Hello, everyone

So supportive of you Daniela Huguet Taylor…as always. Thank you very much.

Hi, Brian Titus on my way to the airport once again. Will check in later….

Safe travels Giselle Minoli. I lost my father at age 9; much different situation for my mom, however. very interesting.

Bravo!!!

Especially:

  A true sexual revolution for women is one that would grant them the freedom to choose to be married or not to be married, without having to listen to accompanying peanut gallery commentary. A true sexual revolution for women is one that would respect a woman’s choice to have children or not without being labeled either a traditionalist or a misfit. A true sexual revolution for women is one that would not blame them for being bestowed with a female biological identity – as though being born a woman were a disease – and one that would proactively help them become fully productive working members of our society, whether they have children or not, if that is what they choose.

Well done; very powerful.

I really want to read this. That’s why I’m just leaving this dumb bookmark comment. Sorry, Giselle Minoli 🙂

Hello, all of you kind people! Daniela Huguet Taylor and Brian Titus I did not know that within our life experiences was the shared one, somewhere, of a father/husband gone too young. It changes everything for a child and mother in this conversation. Thank you both for reading. Whatever you care to elaborate on…I am all ears!

A fantastic read, Giselle Minoli!

The disconnect you describe between the feminist movement and the reality that confronts women is something I witnessed in my formative years as well.

Unfortunately, it is very much alive today. I am constantly shocked and shaken by the things I hear in management circles when women aren’t present.  

It seems that ethics and fair play are expensive. And now that money doesn’t flow as freely as it once did, racism and misogyny are steady gaining ground. The world is still waiting for the feminist movement.

Jon Henry I would be interested to hear what some of those things might be. Although I appreciate that you might not be able to say. I, too, have noticed a shocking increase in sexism. Competition for work can bring out the worst in people. Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.

Very graceful writing Giselle Minoli. It seems peculiar to me that there seem to be some gatekeepers of feminist theory that don’t admit the individual and remarkably protean natures and phases of women’s lives, and how ALL of our lives bend through stretches of formal work engagement and then to the attentions and endless demands of fundamental existence and perhaps back again. 

I think of my mother, years as a working-class restaurant manager to join the income of my father’s blue-collar job to make ends meet in our family, finally free of that to spend years volunteering at her church and then years caring for my father through his Alzheimer’s at home—there was never time for theory. There was only the rock-solid example of intelligence and ethic and capable accomplishment. She’s slowed down at 90, but she’s still the picture of integrity to me, and I admire the hell out of her.  

Thank you for presenting a picture that accommodates the alternate examples of lives richly lived, corporate stars or no. Not to decry in the least the acuity and legitimacy of deep achievement in the business sphere (and the equal respect that should be given to that achievement), but to welcome voices that are equally eloquent outside the boardroom, gender be damned. Thanks for your incisive writing.

Hi, everybody. How utterly classless of me to create a post like this before I head for the airport, sign off again, then back on from JetBlue, then vanish again while I was (driving too fast) to Virginia from Dulles! However…the nice thing for me is that I get to my destination and there are all of these (as usual) thoughtful comments, which make me want to do a radio show.

As I read through your comments I hear/see/sense/feel/smell story after family story that are, each of them, singular, and yet there are these eternal labels placed on us (men included) to be of a sort, to “succeed” in some traditionally accepted way. And those stories are so media-hyped that the other stories, the ones that, as Greg Squires notes, introduce us to those “who by choice utilise a force of determination that appears often weak to me in the more gentrified populations” are often eclipsed.

I am grateful for my years in the theatre, because plays are about human beings and their struggles and it is an enduring tradition, the theatre, as well as the telling of those stories throughout the ages. 

I’m thinking at this moment of one of my very favorite playwrights, George Bernard Shaw, who was, in my view, a great feminist, utterly empathetic to women and ever questioning of roles and imprisoning traditions and values. And he didn’t just pit women against men, he pitted women against women and mothers against daughters (in the brilliant Mrs. Warren’s Profession) and fairly put up to your face (and British Aristocracy’s) a mirror of demanded reflection on what each of us believes to be true in our core.

It is from stories about human beings, not theory, that I find I am most moved to change my own life…

True honesty and baring one’s soul compassionately in a public forum whilst maintaining more than a simple patina of privacy, is a rare and precious gift Giselle Minoli. Your ability to meet the challenge is a testament to your intelligence and experiential depth. Most of all, it speaks to your undoubted, and oft-demonstrated, skill as an exceptional writer—a true communicator.

