Mr. P has unbuckled himself while I am driving, so I deliver a stern speech threatening death in a car accident.
Mr. P: "But you never have an accident."
Shmoogie: (slightly tremulous) "I don't ever want to die!"
Mr. P: (excited) "You know, Shmoogie, if you never died, you would get to see what species comes next [after humans]!"
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For the second time in as many weeks, I was in the car this afternoon blinking back tears. I could write it off as stress, end-of-semester and holiday, maybe one of those random hormonal fluctuations I love so much, maybe lack of exercise, maybe too many sweets, maybe lots of things. But what it feels like, mostly, is that five years ago was the last time my dad was alive at Christmas, which means that coming up in January is the fifth anniversary of his death, and it's not that I'm consciously thinking about five years and calendar dates, but the subconscious picks up the cues and goes where it will when it gets the chance.
Last week, it was a stupid schmaltzy Christmas song on the radio that I don't even care about and who knows why my subconscious does… but that's not the interesting part of the story.
Today is the interesting part of the story, because I was listening to On Being and Krista Tippett was interviewing Brene Brown, who did a TED talk on shame that I might have linked to a while back. I was listening to it because I was intrigued by the TED talk but felt like it was a little superficial and I thought maybe the full hour and the interview format of On Being would toss up more satisfying cud to chew on, for lack of a better metaphor.
It's a great interview and you should listen to the whole thing, really, and I don't say that lightly knowing how busy everyone is right now (but maybe you have some crafty things to get done and need a little piped-in company, not that that's what I use podcasts for or anything… there's a transcript, too, but I think you're missing a lot that way). Anyway, it covers a bunch of broad topics around the idea of shame and vulnerability and the research that Brown has done in that area, but what caught me up short was when she talked about why she started considering men in her research when she had been dealing for years with only women.
A man came up to her at a book signing and asked why didn't she talk about men and she said because she didn't study men and he said, "We have shame, we have deep shame, but when we reach out and tell our stories, we get the emotional [bleep] beat out of us. And before you say anything about those mean fathers and those coaches and those brothers and those bully friends, my wife and three daughters, the ones who you just signed the books for, they had rather see me die on top of my white horse than have to watch me fall off."
And a little bit later in the interview Brown says, "…for men, the perception of weakness is often very shaming and... one of the things that's interesting is, I talk to men and, you know, what I heard over and over was some variation of, look, my wife, my girlfriend, whomever, they say be afraid, they tell me, you know, share your vulnerability with me, open up, but the truth is, they can't stomach it."
Immediately, as I'm listening to this, the years are dialing back at lightning speed and I'm standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, a few years into official adulthood, and my dad is standing there, too, but looking small and huddled into the corner, and I've just been informed that he is seriously struggling with extreme anxiety. I could feel his fear and I could feel the shame that came with it and I didn't know what to say or do. I know I opened up about my own struggles with depression and anxiety, which it turned out I had hidden from my parents better than I realized, and I know that I wish now I had given him a really big hug but I don't know if I did or not. But whatever it is that I said and did or didn't do, I hope to God that, as imperfect as I know it was, I did not make him feel that I couldn't stomach it, that I would rather he die on top of his white horse than have to watch him fall off.
I hope.
And I hope that he wouldn't mind me sharing this story. Actually, I can clearly imagine him chuckling and saying, "I'm dead! What do I care?" but you never quite know after a while if the loved one in your head matches the loved one who really was in every perfect detail. Still, I think even in life he would have been uncomfortable as hell about it, but might almost have said it was ok to post this anyway (especially if he knew he'd be dead!), because he was brave and he cared. And, probably because of that, his falls from the white horse in my eyes were never permanent, more like well-deserved dismounts for a little rest and recuperation. I hope he knew that, too.
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I'm so exhausted from staying up late last night, but I want to take just a second (ok, an hour) to note the best things I've been reading today.
I know data mining has a mixed reputation, but the Time article today on the Obama campaign's masterful use of data and statistics is quite a read, if you haven't already seen it. I've also really enjoyed watching the nerdy portion of the Twitterverse cheering Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who has stood calmly by his statistical poll-aggregating engines for months and came out with an essentially perfect call on all 50 states. Score for math, reason, science. (And worth noting that FiveThirtyEight deserves some credit for preventing a nervous breakdown in yours truly in recent weeks.) (Ok, I have to sneak in and add this response to a "humorous" tweet by David Frum, "Horrible possibility: if the geeks are right about Ohio, might they also be right about climate?" I was myself mulling that over last night, wondering if the idea might be dawning on some people. Math. Reason. Science. Too late?)
