordinary musicians, but playing lead guitar or drums (or whatever) really, really well. And one of the things I'm a bit concerned about with my new claims examiner job is that I'm no longer breaking trail; claims examiners are both men and women. Oh, well.

Nate B.

Re: Sex/gender roles

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think lots of women my age know Kim Deal's name even without being Pixies fans. Because she was a bassist, and that was -- that was a thing. A woman in a band who was not the singer -- and it wasn't an all-girl band -- that was notable. I wish it was less so. I wish it had improved since. I like girls-with-guitars music (and guys-with-guitars music, come to that), and girls-with-pianos music, too, but it'd be nice to have stuff more outside that genre as well.

I have had editors tell me that it was confusing to have a nurse character or a secretary character whose gender was not initially specified ("The nurse looked up") turn out to be male, and I've had editors tell me that the reader will naturally assume that a doctor character is male. This baffled me, because doctor is a "girl job" in my head and in my life experience (both seeing doctors and teaching physics lab sections to pre-meds). If the complaints fell evenly -- that you couldn't tell what sex the character was initially, regardless of profession -- it'd seem like a valid point to me. This way was just weird. Happily none of them wanted me to switch the characters' gender, just to signal it in the first or second sentence.

[jebbypal]

I was told in high school that wanting to take two science classes and two math classes at the same time meant "that i didn't want a social life at all" and this was only about 15 yrs ago (and yes, it was a male guidance counselor - who was also a football coach - telling me, a girl, this). I also had a friend whose mother thought it was amazing that "as a girl, I could still do math, because that was just so rare".

But, growing up, my own parents technically never told me I couldn't do something because I was a girl ...except the one time I wanted to be get a summer job as a pizza delivery person. But I was frequently told I couldn't "go in the attic" or "get a motorcycle" because I was the more reckless child supposedly. Which totally doesn't ring true to me, personally.

Oddly enough, moving away from the middle of the country and out to the east coast, I've found things flipped a bit. My boyfriend was very surprised to learn that I could cook and bake since all his previous girlfriends could do neither and frequently managed to burn macaroni and cheese if allowed in the kitchen by their parents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Welllll...under other circumstances, I might have agreed that two math and two science classes at a time might make a social life difficult for anyone due to time constraints. But it sounds like that's not what the guy meant. Ick.

Everyone should be able to cook themselves pasta. I mean, honestly. That's an appalling level of cluelessness for a parent to allow in someone old enough to date.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Sing it.
I notice this in history as well: there's a whole lot of work been done on How Women Got Into Higher Education/The Medical Profession (etc) in the C19th, when there were obviously (thank you, Carol Dyhouse, for at least addressing what then happened about women in universities) ongoing problems. It would be really, really interesting to analyse What Happened Then? about e.g. the second and third generations of women in medicine who didn't have being E Garrett Anderson and S Jex-Blake causing the Walls of Jericho to tumble to sustain them.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

Definitely there is too much focus on women as "firsts" in history and insufficent discussion of women of influence appart from first-ness and the problems they did or didn't tackle.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

In my bubble, it was important to tell girls my age they could do things, and disapproved to tell them they couldn't, in general (and I believe we determined I'm your mother's age). But I strongly suspect that people not in Northfield and a few other places didn't find things worked that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hold on now -- are you suggesting that Northfield may not be entirely typical of American cities and/or towns?

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I was generally raised to believe that girls could (and might want to) do anything boys could (barring certain physical improbabilities), and that developing a career and being financially independent were important. I found considering financial dependence within my personal relationship extremely painful - one of these reversals people are talking about.

What is crazy weird to me, at this point in my life, is that my (tomboy) mom quite frequently makes sexist statements now - and by sexist I mean apportioning a certain predeliction, skill, way of thinking, etc, to one or another gender. I react to them rather badly, I'm afraid.

And in retrospect, even Free To Be You and Me still gave limited messages, despite gender-bending songs like "William wants a doll". Take "When we Grow Up" (http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/wedontha.htm). It frustrates me to find myself embarrased by something that was considered revolutionary even still when I was a kid.