Your piece energized so many synapses that it’s difficult to know where to start. Perhaps I should begin by volunteering for the position suggested in your last paragraph. My qualifications would seem to match the job description. I am the other side of the gender divide and, as you know, a passionate supporter of true equality between this planet’s two predominant species—men and women. 

Sadly, at this point I should say that there are significant barriers to my appointment also. For a start I’m a trifle biased. I believe that the world would be a better place if the gender inequality were reversed. ‘Man’s’ testosterone-driven competitive instincts, and the inevitable conflict, has retarded humanity’s development for the past 65,000 years. Management by consensus, enhanced by honed protective instincts, is so much more powerful. 

Further, both of my parents, approaching their tenth decade, are alive and well and, although my mother had paid work—as a typist—through the war and until 1950, her vocations were child rearing, charities, and horticulture from then on. Further I was raised in the U.K. where things were very different in so many ways. My father, as many intellectuals, was of a communist persuasion and a card-carrying Socialist until the war. Nobody minded. He was in the majority in his cohort.

Naturally, when ‘Uncle Joe’s’ true colours became known there was a change. My father joined the Labour Party—card carrying too. To this day he is proud of ferrying voters to the polling stations in his motorcycle combination. I’m proud too. He helped bring in the voters to elect the government that enacted social medicine legislation and so many other great programs that helped equalize a divided society. Sadly these are diluted today in the U.K. economy driven by myopia from the other side of the aisle. Ho hum.

What is critical, however, and may help my chances of meeting your requirements for the ‘advertised’ post is that my mother was an equal partner in all efforts. As politics became less critical we worked as a family to consider then campaign on other inequities—racial, sexual, political. Anything other than religious—we have never been into lost causes.

It is that background that has shaped my perception of the world and the inequity of discrimination. I’m particularly passionate on the gender issue. If the position is still open please let me know where to apply. Thank you again for the perfectly balanced and insightful piece.

Oooooooooo. Giselle Minoli Colin Lucas-Mudd Now wouldn’t that be fun!

Also on the way to the airport.

Charlotte Duren Yet another story shared with me about another person’s life. What few people reliaze is how much we writers stew over what we write. We write because we must write. And we write, hopefully, to coax others to come out of the forest and tell their own stories. And if more women (and men) wrote their personal stories, it wouldn’t be possible for “one voice” at the top of a corporation to put out the message that they know the way it is for all people.

As for the young women you think are your competition in sexually explicit clothing Charlotte Duren I am here to tell you that it is not true. I will tell you, because I have seen it for decades and I watch it every day, that they wear sexually explicit clothing because there is nothing else going on there. It’s easy to see why some women would think this is competition, but in reality it is absolutely nothing, it means nothing and it will come to a further big fat nothing.

For reasons that have do with the kinds of people I met when I was growing up, mostly artists, I have never been afraid of getting older. Nor have I ever shied away from telling people my age. In fact, I feel more of everything than I felt when I was just starting out in my career. All day long young women like those you describe come to me and ask me how to do a zillion different things.

And I remind them every single day of the same thing: We become what we practice. If you get up every day and work on only how you “appear” in the world, that is all that you will become good at.

I think every woman and every man should take a few days out of their lives to evaluate all that they have done and then celebrate it. One of the benefits of being in the arts is that everything gets more distilled over time and there are some things one cannot realize when one is young. Find those things and surround your life with them. This should be our message to one another.

There are so very many of us on that treadmill Charlotte Duren. We just need to write about it more. Thank you so much for your time reading and your comment.

Indeed! The visible is temporary and the invisible is eternal. I have lived life according to values that are invisible. Why should I be surprised that the world (“the money,” “the job,” “the career”) doesn’t concur in my valuation? However, that lack of concurrence seems to be more vehemently expressed toward women.

Brian Titus it was set up badly to begin with. “Paid work” has always meant banking, lawyering, doctoring, etc. Women have fought this battle for centuries. It is the reason that when they get divorced their lives are so perilous and they can, in fact, and do, often, fall below the poverty line, along with their children.

I honestly believe it starts with marriages. If a couple “decides” that the man will work and bring in the “bacon for pay,” the couple has to provide the woman a “salary” for her “bacon for no pay,” role at home, which we all know is exhausting. Couples put money in savings accounts and 401(k)s and invest in all sorts of other ways. But it often goes completely unspoken that the reason a man is able to do all that he does is because someone is at home tending to the hearth fire.

