Sigh. Tell me about it.

Tomboy chicks are hot. Grown-up ones, I mean.

And when I was a tyke in the Free-To-Be-You-And-Me '70's I don't remember this being such a big deal. There were always a few girls who played ball and stuff with the guys and we didn't think much of it.

I'm nowhere near close to having kids, but just about all of my co-workers do have children. One day recently when I had lunch with a group of them, one of them spent several minutes describing a "Disney Princess" birthday party she had for her daughter--it seemed like one of the most revolting, repellent things I've ever heard of. It also seemed as if my co-worker felt she had no choice but to throw a Disney Princess party, as if the Disney marketing machine had not only effectively taken over her child's mind, but the minds of all her child's friends.

Free to Be You and Me kicks ass.

It was never really a problem for me either, although I've always been more of a "geek" than a tomboy. The majority of my close friends are male.

There's a strange new puritanism afoot, my friends. I blame Bush.

And the Disney Princesses. (It's a cult, Prospero. A CULT!)

Free to Be You and Me kicks ass.

Free To Be is kinda dorky in retrospect, as well. And if a little girl is sincerely into the princess thing, that's fine, too. It's all about choice. I'm fairly comfortable being traditionally male, but I kinda figured that gender roles had loosened a little bit by now.

I used to beat up boys who wouldn't let me play. I also played girl's ice hockey in the first year an official league was available - I stopped when I was 14 and realized boys didn't like girls who played ice hockey and I wanted boy-attention.

I also used to write on my sister's barbie dolls. I don't know what THAT was about.

I feel your daughter's pain, jrossi.

My daughter went through this. Even in Waldorf kindergarten, she came home telling of the boys making here "earn" her way into their group by being more boylike than even them. She had no use for fairies and elves and princesses and all the other crap that Waldorf pushed on girls.

Through elementary school, she constantly dealt with what came to be called relational aggression amongst girls. (This has become a cottage industry: I now find there is a www.relationalaggression.com)

Through a few very painful years (including eating lunch in the restroom) she figured out that boys were her natural playmates and friends.

Of course, the fact that she identifies as queer is a factor, also. The betrayals and broken alliances with girls in her life always seemed to cut her very deep, and perhaps she experienced is more like romantic disasters. But of course a dad can't go there.

The upside is that she is physically comfortable around boys. She used to horseplay and wrestle with them, and when she has her Doc Martins on, any male that messes with her will probably come out for the worse.

I do not have any answers, other than to just be there for her, listen, and let her figure it out in a way that she can live with.

I nearly suffered a mental breakdown the year I was placed in charge of our office's "Toys for Tots" purchases. Have you ever tried buying a toy for a child you don't know that's gender-neutral? And isn't Legos?

Gender separation in childhood makes me sick. Like those little headbands they put on bald baby girls? That don't have any hair to require a headband? Just so strangers you'll never see again don't mistake it for a boy, heaven forbid! I think our genetic need to procreate is strong enough to survive a girl playing with Hot Wheels. Anyhow, as jonmc indicated, tomboys grow up to be better mates, so it's actually helping perpetuate the species.

Have you ever tried buying a toy for a child you don't know that's gender-neutral? And isn't Legos?

What about balls (the sports kind)? or tricycles/Big Wheels (I seem to remember everybody, male and female, zooming around on those, back in the day)? Being an athletic girl dosen't carry the same stereotypes that it did years ago, methinks.

jonmc, It seems to me that athletic girls have a better time of it now in middle and high school, but little kids still have the universal belonging struggle. I don't know if it will ever go away. If a child doesn't align with a group, or the chosen group rejects them, it's hard. Gender norms/geekdom, all that stuff is still very much there for young children. It is part of development jrossi4r, and I know it's hard for you both, but maybe after camp, she'll be better equipped for the next struggle.

danf, the way you talk about your daughter...it just gets to me. Everyone should have a dad like you.

You'd be surprised, jonmc, how few things are truly gender neutral these days, mostly because EVERYTHING is branded. There are Barbie fishing rods, Disney Princess soccer balls, etc. If you were to hand one of the little girls in her class a "regulation" basketball, they would probably tell you it's for boys and ask for a pink one.

And that is a big part of what bothers me, the whole marketing aspect. This constant repetitive message that boys like X and girls like Y. Even if you do a good job of combatting it (and I like to think I have), you still have to deal with the kids who buy-in.

danf you sound like an awesome dad.

I was a tomboy girl. I just played with whoever would play, boy or girl. I also spent a lot of time alone, but I wasn't lonely. I loved dirt and Tonka trucks and my basketball and bike. I always thought boy toys were way more fun than dolls and frilly mindless crap.

jrossi you're totally right - it IS marketing crap. Captains of Consiousness is about that very subject. It's sad!

Cheer up, jrossi4r. When your daughter becomes a rebellious teen, she'll be making her own t-shirts, instead of paying 20 bucks a pop for them at some future equivalent of Hot Topic. Unlike, of course, the other "popular" misfits.

Though I played with "boy" toys growing up, I spent most of my time outside of the home hanging out with girls (well, what little time I spent associating with other children) except for a few distinct points in my development. And now grown-up ladies can't seem to get enough of my listening skills.

I was the most gender-neutral kid you could imagine. I spent all my time playing with Lego and colouring. (pre- gender branding of blocks and crayola i guess).