Hey, when we grow up, will I be a lady
Will you be an engineer
If I have to wear things like perfume and gloves
I can still pull the whistle while you steer

(the end is still good:)

When I grow up, I'm gonna be happy
And do what I like to do
Like makin' noise, and makin' faces
And makin' friends like you

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Or to put it the way I did recently, "If Atalanta is so independent and interesting, why does she sound like such a simpering ingenue?"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A five- or six-person class makes not calling on one sex worse, not better!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I'm so very happy with "Kingpseaker" is that I did exactly what I wanted to do with gender in it: show a gender system that isn't equality and that arguably puts the female narrator in a problematically subordinate position, and then have the story not be about how she breaks out of it, but rather about how she makes it work for her. "System is broken, character breaks system" stories are often too simplistic, too wish-fulfillment, for my taste. I'm more interested in seeing characters navigate the systems they have, and find the possibilities within them.

I'm 26.5 and grew up in suburban Dallas with parents who generally left me with the idea that I could do anything if I applied myself to it (within the bounds of physics, of course). The result of my upbringing seems to be that I steamroller over most sexism without even noticing the bump; I only remember two teachers I felt were sexist -- both of them antique fossils in our educational system -- and I just maneuvered around them rather than trying to confront them head-on, figuring they were too old to bother trying to change. I was on the math team in elementary school, and while I came perilously close to failing AP calculus my senior year thanks to losing interest in math round about the second sexist teacher, I never thought I couldn't do it -- just that I couldn't be bothered to.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And while it's sometimes at least a bit interesting to look at situations where a disproportionate number of members of some population decide they can't be bothered to do/learn something, it's not the same situation as when they're told they can't.

[eposia.livejournal.com]

I got no significant "girls Can't" messages until I was old enough to recognize the flaws in the arguments. (The first time I heard the "girls can't do math" bit I laughed out loud, as at the time I was in an 8th grade Algebra II class (two years ahead of the curriculum at that time) with 8 girls and two boys - and of those, the two boys were consistently the C or failing students. That pattern held true pretty much through my time in public school - there were usually more girls in the honors classes, who were also the better performers in both grades and social achievements compared to most of the guys.)

In my current writing project, I have a Badass Protagonist who is Female, but the point of the story isn't emphasizing what she does as being anything more special because she's a girl. In fact, I find that the stories I enjoy reading and writing more these days are those stories that bend the gender assumptions a little more creatively than the "First Girl Who..." trope.

I've had several interesting conversations about this issue with my stepmom, who was very much of the "women's lib" generation and had to overcome a lot of the "girls can't" programming. We've talked several times about how the influences working on our upbringings were so drastically different (and how the successes of her generation's women contributed to my own gender-neutral "you can do anything you put your mind to" childhood programming).

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I don't think I'd bother with a First Girl story either but maybe for different reasons. I loved Dragonsong absolutely to pieces when I was a kid, for instance. It's more that I never heard "girls can't" as a child, and then I went to college and saw so many people making choices that followed the standard sexist rules, and everyone said, But no one is stopping you so it must be natural.

So the First Girl story, it seems too easy now. If someone marches right up to you and says no, you know what to fight against. Let's have a real challenge, you know? (Uh, 32 female.)

Title-sparked tangent

[aszanoni.livejournal.com]

I never would have thought of _Dragonsong_ as a First Girl book. I read _Dragonsinger_ first, and always saw them both as unhappy girl finds a place where she's happy. Considering that I deliberately read _Dragonsinger_ first because it was thicker, after reading their back covers, that probably tells you my seventh-grade standards for a book. :>

It could also be that I never noticed the whole category of First Girl with certain authors. Too common a theme.

I'm trying to think of an Anne McCaffrey book before the mid-90s that wasn't a First Girl book - barring _Dragondrums_ and _The White Dragon_. I can't think of one.

- Chica

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

22 female. I have a lot of gender preconceptions, but some of them are due to a small sample size. Girls are smarter than boys, because my sister and I were in advanced elementary classes and my brother wasn't (because the teacher really contributed to a horrible year for me). In the advanced classes, there were something like seven boys, and all of them were... unsuccessful along the dimensions I valued and still somewhat value for measuring success. There weren't many guys in biology when I was at IWU, and they didn't count because they mostly wanted to be teachers or weren't in my classes.
I haven't been told flat-out that I can't do anything because of le boobies. I do self-segregate pretty strongly, though, and the main tension in my life at the moment isn't strictly gender-based but discipline-based: the guys tend to have engineering backgrounds, the girls have other sciences. So they're reviewing what we're learning. If there were a girl engineer-undergrad-major, she'd probably kick the euphemism out of them, because as above, girls are just smarter.

Trying to write interesting things about gender is not producing stories, but it is rubbing my face in my own preconceptions.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

Age 31 here. I'll never write in a setting that doesn't have gender equality (barring my own failure to fully examine my assumptions).