Single men know they have to pay for all of these things: the laundry, the housekeeping, the secretarial and social organization of their lives and they hire someone (often) to do that for them. Suddenly, bizarrely, inexplicably, that same man gets married and it’s like Hurray, it’s now free! 

No. It. Isn’t. It is a team. It is a joint decision. And even though technically speaking this is not the genesis of Virginia Woolf’s 500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own, what would be wrong with a woman getting a paid salary for her share of the work?

This, then, provides an interesting basis for their marriage. Each person’s goals discussed and championed. Each person’s life held up for support.

The notion that women and men give up their lives for their children, as thought they are petri dishes spawning has always been appalling to me. Children need to see their parents lives – the mother’s and the father’s – fulfilled.

Brian Titus, the very conversation about love, relationships and marriage needs to change. There is also the sexual component…but that’s another essay. 😉

Giselle, your last comment reminds me of something that happened about 20  years ago. 

A colleague (female) scolded me that “my biological clock was ticking” (and that, by implication, I should get started right away producing children).  

I looked at her, cupped my hand to my ear, and said, “That’s funny, I don’t hear anything.”

Giselle Minoli Thank you so much. I accept. Oddly enough two of the better, male, commentators in this forum and I spent a while considering co-authoring a book eighteen months ago. The structure was left, right, and center, not politically, but from the male chauvinism and female consensus building activities in digital fora. My role was to take the female part with power being added to the arguments on the basis that I was writing for women—but as a male.

As to our parallels, there are several others. I’ll drop you and Meg a line with some photographs from my father’s biography. The  one of my mother pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete as my parents built the second home is particularly powerful. 

Giselle Minoli So much the same for the writer who has written six buried books, only to have the seventh make magic, and then be acclaimed as having “come from nowhere.” So easy to ignore the long hours at the keyboard alone, doing the work. So again for the woman next door, “Meh, she’s a housewife”—the housewife that perhaps taught the kids the stirring of art that will stay with them for all their lives, or who tirelessly labored under the headlights as a volunteer for a social cause or candidate, making a difference—or a hundred other things. 

So hard to get past the labels and the blindnesses of labeling.I do this endlessly too: pass an old guy wobbling down the street and categorize and dismiss: “Ahh, another old man.” But maybe that’s the old man who had the bike shop for 45 years, putting the three kids through college, launching a thousand kids to wheeled adventures, and maybe even translating Rilke at night. So many ways to make a difference than climbing gilded ladders.

But it’s damn hard (for me, at least) to NOT categorize and label; it’s the mental shorthand that saves us from that ghastly burden of deeper reflection. Guilty, most of the time.

Giselle Minoli “… all of our lives are far more rich and complicated than are allowed.” Well put; so they are. Thanks for the textured assessment of G+ men and the albatross of labels. But does this mean I now can’t submit inane lyrics to Justin Bieber’s publishing house? Damn…

It’s never too late to begin Jodi Kaplan. Methinks Tom Bentley can do it if he puts his mind to it!

Hey, I can do asinine on command: for instance, a rabbi, a frog and a myrmidon walk into a bar. Oh, never mind…

Always delighted to chat with you Giselle Minoli. I shall be beetling away at my desk on Sunday. Ping me when you would like to chat. Safe travels.

I will answer more fully later James Barraford I’m driving to the airport and can’t stay. But…people…men and women behave differently when there is a paycheck being made. This is not the case on G+.

A great essay, Giselle Minoli.  I think you touch on one of my fundamental problems with feminism qua feminism (and much of the reason why I choose to identify as a humanist instead)…it has a great deal of baggage associated with it that smacks of a detached elitism–which is a rather damning criticism when placed up against the realities which confront so many women.  

I ran into much the same thing when discussing the quality of public schools with a friend of mine. She could not understand why I would be supportive of vouchers and competitive enrollment–in short, of public education reform generally. I pointed out to her that while she had attended some of the best public schools in the country (CT) and gone on to, yes, Smith, I had grown up in the impoverished, incompetent school systems of the rural Carolinas and gone on to a public University. There was no reasonable way to draw the same conclusions from such fundamentally different starting points. 

Giselle Minoli I’m completely serious when I say you need to flesh out into a book . Not necessarily a counter, but another view. If not a full book, a long ebook. We have a long history of pamphlets political, personal and otherwise. We would benefit from your writing such a book/ebook.

