How far we have come...

[DanaC]

I can only speak from my own experience on this but: I have always used humour as a social coping mechanism. It may be that my experience was different because of my health problems - I had extreme and disfiguring eczema covering around 80-90% of my body for most of my childhood, from around the age of three - so my problems integrating with other children started quite young. By the age of six or seven I was very much an outsider.

I do recall that amongst the friends I did make as a kid (there were ups and downs on that front throughout , as for many I don't doubt) humour was our prime currency. The girls I hung around with, just as much as the lads, communicated through jokes and rehashing the funny lines and catchphrases we'd heard on tv. The girls I was friends with, were usually very much like me in that regard. essentially, I and the girls I related to, just as the boys I related to, were pop-culture nerds.

This idea of girls finding socialising somuch easier - and being emotionally literate at an earlier age than boys may be true for some - but really doesn't describe my, or many of my friends', experience of girlhood.

By the time I got to puberty, I already had the body image issues and the socialising issues. I was into dark speculative science fiction, philosphy and history. I was a nihilist and loner - the word emo hadn't yet been coined.

The problem with generalisations about gender is that they only ever apply to a particular band on the spectrum of experience. Lots of girls struggle with the things they are supposed to find easy and naturally gravitate towards the things that aren't supposed to draw their attention. Same goes for the lads.

In answer to the question about the wise mums in adverts and popular cultrure: I am fine with portrayals of wise women, as long as they are not a counterpoint to, and predicated on, a lack of male wisdom. I find the whole idea that women are somehow emotionally superior, or that they are somehow always the 'grown-up' in the relationship quite distasteful. It pisses me off when people argue that having women in the workplace will improve that workplacebecause of the special skills and qualities that women bring - because it is still predicated on an innate and all-encompassing difference between male and female brains and minds.

That just isn't how the world works. In my life I have known plenty of emotionally inept women, unable to communicate their feelings or navigate social situations and plenty of highly intuitive men, able communicate their feelings perfectly well and navigate complex social situations with ease.

When people talk about the different ways that men communicate with each other and women communicate with each other, it kind of baffles me - because for the most part my experience tells me that we actually communicate with each other in broadly similar ways.

[it]

Originally Posted by DanaC

This idea of girls finding socialising somuch easier - and being emotionally literate at an earlier age than boys may be true for some - but really doesn't describe my, or many of my friends', experience of girlhood.

That's because gender generalizations are usually centers of curve balls, not absolutes:

I know it's been observed in math skills, language skills, violent crime ratio's, even something as basic as height.

It's never "All [insert gender] are better then [insert opposite gender]". On any spectrum, there's plenty members of the opposite gender who'd be better then the average member of the gender in advantage, and vise versa (Hell if you modernize this to include transfolk as the gender they identify with, the cross sections could even apply to reproduction capacities, though it would be a bit more difficult to find variable criteria to draw a curve ball from).

That doesn't mean though that generalizations can't be talked about, are useless or aren't meaningful, especially in how they impact society at large (Like in the case of various industries and professions), just that they don't make sufficiently good indicator to prejudge an individual.

Originally Posted by DanaC

In answer to the question about the wise mums in adverts and popular cultrure: I am fine with portrayals of wise women, as long as they are not a counterpoint to, and predicated on, a lack of male wisdom. I find the whole idea that women are somehow emotionally superior, or that they are somehow always the 'grown-up' in the relationship quite distasteful. It pisses me off when people argue that having women in the workplace will improve that workplacebecause of the special skills and qualities that women bring - because it is still predicated on an innate and all-encompassing difference between male and female brains and minds.

That just isn't how the world works.

I agree, but what I am more curious about is less in judging the phenomena and more in understanding it's role in larger dynamics. What does it do to young and still maturing girls to see those depictions? How does it shape world view, ego, ideals for the self, interaction with the opposite gender, and so on?