Bill McKibben's proposal that we start naming hurricanes after fossil feul companies and ThinkProgress's recap of five things we can now count on from Obamacare warmed my heart. So did the victory speech I stayed up ridiculously late to hear. And "Barack Obama and the Death of Normal" by David Simon is a symphony for the liberal soul.
When I needed calming reading material during the wait last night, I was comforted to have my spiritual reading group's current selection, "The Wisdom of No Escape" on hand. It's a short and wonderful book on the transcendent practice of loving-kindness.
For more on the spiritual grounding side of things, I listened to some of Krista Tippett's discussion with Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin yesterday evening after polls had started closing but results weren't yet in and I was getting way too agitated. Krista Tippett is like an anti-agitation pill. I also felt enobled by Jonathan Haidt's piece in the NY Times this morning (which Tippett tweeted about, which is how I found it) on getting our own minds out of partisan gridlock. I had trouble explaining that one the first time I tried today... I think the point, for me, is that because we can easily get so tribalized about our politics, we would do well to seek out the glimmer of light in the opposition's most sacred worries, even if it's painful for us. Not that we have to agree, but that we would do well to recognize the worthy values at the core of their concerns.
It reminded me that a few weeks ago I was deeply moved by another Tippett conversation, with pro-choice activist Frances Kissling and pro-life activist David Gushee. I appreciated that Kissling was willing to say that the way the pro-choice movement has talked about the fetus has often been "crass", but she remains strong in her convictions and responded firmly to Gushee's leading question, "Is abortion empowering to women?" saying that "I would not say childbearing is necessarily empowering to women, either".
But voting in an election that crushed so many arrogant men with an utter lack of moral imagination when it comes to people different than themselves? I bet Kissling would agree with me that was pretty empowering.
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We're three weeks into kindergarten now and, overall, things are going pretty well, but Mr. Pants does go a little crazy in the evenings. Predictable, really, and I try hard to be sympathetic (while also not, say, allowing him to beat up on his sister just because he's cranky) because, you know, he's in this very structured situation with very little say over what he's doing for six hours a day and he probably needs to blow off some steam once he's out of there.
But an interesting thing happened on Friday. He came home with some little stuffed animals that he'd gotten to choose "from the treasure box!" because he'd racked up 10 days of stars for good behavior. Boy, was he excited. Remember being a kid? A treasure box! You get to pick a toy!!! Awesome!!!!!!
So he was showing me his treasures and he was so happy and then after a little while his mood shifts and he starts to pout and he quietly says something about how he's scared that he won't always be able to be good because sometimes he feels like he wants to do something against the rules and he's afraid he won't always be able to make good choices.
And a little flashbulb goes off in my head, Oh!!!! He's not just "blowing off steam" because he's got excess energy after sitting still for awhile, he's anxious. Anxious about "being good".
(And then I'm kind of pissed off, because, you know, if there wasn't a treasure box and all this pressure to have 10 perfect days in a row, he'd probably be a little less fixated, but this is not really my point...)
So, then, on Saturday night we're reading before bed and now we've gotten to Little Town on the Prarie and Laura is 15 years old and her sister Mary is two years older and, by this point, blind from a bout of scarlet fever several years before. We're at the beginning of the book and the girls are going for a walk together and there's this astonishing moment where Laura tells Mary that she used to really hate her because she was always so good and Laura just never could be that good and it made her so mad she wanted to slap her. And Mary is upset, mostly because she's afraid that Laura still feels that way sometimes, but Laura says, no, no, you just seem to be good without trying now and it isn't annoying at all.
And then Mary admits that she deserved to be slapped back then because all she was doing was "showing off", being so impressed with herself for how good she could be.
And what had changed, Laura wants to know?
First, Mary quotes the Bible, that "we are all desperately wicked" and then she says, "But that's not the point... I don't believe we ought to think so much about ourselves, about whether we are bad or good... — it isn't so much thinking as — as just knowing. Just being sure of the goodness of God."
And I'm reading this to Mr. Pants, thinking up to this point, oh, how lovely is this little vignette of two sisters reconciling and clearing the air of their younger quarrels; maybe this will help him somehow, and then we get to this and Mary's words hit me. "I don't believe we ought to think so much about ourselves."