Gary Walker I have often wondered about the blindness born of elitism. I know many people far more privileged than I growing up who can see clearly while others are blind as bats. So, too, often those who have to struggle (too much ?) cannot see clearly, while others do not feel sorry for themselves. At some point how we choose to be in the world is our own choice.

but. I’m with you when it comes to public education reform. The way it is currently going only those children with parents of means will be able to go to school. And then woe be unto all of us for how narrow the prism becomes and how small the applicant pool.

Yes…humanism. But there was/is a need for gender inequality issues to be addressed. I just don’t think academic circles was it. Thank you so much for reading, Gary.

Another idea James Barraford , hope you share The Journal for Social Era Knowledge with your circles?  They will not put the Journal into Google Currents until we have 200 subscribers, and I cannot get “subscribers” until people can FIND the Journal in Google Currents.  Rather a Catch-22. ( Google+ Would you PLEASE listen to this complaint of mine that I have been trying to get you to understand for a while now?)

In other words, James, we are trying to create a successful publication too.  Have to start somewhere, right?  ;’)   Hope yours is going great!  

I have boarded my flight and, for buon viaggio, could I ask all of you awesome people to subscribe to Meg Tufano’s Journal for Social Era Knowledge? You won’t regret it! Thank you!

Meg Tufano I have shared wiith my circles. I also shared it on my Facebook page as I have some seriously smart ladies (and gents) there. 

I have to admit I didn’t know the origins of the site. I understnand the frustration with Currents. Media Tapper was supposed to be added to Flipboard back when that meant something and they reneged. Keep trying is all I can say.

As far as my site Cultural Purveyor, it’s on hiatis until I decide what to do with it, but thanks for asking.

hi Giselle Minoli 

I  did not watch American Idol on purpose. I do not like this year’s judges and have been unable to make a connection with any of the singers, who seem to be getting younger every year. Last night I was taking my evening nap before going to bed, was watching the proceeding show and woke up in time to learn that the contestants were going to sing “The Beatles.” 

So I watched.

I was in High School when they came to America and starred on the Ed Sullivan show, I was in college when I first allowed my hair to reach and then cover my ears.  I voted for McGovern over Nixon, rooted for Ali over Frazier, loved Phil Oches, had holes in my jeans before they cost extra, never dropped acid but when I smoked I inhaled, and I was one of the more conservative of my peers.  

And then there was John and Paul who wrote anthems rather than songs. And even if you didn’t believe in their cause, you had to believe in them. 

It was ironic that the American Idols had never heard the songs they were singing until a few days before they had to learn them.  They could not possibly appreciate the significance of what they were singing or what those tunes meant to my generation. 

I love +Giselle article because it was what John Lennon was about.  

My mother was a doctor when women weren’t doctors.  Her idol was Madame Currie, she raised three kids, she was a professor of radiology, she remained married to my dad for 52 years and I don’t think she ever burned her bra, maybe because she never had time to do so.  

I voted for McGovern because Nixon looked funny when he made a “V” with his index and long fingers.  Nixon was a man that could only be photographed in black and white. The man literally sucked color out of the room.  

I rooted for Ali because he boxed the way I would have wanted to box if I was a boxer.  He danced, jabbed, danced some more and then clobbered someone.

I loved Phil Oches because he sang the songs I would have wanted to sing, eliciting social consciousness to a radical movement that had no chance to succeed.

I inhaled because it made me feel good and I liked to walk with my fellow tokers to the deli for one of those twelve-inch sandwiches.

I loved John Lennon because he wrote what I would have wanted to write.  He wrote of a world of peace, love and reason. 

I love +Giselle’s article because it was what my mother, Phil Oches, John Lennon and my entire generation was about. It’s about being the person who reads the writing of the famous author and deciding if the message is worth embracing. It’s about buying a laptop and deciding if Facebook is worth the time it takes to log on. It’s about the struggle to grow without a trillion dollar trust fund up and the strains of being grown without a pedigree covered in IVY.   

America is about people like +Giselle who wake up early, work late, and spend their days swimming in a cold lake while trying to stay warm.

But +Giselle can write a wonderful essay.  That’s her talent and I adore her. 

A beautiful angel flapping her wings in a void.

Good morning from New Mexico, everyone. Brian Altman, I love you and am convinced that in your last life you were a musician/artist/poet/painter person. I might even have suggested, Tom Bentley, that he was Jack Kerouac’s reincarnation but the timing doesn’t work for that. Still, there are many interesting and slightly scary talents I live with in my life with Brian, such as that there is no Beatles, Simon & Garfunkle, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Eagles, Phil Ochs (and hosts and hosts of others) song that he doesn’t know by heart and and sometimes, when I’m cooking, and we’re talking about whatever he’ll start free-associating and recite Shakespeare or some poem he memorized when he was in the womb or some passage from a book, or we’ll go see Les Mis and he knows the words to every single song backwards and I’m not kidding.

