Friday, June 16, 2006

i know what boys like

two things related to the same thing that made me angry today:
  1. a craigslisting for a bright blue foot locker chest. Quote: "I only have girls, so blue is not a color they want in their room."
  2. the playroom of a house I was in today that will be for a brother and sister. the sister's side of the room had butterflies and fairies. the brother's side had rockets and tank engines.
circumstances that might have made me less angry:
  1. "my girls don't like blue, so we have no use for it." the "thus" implication of the "so" in the original phrasing makes it sound like the blue/pink divide is a biological imperative. which is just stupid on so many levels.
  2. if the sister were older than 2, AND had shown no interest in anything else besides butterflies and fairies her whole life. apparently, the butterflies are an imperative, it's just not biological. girls like pretty, boys like doing.

wait, hang on... let me check the year.... yes, it's still 2006.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yesterday at my mom's house Jason and I were looking at my old "School Days" scrapbook that had blank spaces for school pictures and places for you to list your favorite subjects and stuff. Each year had a list of different occupations, and you could check off what you wanted to be when you grow up. One side of the checklist had mother, secretary, flight attendant, model, and teacher. The other side listed fireman, soldier, astronaut, baseball player, and president.
-Katya

Carrie said...

besides the obvious, i find it interesting "mother" is a girl's choice, but "father" isn't. and good god, think of the failure of society if those careers (both categories) were the only ones people entered into!! we would be comfortable in flight, and there would be no fires, and we would have some people up on the moon doing stuff, but we wouldn't have medicine or food or basketball players.