Because, really, how much effort do I spend worrying about whether I am bad or good? About whether this purchase, that meal choice, this babysitting arrangement, that school, this career, that hobby is good or bad or good enough or at least not too bad? Too much, even if I do try so hard to avoid "showing off" about it.
Clearly, there are choices that good and bad and better or worse and it matters, but nothing is perfect and the world is so complex that we would have to be God Himself to see every last ramification of any one of our decisions. And thinking too much about myself, about whether I am "bad" or "good", sure does make me cranky after a while (or — for shame! — self-righteous), which really gets in the way of what I know is the higher calling, being sure of goodness and, maybe simply as a side effect, being a blessing to those around me.
Because I am, yes, "desperately wicked". But studying my own accounting book, however subconciously or surreptitiously, trying to make sure the "good" marks outnumber the "bad" ones can't fix that or help much of anything else, although I think most of us hope or think or wish sometimes that it could.
****
Hitting "post" before I lose my nerve.... Happy Monday!
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Honor! What a glorious word!
Or, maybe not so much.
This is a theme that's shown up in several books I've read recently, including Better Angels, that a "culture of honor" is actually a really damaging thing. Take offense easily, take it personally... run a much higher risk of violence.
Pinker (Better Angels author) talks at length about dueling, which used to be quite common and taken very seriously, but in a matter of a generation or so became the object of ridicule and then quickly disappeared.
(As an aside, the ridicule-leads-to-vanishing idea has me thinking a LOT. Is that the problem with climate change? Just think about who has the ridicule advantage there. The other side is so unstintingly EARNEST. Not that earnestness is always a bad thing. I'm much better at being earnest than at being humorous, myself, but this does have me thinking...)
Anyway, I'm thinking about the news last week, the assumption in the media that "of course" an insult to Islam will lead to violence. Of course? Surely Colbert isn't the only one capable of pointing out (with humor!) that plenty of people respond to insults with something ranging from indifference to disgust to anger, but that doesn't mean other people die.
The violent defense of honor, Pinker says, is going the way of witch hunts. Good riddance.
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I think I'm finally coming out of the gloom I couldn't quite shake while reading (listening to) The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Not that the thesis was depressing! Far from it! Hugely optimistic thesis!
But, as the author states as part of his powerful conclusion, "In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness."
In a book about violence, even if it is about the shockingly successful reduction in violence that has been achieved in the past 1000+ years of human history, there is a whole lot of violence to consider.
It clings to you for a while, like the smell of rot.
But it's been a few weeks since I listened to the final chapter and finally the miasma has mostly lifted and I the optimism is shining through!
No post could do this book justice, but I have so many thoughts about it, thoughts that keep emerging and recombining and evolving as I hear the news and consider the election and watch my children fighting, playing, forgiving, and clinging to their grudges.
My point is, my thoughts are going to have to come out in dribs and drabs. They would anyway, but it's nice to have the excuse of being busy with school. ;)
For today, I just want to see how succinctly I can state the main ideas:
Just for fun, as a haiku:
Violence shrinks away,
praise reason, novels, justice,
men no longer duel!
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I stopped worrying too much about global warming a few years ago because it seemed like finally everyone was worrying about it and therefore something was going to be done about it and therefore I didn't need to worry. It kind of fell out of the news there for a while, too, and there were terrorists and wars to worry about and I had real life to worry about. I figured the scientists had global warming covered and the politicians were coming around and everything was going to be fine.
But Bill McKibben's recent article, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, scared me. And pissed me off. How dare he write 5 pages of words and numbers that are supposed to add up to "The sky is falling! Do something!" but not include a single informative graphic? The article is trying to be terrifying but ends up being stupifying. People — real people with jobs and kids and lives to deal with — cannot read that crap and get anything meaningful out of it.
Do you know the story of the Challenger launch? Not the one where it blew up and everyone was shocked. No. I mean the one where the engineers knew the very cold temperatures that day were going to make the launch a catastrophe but couldn't explain that clearly enough to the people who could have stopped it.
And that's the problem with climate change. Honestly curious, because I'm not a climate scientist and I've pretty much always just accepted "global warming is scary!" because that's the message I've gotten my whole life, I went googling for some basic information after reading McKibben's article. I figured it's such a big deal and so many people have been so concerned about communicating it for so long that there have to be some really great infographics and stuff out there.