I guess we like words in our house. Our House…is a very, very very nice house…dont’ get me started! 😉

Ha! Jodi Kaplan…couldn’t have come up with a better rewrite if I tried!

James Barraford I don’t know that one, but I will listen to it. BTW…thank you for your kind comments. I am actually working on a book…but my plans are not for it to be an eBook. I have nothing against eBooks…it just isn’t my personal vision. 😉

James Barraford Thank you so much. I would actually like to have a bona fide conversation with you about this. Yes, the plans are for a book to be read in any format, but I can’t get there until I get there. The book is about a lot of things…and it’s hard not to tell you more than that, but some things need to remain a mystery, until they are no longer a mystery…if you get my meaning! 😉

Good morning, everyone. I managed to subscribe to the Journal for Social Era Knowledge through Google Currents in my iPad (or your iPhone or mobile device…I just used my iPad). Here’s HOW to do it:

1.  *Get Google Currents* on your device by going to iTunes or downloading it here: http://www.google.com/producer/currents

2. Open up your browser (any browser…I used Safari) and type in, character-by-character, this ridiculously long URL: http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowi46pAg/the_journal_for_social_era_knowledge and hit Go or Search or whatever…

3. This will open up the Library of Congress Index for the Journal.

4. There will be a little button at the top that says Open. Tap that button.

5. This will open a page with a button that says Subscribe for free. Tap that button.

6. You will be subscribed and end up back at the Currents page.

7. Go to the little Cog Wheel at the top of the Currents page next to your Name and email address (which appears because you are signed into Google) and Sync All Free Subscriptions.

8. Then…go back to the Currents Menu and look for Other (which is a category that will be listed under Lifestyle, Business, Science, etc.) and Tap on Other.

9. You will see the *Journal for Social Era Knowledge pop up as a Title.

10. Tap on it and the Winter 2012 issue of the Journal will appear. +Meg Tufano has not indexed the Spring issue yet, but she’s going to.

If you all could do this, it would be great for the Journal and for ALL of the contributing writers…

There are several steps here, but it’s NOT hard, just do everything carefully and deliberately and it will work. It worked for me perfectly.

Thank you!

Meg Tufano Giselle Minoli James Barraford 

Did anyone see this article in the Times on Sunday. My apologies if I missed a discussion about it somewhere already, but thought you all would be interested. It’s something I was certainly thinking, but could not put into words.

But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

Sexism and the Single Murderess

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/bruni-sexismand-the-single-murderess.html

The Amanda Knox story and the way it is reported and most particularly Brian Titus the way women are responding to it…it’s all very disturbing indeed. Frank Bruni is one of my favorite journalist writers. Somehow I missed this. As I wrote, there never was a sexual revolution for women and there won’t be until women stop being defined sexually merely. That is what is going on here. Somehow male sexuality is part and parcel of their make-up as human beings. It is assumed that a powerful man, in business, in politics, in life, has a massive and unsatisfiable sexual appetite. This is the reason we forgive them their trespasses, right? We say things like, “Well, all men who are successful are like that and the women in their lives just have to get used to it.” This is the cultural myth, the rubbish that has been crammed down our collective throats (sorry for how trashy that sounds) for centuries.

But when it comes to women the exact opposite is assumed if they are successful – that they somehow have managed to put a lid on their sexuality, that they’ve properly buttoned themselves up, buying multiple twin sweater sets and lots of pearls to round out the I’m a Nice Girl look, You don’t have to be afraid of me, I won’t destroy this business, steal another woman’s husband, say something naughty, I’m a Madonna, I don’t have a sexual thought in my head.

No, as Bruni says, none of us will know what happened in Perugia, Italy. A woman’s sexuality, whether it’s exposed, expressed and exhibited in Victoria’s Secret, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, GQ or Penthouse, is for the express pleasure of men, somehow weirdly disconnected from the woman herself who is at once expected to be gorgeous and sexually available for her entire life, but also expected to be numb to her own femininity, unless of course she is in the beauty or sex business or celebrity business, in which cases she is in it for the money. Young girls need to be taught from the time they can walk and talk that their sexuality is first and foremost for them, about them, of them, for them. It is theirs.

If scientists were able to harness all of the rage and fear that women’s sexuality instills, we could have built an outpost in space by now for all of these rapacious and repressed women to go and live freely. Here they just throw them in jail. Remember Mary Kay Letourneau anyone?