Sometime in adolescence, I got really tired of reading first-girl-who stories, probably because so much of what I read fell into that category.

No one ever told me I couldn't do something because I was female, although once I got to college, and especially grad school, there were obviously people who didn't believe women could do physics.

[ellarien]

I'm 42, and grew up in the UK at a time when trousers on girls were rare and somewhat frowned on, but the only 'girls don't' I remember came from the admissions tutor at the first university Physics department where I turned up for interview; I'd commented with surprise that there were only three girls in a group of twenty, and he said offhandedly, 'Girls don't apply to do physics.' It was a little late to tell me that, and in fact there were about twenty of us in a class of 100+ in the end. (Mind you, I went to a girls-only school from age 11, and no-one there discouraged us from doing maths and sciences; woodwork/metalwork versus cooking/sewing didn't come up, because none of those were offered.)

[st-egfroth.livejournal.com]

The comment about coming from a girls-only school is interesting. Of the 7 or 8 other girls I knew reasonably well in my cohort of (UK) undergraduate physicists, I was the only one who didn't come from a girls-only school (and actually even I had a couple of years at one when I was 10-11). Interestingly, the male/female ratio was similar (1/5ish) despite this being (I infer, since I'm 27) something like 13 years later.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I will never, ever write a book where I make up an imaginary setting where women are widely believed to be only good for their marriageability.

I suspect that this is also true of my own work, just because I find such settings tedious.

Don't think I can comment much on the "Girls can't" or "Girls don't" themes, other than to note that in my (initially female-dominated) social group in high school, girls did in fact do maths and sciences, as well as other geek activities (i.e. playing RPGs/CCGs). This struck me as the natural order of things, and I'm usually nonplussed when confronted with the fact that other people don't see it that way.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of a culture where women are widely believed to be only good for their marriageability, while at the same time they're doing approximately everything of real significance.

Thus, I write historical fiction.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think people tend to forget how much economically necessary and productive activity used to go on within the domestic sphere, it was not all about sitting around doing fancy-work. E.g. a woman's skill in dairying or collecting and selling eggs might make all the difference to a farm's prosperity. I was saying on someone else's post the other day that surnames like Webster, Baxter, Brewster, are derived from the female forms of the trades in question.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

I am 21, and I remember hazily once getting told I couldn't play with my dad and brother when they rough-housed because I always got hurt and cried. I think that probably had more to do with my being two years younger than my brother than my being a girl, however.

I -do- remember the vague social pressure to be girl-like, and my subsequent enthusiastic resentment of it. I would *not* wear dresses after the age of 5 or 6, up through 'till the end of high school. And I still eschew makeup as a kind of double-standard.

But, the 'girls can't' stories do frustrate me. As do most classes on feminism, especially the ones that re-write history from a modern perspective. They lack *subtlety*, and they often don't ring true, because no grown up man or boy who I have talked to has ever said, "girls can't." Not once.

Also, just read Grapes of Wrath. And oh, there is a gender divide in *that* book. "...Rose of Sharon was pregnant and careful. Her hair, braided and wrapped around her head, made an ash-blond crown. Her round soft face, which had been voluptuous and inviting a few months ago, had already put on the barrier of pregnancy, the self-sufficient smile, the knowing perfection-look; and her plump body - full soft breasts and stomach, hard hips and buttocks that had swung so freely and provocatively as to invite slapping and stroking - her whole body had become demure and serious."

But then, the female characters are some of the most interesting and admirable in the book. And they are presented that way. So that's interesting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I really hate Steinbeck, so I am the very last person who should discuss The Grapes of Wrath gender roles with you.

But--yeah. I know that people aren't always subtle in real societies or real relationships. I know that people aren't always interesting, either. I prefer to read about the ones that/who are.

[windcedar.livejournal.com]

I'm twenty-six, and I remember being utterly shocked when, at ten or so, a friend's mother told us both that when we grew up we should marry a doctor or a lawyer.

...marry?! Not be?

But messages like that were few and far between for me (though that friend must have gotten them a lot more). It did gradually dawn on me in my later teens that one reason my mother was so encouraging of me and my sister getting Edumacated - more so than with my brothers - was because we were girls, and therefore needed...hmm...more ammunition? in taking on a sometimes-sexist world. Which, come to think, might be a reaction to her being told "Girls can't/don't" when she was growing up. It's interesting how these things reverberate down the generations in different ways...

For what it's worth, I'll read books about the first-girl-who, but I don't particularly seek them out, and the story has to have something else going for it too. Otherwise...like you said, meh. :)