But no. Most of what I found was either extremely vague pronouncements in the media, or super technical stuff with lots of numbers and chemistry lessons and caveats. Numbers are thrown around that are meaningless to me and to most other normal people. Billions of metric tons. Parts per million. One hundred thousand years. Two degrees celsius.
And THERE's the other problem. Two degrees? Wait, I understand two degrees! Two degrees is nothing! Even if two degrees celsius is 3.4 degrees fahrenheit... I mean, I've fought over a 2 degree difference on the thermostat, but it's still hard to get too freaked out by 2 measely little degrees, right?
But it turns out, two degrees (we're already about half way there, by the way) is quite a lot when we're talking about long term shifts in the global average temperature instead of daily shifts in the temperature of a living room.
One or two degrees, according to NASA, defined the Little Ice Age! Just one or two degrees and glaciers were shoving Swiss farmers off their land, New York Harbor was freezing solid, and crops were failing, killing a tenth of the population in European countries through starvation. (thanks, Wikipedia)
And there's plenty of reason to think that we'll be up more than 2 degrees by the end of this century. I won't be here, but my kids might. And I hope their kids will be.
So, two degrees is actually a big f-ing deal.
But let's not leave it at that. Let's take just a minute to look into the parts-per-million thing and the gigatons of carbon dioxide thing, since I went to all the trouble of filtering this stuff out of the Internet and firing up my calculator.
First of all, the most shocking news in the McKibben article comes from a recent report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which looks at the oil and coal industries from the dispassionate perspective of investment banking. Let's look at how much coal and oil and gas is on the books, ready to be dug or sucked out of the ground, they say. And let's see how that compares to how much we can stand to burn before the world becomes something utterly different.
Oh, yes, let's. See, there's this number that people have come up with. That number is 565 gigatons. Supposedly, we can pump another 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and still have some hope of staying within 2 degrees of change.
But, get this. The various coal, oil, and gas producers have already found and accounted for 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide. It's worth $27 billion to them and that's what the Carbon Tracker Initiative is concerned about because that's a lot of money being counted before it's made off of burning a lot of stuff that we can't actually burn because...
Well. What the heck is a gigaton??? Giga sounds big. Ton sounds heavy. But carbon dioxide sounds light. Invisible. Hardly measurable. Right?
Ok, but it turns out it isn't that complicated, afterall. The atmosphere is made up of a bunch of different gases (I'm partial to oxygen, myself) and gases are made up of molecules and — guess what! — you can count molecules. So we can measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that way. Corral a million molecules of air and count how many of them are carbon dioxide molecules.
And here, thankfully, the numbers become nice and normal again, something you can actually wrap your head around. Because for the past 100,000 years, which is quite a bit longer than the entire existence of humans (I always have to look that up), the atmosphere has been between 270 and 290 ppm carbon dioxide (that's "parts per million", meaning 270 to 290 carbon dioxide molecules in every hunk of a million random molecules).
Until the Industrial Revolution started. Since then, we've burned a lot of carbon and that's put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Woah. I was pretty shocked to find that. You mean, the entire existence of humankind we've been at 270 to 290 and now we're at 394??? That sounds like an awfully big change already. That sounds kind of scary.
So, what about the 565 Gigatons they say we can still put into the air?
That would take us to 459 ppm.
And 2,795?
That would be 745.
Humans have only ever lived with 270 to 290 and now we're well on our way to 459? And somebody's already counted the $27 billion they're going to make by pushing us to 745?
I'm not a scientist. But those are numbers I can wrap my head around. Those are numbers most of us can wrap our heads around, I'd say. So, scientists, stop confusing us with gigatons and stop trying to scare us with 2 silly little degrees, and start showing us 270 climbing to 394, heading for 459 and threatening 745. Maybe something like this:
You know the craziest thing? According to an investment analyst, the coal and oil and gas companies are still spending $100 billion dollars a year looking for more. How about for starters we make that stop? How far to a wind, solar, geothermal future would $100 billion dollars a year get us?
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We finally read the recent Atlantic article Why Women Still Can't Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter. For context, I haven't read any of what I imagine was probably a classic Internet brawl over it, except for an angry tweet here and there when it first came out.
Overall, I liked the article ok. It's nice to hear something like realism from a highly successful woman with children.
But there are two things screaming for attention in the whole thing that were almost completely ignored.
