A Voice for Men’s DriverSuz: “Male care and compassion for women is why women don’t live in barns and pens with the cows, pigs and chickens.”

SittieKitty – don’t worry, David banned themaskandrose.

Yeah, I was pretty sure he was on permamod or banhammer from his shit last time – I was too lazy to look it up, too, so just emailed David. All hail the Dark Lord!

If any group talked about, say, minorities the way the MRAs routinely talk about women, it would be viewed as unconscionable hate speech. The MRA is the sexist equivalent of the KKK.

Yep. Not that many MRMs have not posted racists AND sexist BS as well. Fetishization of asian and black women is not uncommon in the MRA crew.

Okay, “fitted” – just expanded my English vocabulary! And regarding girls’ and boys’ lego not combining, maybe my colleague just meant that the lego people look all differently, or that they’re completely different colour schemes or something, rather than they being physically impossible to combine.

Anyway, it’s messed up that things are moving backwards when it comes to kids and gender.

We were kids playing in dirt. Sheesh, even my dresses were more brown and orange hued, but that could’ve just been a late seventies/early eighties thing.

Yup. My girls were born 81 and 84. I even had toddler-sized brown. corduroy. overalls, for the older one. As for toys. They were just toys. mr hated Barbie dolls with an all-consuming passion. Not in my house!! He eventually relented when the younger one really, really wanted one for Xmas when she was sevenish. But they had huge buckets of prime colours lego, yellow Tonka trucks and all kinds of mechanical toys and games as well as the super expensive Meccano kits. (And train sets. I’ve now been informed that they weren’t much fun. I was guilty of organising/ playing with them too much and I got in their way.)

Pinkification started with Barbie from my point of view. Apart from trikes and bikes. Girls and boys bikes were basically the same but distinguished by a different colour and accessory selection. Much wider selection than just pink/purple versus black/yellow/red then. But there was no need for it to go the way it has.

As for clothes. I have a piccie somewhere of my soldier/ outback stockman/ uber-conventional dad when he was probably two years old. In a dress! With smocking on it! Ankle-length! When babies were babies, children were children, adults were adults and there were defined steps along the way. I think my kids generation was the last where you could still dress babies in white and just add a ribbon or other sex identifying accessory.

As for dressing alike. I dressed them in exactly the same clothes a lot of the time. If I hadn’t, no one would have known they were together, let alone related. One with blue eyes and thick curly black hair and built like a swimmer/boxer, the other with limbs like matchsticks, white-blonde hair and brown eyes. They had trouble convincing the kids at school that they were sisters even though they had the same surname.

And that’s my cue to show the pic I’ve been working on this evening.

(Hey, it’s clothing related, it’s almost relevant!)

Talking about ignoring “male protection” and other benefits (and “benefits”) that all women owe their lives for, what about the fact that a lot of the reasons humanity got where it is in the first place is because of unpaid labor and inventions made by women? Even today majority of the hard work is done by women and children. Generally as slave labor and/or or just for the sake of survival.

Not to mention a lot of the so called benefits that we “owe” for were only necessary in the first place because of the oppressive system.

It’s also kindova douchey move to describe some act in the past being something you owe either the ancestor or today’s equivalent group, because none of us asked to be born. Like, I shouldn’t have to owe someone for doing or not doing X when I had absolutely no knowledge or chance to impact said action in the first place.

Not that I might not be thankful for someone doing something at some point in time without my input, and not just to sound like I’m ungrateful. It’s just that I don’t think I should owe anyone anything just because they did something unrequested. It’s really situational to boot…

Know what I’m sayin’ ? 😛

Lego “Friends” it, to my knowledge, newer than the girl-directed Belleville legos from my childhood. Well, I didn’t actually have a single belleville set. My brother got tonnes of legos but we both played with them, and he didn’t mind sharing. He played with my toys too, but he tended to ruin them relatively often. Good thing my ponies were mostly knock-offs and not the real deal.
Belleville stuff was a lot bigger than the regular legos, so they weren’t really compatible.

My godmother got me a barbie almost every year. We barely saw each other, so I guess she just assumed that I liked them. I didn’t. I gave them all away or they were all broken some horrendous way – I did keep a horse that came with one of them though. I absolutely drowned in animal toys. Ponies, dinosaurs, stuffed animals… also aliens and the occasional Gojira and werewolf. Also, glow in the dark skeleton. And pokémon. Lots of pokémon. I still have most of my toys and all of my pokémon stuff is with me at my own home.
Like, my brother played with my barbie more whereas I never did. She was the lady his action man had to save. (All though he failed to save her most of the time lol)

I also had a make-up doll head, which me and my friends played with by grabbing her hair and throwing her around. It eventually got stuck in a tree and we never found it again o.o
Until some years back, my brother did, and we flung her around again. Flew in a tree, never came down.

I mean, my parents pretty much got me what every toy or thing I wanted at the time of my birthday. Relatives tended to get me stuffed animals no matter what, and I was perfectly happy with that.
All though it pissed me off to no end when my brother asked for video games, and nobody said anything against, but when I requested a videogame, they tended to ask “what would you do with that?”. PLAY IT, FUCKING DUH.

I gave them all away or they were all broken some horrendous way

When my middle sister and I were young we finally invented a game to play with our barbies. It involved sitting at the top of the loft ladder and conducting mock trials, then sentencing them to die in extremely nasty ways. If I recall correctly, we named it ‘Barbecue Pit’.

I would have made a fantastic despot.

On the topic of increasingly gendered clothing and toys, folks might enjoy Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I saw the author speak about it and she had some good things to say.

I got very excited when I saw a pink “chemistry set”. Then I looked more closely, and realised it was for making cupcakes.

I fucking hate gender binary toy marketing. If a toy is operated by your genitalia, it is not for children.