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.

[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."

[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?

[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.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

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.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Good question.

Well she's eighteen. And I don't really know all that many people well who I could use for that, at least, not any who are anything like her. I think it's particularly a problem in a young character. I do want her to be interested in clothes, I don't want her to come over as Susan Pevensie.

It'll work out, but it's being annoying at the moment.

[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]

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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Eighteen was the year I started having mild interest in clothes. But I'm still not sure I'm much help, because my clothes interest is sporadic and probably odd.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

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.

[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.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I taught myself to cook pasta by a secret special method: I read the instructions on the box, and did what they said.

See, all those years of schooling *were* good for something; I can read, and I can follow instructions.

This does leave me to worry seriously about people who consistently *can't*.

(Macaroni and cheese is harder than just cooking pasta, of course. I find the secret to not burning stuff is to keep an eye on it, myself.)

[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?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I suspect that you are thinking of macaroni and cheese, and I was thinking of Kraft Dinner.

I also suspect that someone who brings up macaroni and cheese as the extreme easy thing people couldn't manage to do right may also be thinking of Kraft Dinner. But jebbypal can speak for herself on that part.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

If confronted by Kraft Dinner, if I were too weak to run screaming, I would try reading and following the directions and see what happened :-).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, I think there's some possibility of that, anyway, yeah.

On the other hand, Pamela clearly lived in a different Omaha from the one you lived in.

[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.