I have to say Giselle Minoli that in a way Meridith Kircher’s sexuality was deprecated almost immediately, superceded as it were by the leery prospect of the Knox femme fatale. She was dead, and her sexuality made practically void. Except of course when it came to salacious detail of her behaviour while alive. Memory of her was fleet and flippant, I noticed when watching from the UK’s own media.

I would even go as far as saying that a similar deprecation occurs with victims of sex crimes, though I’m sure this is patently obvious.

Your thoughts lead me to think of the monolithic nature of the males concept of the female, as a general predisposition.

Greg Squires The news that came out this week about the Air Force and its pretend effort to curtail rampant sexual abuse in that branch of the military illustrates in a heightened way the extent of how women are seen primarily as sexual objects (the Assault Prevention Officer was himself arrested for sexual assault…the mind boggles, here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/us/air-force-officer-who-led-sexual-assault-prevention-efforts-arrested.html).

Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In further illustrates (perhaps without intending to) the assumption that when it comes to women there is a very narrowly defined path they must march down in order to arrive at the top unscathed.

And I cannot begin to tell you the number of fathers I know who celebrate, brag about and champion their sons’ exploration of sex (go out, have fun, explore, don’t tie yourself down too quickly, life is for the young, play the field, snack at the female smorgasbord), while at the same time completely flipping out about their little girls’ budding sexuality, as though it is a poison from which there is no escape, and which therefore leads mothers, schools, sex educators to talk about not getting pregnant or getting a disease as the only viable sex education topics, as opposed to teaching a young girl/woman to love herself, love her body, and to figure out what sexuality/sensuality/beauty mean to her first and foremost.

It is so deep in the international culture of power and money Greg Squires that I think the education about it is going to have to come very strongly from men rather than from women. Sadly, whenever women raise the issue they are branded “feminists” or “anti-men,” which are words designed to silence and repress in and of themselves.

Brian Titus 

I think Dads need to treat their daughters and sons differently:  they have different needs, and will have different lives.

Let Women’s Liberationists have at me.

MOST important (I’m talking from scientific psychological data), TALK to your daughters about intellectual things (the news, what they’re studying in school, doesn’t matter) and then listen to their answers and keep at it.

We do not know why, but young women who have intellectual conversations with a father figure (doesn’t have to be a dad) have MUCH higher achievement at every level of academia and business.

I should write a book!  ;’)

(There are hundreds, I will make up a bibliography.  And have been derailed from my reading by a dental emergency.  Back at it tomorrow!  ;’))

How did I miss these comments…on my own thread no less. I got notification of Adam Johnson’s comment but not Meg Tufano’s or Brian Titus’s. Well let the feminists have at me as we’ll, Meg, or mothers because while fathers are often busy trying to protect their daughters (Brian it is natural…you know the anti-female world they are growing up in), mothers too respond by not pushing them out there, so girls often grow up feeling victimized and powerless.

What happens is that girls are often very much themselves when they are very young – opinionated and every bit as equal in the family. Then socialization starts and the signal to quiet down, to shush up, to not rock the boat begin in force until girls are silenced and their focus switches from being themselves to pleasing others. At the same time this is happening they are getting the signal that there is something wrong with being a girl – you can’t cry, emotion makes boys uncomfortable, don’t show any weakness or vulnerability – come out with your fists up ready to fight, and fight they will until they are in the box, unless they opt to abandon their own authenticity and spend their lives being good girls.

I was told at a family dinner three years ago by one of the young women present less than half my age that I needed to be “reigned in.” She was not kidding.

I posted the other day about Orthodox women in Jerusalem holding a certain group of women back from praying at the Wall. There is more fear of equality than perhaps of anything. And I agree with Meg that a father can give his daughter either permission to break free of these constraints or he will send her the signal that a woman’s brain is not something to be developed.

It is deeply complex…but it starts with awareness. Without that a young girl has no chance of figuring out who she wants to be…not who her parents think she should be.

Daisy Buchanan anyone?

It’s not safe to assume that at all Walther M.M.

As a rule, when you preface an opinion with “from my limited knowledge of ” that’s an indicator that is probably something you should refrain from holding forth on.

For instance, if I were to say, “From my limited knowledge of immunology….” there’s a pretty good chance that whatever follows is going to be a mixture of assumption and good old fashioned error.  