The first is the obvious one: Why are we still only talking about women? Why do we take it for granted that successful men have no desire to have a life outside of their work, a life which involves spending non-negligible time with their children? Or with anyone or anything else they might care about? Maybe some don't. Maybe some do. Maybe, in a different culture, more would. I certainly didn't expect Slaughter to go deeply into these questions, but I was disappointed that she skimmed past them almost as if they weren't even there.
Instead, there was a whispered assumption that most women want to have children and want to spend lots of time with them, but men don't. Later in the article, she said some nice things about fathers nowadays wanting more time for their families, too, and it's possible that if the article had been titled "The Future of Work-Life Balance in High-Powered Careers" I would have read it with a different attitude. (And it's quite possible Slaughter didn't come up with the title.) But.
Second is the existential question at the center of the whole mess. (It continues to amaze me how rarely anyone publicly contemplates existential questions.) What is all this for? Are we here to scramble like crazy in the highest echelons of power each of us is capable of reaching? If so, is that because we are here to amass as much prestige as possible? As much intellectual stimulation as possible? To do as much valiant, hero-scale good for as many people as we can?
On the other hand, why have we brought our children here? For our enjoyment? For our pride? For our naturalistic imperitive to carry on the human race? The vestigial animalistic pleasure of seeing our genetic material carried on into another generation? Our economic duty to supply future workers?
Slaughter's article was supposed to have me thinking about family leave policies and ambitious women's potential career paths, but her "of course this is what my job was like" description got me stuck on the existential question. Woah. What on this earth can one person be doing at meetings, on phone calls, at receptions, in hearings, in speeches, on their computer that can possibly justify this ceaseless level of busyness, of sheer hours awake and "productive"?
Either these careers absolutely require all this if the human race is not to fall apart (or, more parochially, our country is not to fall apart, or our way of life is not to seismically shift... except that MIGHT not be a bad thing...), or no career requires this (and actually doing a good job may be damaged by such excess!) and maybe we should be wondering why it seems so necessary.
Either way, it's unsettling to realize that we who are hoping to improve the playing field for men and women, parents and non-parents, who believe that frenetic working must be tempered with time for contemplation, with time for relationships, with time for living, are largely dependent on an elite in power who may think they believe in those things (or may simply not), but cannot (or feel they cannot) actually speak those beliefs through the one life they have to live.
And that is either tragic or terrifying. Or maybe it's just curious, something to think about, something that maybe could actually change someday.
Slaughter brushes past this question, too, but there's a glint in there when she describes working with Orthodox Jewish men (including the current White House chief of staff) who, of course, do not work (or even commute) from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. To keep this commitment, to faith, to family, to something other than work, is apparently possible (and is — the irony! — greatly admired by coworkers) even in "an enormously demanding job".
***
There's another, related question, but it is too messy for me to tackle in my own words today. If you can handle reading radical stuff and honestly considering the points being made even if the rhetoric sometimes gets a bit heated, you might try this short piece: Housework Under Capitalism, the Unpaid Labor of Mothers. I know nothing about the author, it was just what I got when I googled "capitalism unpaid labor women" and it makes a lot of the points I'm gnawing on, though not always in quite the way I think I would make them.
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Another mass shooting, a lot less chatter. I don't even feel like talking about it. Is it because I'm still feeling a little hungover from all the gun control fighting after Aurora? Or because a hate crime against Sikhs (whether the gunman realized they were Sikhs or understood what Sikhism is) feels like something unlikely to affect me while a random shooting in a movie theater feels like it just might affect me? (At least the question is being asked.)
Irony: I've been in Sikh temples more times than I've been to a midnight movie premier.
You should visit the kitchen of a Sikh temple sometime, my respect for the religion starts there.
***
Another place I've been more than once: jail.
No, not as an inmate. This isn't going to be quite that interesting.
I was going to tell you the long story, but I don't have time for the long story. Short story: I was depressed. (ETA: this is ancient history, like ten years ago.) Part of my self-developed plan for getting not depressed (I did see a counselor; don't self-treat depression... I'm supposed to say that, right?) was to do a selfish selfless thing — volunteer at the local jail mentoring inmates. As you may or may not know, vast numbers of inmates are, first and foremost, drug addicts. (Slightly tangential link: Planet Money's fascinating piece on Suboxone, a prescription pill to cure addiction that most users get on the street from their dealers.)
