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Edited on Wed Jul-11-07 10:40 PM by lwfern
I got off that mindset with some deliberate deprogramming. And I didn't mean to imply I routinely greet the boys with comments on their clothes - I routinely and deliberately avoid that, but not with the absolute zero tolerance policy I have toward the same comments aimed at the girls. I'm talking once or twice a year, a guy might come into the room with something very unique that I mention.
I did give positive feedback to a girl who made her own pattern and created a stuffed animal from a creature she designed. However, if it's clothing on a girl, even if I know she designed it, I won't comment on it. Girls get more than enough attention based on their looks and clothes, and there's some reason to believe that's connected to why they consistently underestimate their own academic capabilities in school.
Teacher feedback tends to be very gendered and if I'm an ever-so-slight counterbalance to that, that's okay. Teachers tend to give feedback to boys based on ability (praising their intelligence, their persistence if they had problems with something, etc.) and they tend to give feedback to girls based on appearance.
After I first came across that, the next day, I made a point of giving a random comment to one of the girls. It wasn't a critique of a project, like I normally give. It was a (seemingly) offhand observation as I was watching her work that she was consistently good at something, I forget what. The reaction blew me away, and made me very sad at the same time. She dropped what she was doing, and told me on the spot how much the comment meant to her, and she got all serious like it was a huge deal in her life. It was eye opening for me.
In one of the classes I took last year, the instructor actually told a student who had just gotten her first teaching job in an alternative school for teen girls, that they'd be less likely to misbehave if she complimented them each day on what they're wearing and how they look as they enter the room.
I was horrified (and said so). I don't think reminding girls of their status as little ladies and praising them as visual candy is an appropriate way to control their behavior. And I don't think it does anything meaningful for the self-esteem of teens that are there because they are in trouble with the law in some way. That was in a Masters in Education program, of all places.
Anyway, being aware that the girls are overloaded with the message that their appearance matters, there is no way I'm going to add to it. That's why I don't like the flattery, either, like when people here start entire threads about how "nice and ladylike" Chelsea Clinton looks. They don't get why I find that sexist - all they see is that it's a compliment.
Onto the McCain thread. Personally, aside from the obvious McCain's a homophobic ass reaction, a reaction I fully endorse, I was not impressed by the DU comments on his looks, although those were sparse and vague - nothing like a Laura Bush thread, where every bit of cellulite and gravity and counter-gravity is analyzed in detail. The focus is different. Even with that title, the temper tantrum bit which is deliberately infantilizing, overall he's being characterized and mocked on the basis of being homophobic directly because of a specific homophobic comment he made.
While the looks and temper tantrum comments might be a smack in the face to him if he read them, they aren't contributing to a culture where men as a class are discriminated against, where men as a class are devalued in the workplace for being unphotogenic, or where men as a class aren't taken seriously as professionals because they are stereotyped as being angry. There's no historical weight of oppression tied to those comments being directed at him.
What did you think of the thread?
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