Well it’s fairly straight forward. It’s not safe to assume. In fact at the risk of sounding argumentative, its generally not a good idea to assume anything much. Why would it be. Chromosomes alter the course of Androgen related development for both primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Androgen is a hormone. In respect of its influence in the development of sexual animals, there is no need to assume. It’s well known. After sexual divergence though, secondary sexual characteristics interplay with environment. This is the common understanding physiologically. Further explanation would probably take up too much of this post.

I should give references to all this. I’m sorry to appear pedantic, but before considering the influence of environment, including hormones, it is valuable I think to understand the developmental differences that lead to different starting points for the individual who finds themselves at some point on the sexual distribution curve. And it is a curve, not a polar choice between boy and girl, male female. If this is clear, then it perhaps can be more broadly understood.

I’m sorry that I have to disappear into a meeting. I look forward to reading your thoughts later…I think it’s really valuable…and interesting.

Thirty years ago when I was at CBS, this was the advice given to young women executives: always be nice, speak softly, never write long memos, keep it brief, never correct a man in a meeting, never take credit for being the one who gets the job done, never show up your colleagues, don’t be ambitious…just work late hours, never ask for a raise, when asking for a promotion, don’t ask for more money, never insult a man even when he’s insulted you, laugh at whatever jokes are told even if they are not funny, find out the political party of the men you work for and agree with their POV, at least publicly, never get angry at a man who makes advances to you…and the list goes on and on and on.

I don’t think it’s changed one iota. If it had Sheryl Sandberg wouldn’t be writing her book. She wouldn’t need. My disagreement with her has to do not with her premise that women aren’t succeeding and rising to the top they way they should, but with her premise that it is the fault of women themselves.

Theories about child-rearing are not coming from parents. They are coming from psychologists, scientists, doctors…one decade it’s Spock, another don’t punish your children, another it’s let them sleep with their parents as long as they like, another it’s telling educators never to criticize a student.

We are stuffed with everything except common sense: when learning anything, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the piano, or ballet or football or shooting a gun or flying a plane or orthopedic surgery, no one gets better at anything without practicing and practicing and practicing.

The problem is that girls are taught that they don’t have the talent, don’t have the know how, don’t have the ability to do what boys do and, even if they do, they won’t be accepted. Isn’t that the problem with the female helicopter pilot who spilled the beans in the early 90s on the Air force sex scandal? She was a talented pilot but her career was over? Wasn’t this the problem with Suzanne Sommers? She asked for the same money as male TV stars and she was fired. Wasn’t this the problem with Hillary when Bill was President? She was supposed to be the silent First Wife and not have any ambition to do things differently.

I just don’t see any of it as hormonal. It seems entirely cultural, entirely historical, entirely hierarchical, often religious even and always destructive to society. I don’t think we’re doing girls…or boys….any favors by limiting what we teach them they are capable of because of old notions that female = soft, male = aggressive, female = emotional, male = emotionless and a host of other boring constructs.

Walther M.M. you are right…that is the difference between our arguments. I suppose I make mine because I feel (instinctively? foolishly? correctly?) that even if there are inherent differences in the sexes I am not sure they should be encouraged or selected or noticed in any significant way in terms of what we focus on in bringing children up. I mean…I am really wondering if the differences themselves (if there are any that affect behavior) simply don’t matter/won’t matter once attention is taken off of them. For instance, what if girls and boys were brought up not to have any notice taken of anything that signifies “boyness” or “girlness?” In the spiritual world I suppose this would be called simply not responding to something. In the theatre world it is called (when an actor is working on a scene and is frustrated with their work, displeased with it, not getting where they want to be with it…) not commenting, because commenting implies judgement – something is good, something is bad. Instead…what if we were to just teach children to simply notice how they feel and move forward anyway?

Babies are interesting because their emotions flow and morph very quickly, a smile turning into a frown, a frown turning into a wail, a wail turning into a stare, a stare turning into a scream, a scream turning into a smile again. But when children get older we start to “shape” their behavior by commenting on and noticing their emotional state.

I think we are saying the same thing but coming at it from different angles. I like your suggestion that we simple allow girl and boy children to discover who they are and what they want to be without any interference. Ah…what freedom to be a child with parents who have the courage to let them breathe. 

Did you catch that interesting article in the Times months ago about parents who were allowing their boys to dress “female” and not be freaked out by it? I’ll see if I can find it for you…

The purpose I had in mentioning secondary sexual characteristics is that they have in fact been selected. While we might like to think of the convenience of being able to determine all behaviour independently of our genes and biology, this is not actually how our delivery into this world is accomplished. I think it is best to accommodate these observable facts, as it can help us discriminate between factors that are purely invented as categories, and those that have a deeper significance.