Anyway, you know a felony means you can't vote for the rest of your life. And that black men are convicted of felonies much more often than whites (although I will say the inmates I worked with directly were both white). A fascinating article came through my Twitter stream today on those facts, plus the fact (which I had never before considered) that prison inmates get counted in the census as being part of the district which contains their prison, thus increasing the representation of districts containing prisons even though the inmates can't vote. End result, "prison-based gerrymandering" with parallels to the 3/5ths compromise. I've added the article to my reading queue for closer examination.
***
And I'm out of time, but you might also find interesting the ACLU's case against a Louisiana charter school that reserves the right to require female students take pregnancy tests and then kick them out if they either refuse the test or come back positive.
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"Why did you give me a pink lollipop in my lunch?!" Mr. Pants sobbed at me.
We had had kind of a rough morning and I was coming in to his room to end his time out and see if we could get in a better groove.
"Because you like lollipops!" I had dropped a watermelon lollipop in his lunch a week ago, trying to do something especially nice for him.
"But I hate pink! Pink is a girl color!"
"Well, did you taste the lollipop?"
"Mhmm."
"Did you like it?"
"Yeah, but it was pink!"
There followed a surprising conversation. His feelings about pink are, in fact, complicated. He hates pink. Pink is kind of a pretty color. He's afraid he might sometime decide he likes pink. Pink is a girl color. He hates pink. (I don't know if he remembers he used to like it.)
I told him that pink is just a color and it's true that our society says it's just for girls, but that at other times and in other places people have thought that pink was for boys and not for girls! Isn't it silly that people think things like that? I want you to like what you like because you like it, not because it's what everyone says you should like. There are a lot of things that people are going to tell you you should do and say and think and like and be because you're a boy. It doesn't matter. I want you and Shmoogie to be good, strong people. A good man is a good person. And a good man can like pink.
My tone was serious. I've been reading a fair amount of feminists lately —thanks to Twitter and the shock of finding my gender to be such a small minority of my current passion — and just this morning, I'd read this astonishing post by Shannon Hale, a female author of young adult literature (who I've never heard of, but now wish to read). She gives talks on writing at schools and often finds that the schools have separated the classes for her presentation — the girls are taken to hear her and the boys stay in their classrooms and miss the whole thing. I'm so dumbfounded by that, I'd be sputtering if I were talking.
I try to keep it cool, to raise my girl and my boy to be whole and happy people, comfortable with but not defined by their gender. But then I take them shoe shopping and the whole store is divided down the middle. The pink and purple sparkles on one side and the red and blue flames and menacing superheroes (Mr. Pants has only recently overcome his terror of "Iderman", aka Spiderman, who is pretty scary-looking if you think about it) on the other. Shmoogie picked ladybug rain boots over pink flowered rain boots and Mr. Pants wanted some, too. "Do you?" I aksed, not sure what to do. "I'm not sure they have your size. Let's go look at those over there and if you still want the ladybugs, we'll come back and ask about your size."
He picked firechief boots, thrilled at how well they will go with his intended Halloween costume — Super Fireman.
And I quietly sighed in relief that I didn't have to prepare to explain why his friends were making fun of him for wearing ladybug boots.
What if they were called "redbugs"? Would they still be the exclusive province of adorable little girls? What if they were "bloodbugs"? How unladylike. But everybody knows boys are all about blood.
It makes my stomach churn to see a little boy show up at the park in full military camoflauge, ammo belt and toy gun.
My heart sinks when we walk down the Lego aisle at Target and everything is clearly aimed at "boy" and most of it is frightening or violent. It's a narrow representation of Lego's product line, which I generally think of as being gender-neutral (although if you click on their homepage link there, you'll see new specifically "girl" products assailed by Ruth Suehle on opensource.com and by blogger Kate Bacchus), but it's what Target thinks my boy should want.
And, I don't know about you, but Target where we live is pretty much the arbiter of taste among the preschool set. It's rare that a trip to the playground, the zoo, or the pool doesn't involve exchanging knowing grins with other parents over the matching strawberry hats on our daughters or the t-shirts on our sons.
It always makes me think uncomfortably of the time we watched Goodbye, Lenin with a friend who grew up in East Germany. I had read about the one soviet brand of pickles in the reviews, of course, but I was still flabbergasted when she exclaimed, "That baby blanket! We all had that baby blanket!"
It was a blue blanket, if I recall correctly.
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