For example the female breast, and I will use this as an example because of its relevance to ‘ gender stereotypes’, is from the perspective of natural selection a selected secondary sexual characteristic. We do not will our breasts to grow larger. This has been already accomplished by both genetic mutation and selective behaviour. As the selfish gene demands reproductive success, it behoves us to consider the intuitive impulses that correlate often to anxiety about breast size with females.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is seen as a redress to perceived reproductive disadvantage. It is not seen as primarily a notion of self image referenced to group or self psychology.

Just popping in to say hi Giselle Minoli & sorry for not participating — I’m on ‘staycation’ with my wife and her sister this week (see my profile for fascinating updates!) Trying to follow along on the sidelines between bike rides & decadent meals!

I will say that no matter how much we say we would allow our children to make “gender-inappropriate” choices (e.g. boy wearing a dress), it is in practice extremely difficult to do so. As with many things, it is of course much easier to just go with the flow, and in the case of gender roles, “the flow” is so strongly set already.

I do think there was a time when we tried to give this some thought within our society — just like there was a time when we cared about racial equality, peace, our planet’s health, the energy crisis, etc., and those topics were discussed as if they were things we needed to accomplish. 

Maybe that’s just an idealized memory from childhood and it was never really like that, but I sometimes feel we’ve gone backwards in so many ways. Maybe not in the actual implementation of equality, but in the fact that we seem to have stopped thinking or caring about it in the way we used to. Like people assume it’s just all been fixed, and now we can get back to our Foxy Knoxy stories and our SUVs and our drones and our war on terror.

Shall do Matthew Graybosch Though I hadn’t mentioned a thing called evolutionary psychology. Only sexual differentiation. I shall provide references for this as and when i can.

For what it’s worth Greg Squires, in my experience men are much more vain than woman will ever be…which is the reason they are “culturally” the ones who “traditionally” have mid-life crises. They are afraid of dying and getting old. They are power hungry and need to constantly prove their virility and worth. They are totally controllable by their vanity…(e.g., GWB dressing up in a jump suit and getting on an aircraft carrier and declaring Mission Accomplished is all about vanity).

Pretty harsh criticism, eh? Pretty harsh belief system, eh? I have never believed that women’s vanity can hold a candle to men’s vanity. I’m being brutally honest here.

Greg Squires you are misinterpreting what I wrote…I didn’t suggest it was your own POV…I was merely countering what someone told you just to point how how dangerous these beliefs are when they are taken as gospel including my own! 😉

I’m sorry about that Giselle Minoli. My skills here need improving.

Greg Squires if the man who believes as you report happens to be the CEO of an international company of say 10,000 people and half of them are women he will carry that belief system into his company and not only teach the other men to believe that but subject the women to it along the way. This is why I think that what we believe may be more significant than whatever may be going on biologically. It’s really dangerous stuff …

I think I understand pretty well Greg Squires’s stance, because it is similar to what I perceived the situation to be. There are some differences between males and females (statistically speaking, and not very pronounced, just slight differences in mean values). Because of the need for strength back in time, and the vulnerable state of females while pregnant, certain gender roles fell automatically into place for survival.

The thing is, these gender roles form a sort of feedback loop, and as time passes, their strength, and gap, increases. Social structures also get corrupted, as male dominated positions of power tend to be corrupted by the greedy who seem to inevitably end up taking them. From then on, it’s all downhill.

I recall an article elsewhere that studied societies that were more “matriarchal” in nature, and in those, generally speaking, there was a higher degree of harmony and happiness (and sexual freedom). When you pair that up with other studies that show how lack of affection raises testosterone levels, as well as violence, it becomes quite apparent that letting “hyper masculinity” run the show can be a very bad idea. Yet, we live in a society that encourages exactly that.

Greg did mention that whatever gender difference exist, today it may be used in an exaggerated matter and taken as gospel, to force people into fitting into boxes (which is what Giselle Minoli just said as well). That’s also why I would suggest then to throw out the window all gender assumptions (whether they are true or myth, since for many of them, we just don’t know with certainty), and work with individuals from an initially neutral point.

If we had a society that imposed no expected gender paths on people, and respected their choices, then whatever innate differences exist between males and females would not be denied, merely respected (of course, a potential problem would be leaders in their respective areas concerned that there isn’t a perfect gender split in their domain, and trying to enforce it. But I think we are a long way from this actually being a problem, rather than a necessary thing [e.g. regarding STEM careers]).