I spent all my time playing with 'action figures,' and putting on 'costumes' and...

*runs off to cry in the bathtub and eat ice cream*

(actually I was all over the map with toys. I colored and played with legos, but I was also a fiend for wiffle ball and toy guns and stuff. I remember that one thing everybody did, girl or boy was ride their bikes. Yay for bikes.)

I was a total tomboy. I don't remember there ever being a problem with the boys -- they didn't mind me joining in (unless they were doing sports, which I was categorically bad at). But my mother? She was the problem. Every year for christmas I asked for Star Wars toys, never got 'em. Had to play with the neighbor boy's.

So, jrossi, good on you for letting your kid be what she wants to be.

That's a tough situation; I bet there are adults encouraging the kids to act this way, maybe at camp, probably at home. It's a shame, too -- it's a creepy way of sexualizing kids' lives way, way too early. I wonder why adults do this... are they making up for perceived holes in their own personalities by over-feminizing (or the other way 'round) their tykes? Yeeech.

As far as what jonmc was talking about, w/r/t when they're all growns up: I met this woman once who was tending bar at a downstairs joint my friend and his band were playing a show at. She was sexy as hell, and I got to talking with her, and she turned out to be working on a criminology degree and preparing to pursue a career as a sniper with the NYPD SWAT unit. She was tough, grew up with six older brothers, and hella strong; like a Tiger tank clanking down the street blowing kisses and knocking down buildings, she was all woman and then some, a grownup tomboy heartthrob.

They don't make a Barbie Sniper Rifle, that's fer sure.

Well, barbies are awful small, and a scope big enough to hone in would make the rifle handle poorly.

Hey, they had the Steve Austin doll with the bionic eye you could look through; why not Barbie?

I bet Mattel would hire us in a heartbeat.

With all my older brothers I tended towards being a tomboy, although I quickly learned to put my girl game face on at school, and run around with the boys at home. I liked GI Joes and playing guns and building forts and fighting and getting dirty. I also learned to like fun time with the girls, like sleepovers and such, although it always annoyed me that when more than two little girls get together there only ever seemed to be a handful of acceptable activities, and rough stuff was out of the question.

My younger sister was way more of a tomboy than I was, though. For years she insisted on wearing boys' clothes, keeping her hair cut short, etc. To my mother's credit, she let her do it, and when well-meaning people tried to put in their own two cents, she told them to butt out. I think the only place she drew the line was refusing to buy her boys underwear...

When I was in middle school I was embarrassed to explain to my friends that I didn't have a little brother, but that she was my sister - I got over it, though. Up until middle school, she always played on the boys' teams for sports - baseball (not softball), boys hockey and soccer. The leagues always allowed it because her skill level was very high and she tended to overwhelm the other little girls anyway...haha. Once she got a bit older, and was playing on school teams rather than local rec ones, she had to stick with the girls - but there certainly wasn't any harm done, as far as I can see.

Great thread. I chew on these thoughts all the time. (And I'm still able to recite Free to Be almost in its entirety, FWIW.)

There's a strange new puritanism afoot, my friends. I blame Bush.

Just yesterday, I was talking with a historian about gender division throughout history, focusing on the 19th century. She said "The 19th century was the peak of gender division in all of the history of Western culture...." which is often agreed to be true. Then she appended "...until now."

I don't quite know what to make of it, other than a general threatened feel in the culture that is something of a backlash against the 60s-80s wave of feminism. It happened after the liberated 1920s-30s-early 40s too, and we got a couple decades of 50s-ish regression that then gave rise to the next wave. I don't know if that fully accounts for what's going on today, though. We're also in the grip of a scary religious revivalism, and that might play a part.

My mom and dad tried pretty hard to raise me free of gender consciousness. Sometimes it worked. I had trucks and drums and toy guns and also had Barbies and jumpropes and dollhouses. I never doubted for a minute I could do anything I felt like. I was the first girl in our district's Little League (though I sucked at baseball). I played backyard and street games and liked getting dirty, but also liked handclapping games and spent a lot of time reading and drawing. I like to think I did things I wanted to do in a pretty authentic way.

It did start to cost me in junior high, though. I ended up having lots of friends who were boys and odder girls like myself. The girly-girls were a clique I was most certainly not welcome in. This made me think I didn't like girls for a time, and didn't want to identify with other (young) women. I continued to work on this problem in high school - because of course, I wanted to be cute and have female friends. And yet, I hadn't been taught the set of behaviors that would make all that happen, so I could never fit in to the hyper-female social set. Then, too, I actually liked boys better...at least for that peak division time in high school. I liked that they were funny and spent time talking about things and ideas rather than just about other people, which many girls seemed to. I liked that they were active and liked to do things on their free time rather than just sit in a circle and talk. I liked that they were at the same time bold and humble. They seemed more real, as people, to me in those years than the girls did. The girls seemed all calculation and subterfuge and multilayered complication.

Of course, it was never all that cut-and-dried. I had some really great female friends, but we were all outside the pale of female youth culture. I am okay with a lot of that, and in retrospect I'm happy with all my choices, which just resulted from consulting mostly myself about how to be. But it did mean I was more naive, in some ways, than other yung women. So a lot of my adulthood has been spent finding models of femininity that I think are beautiful and sexy but also strong and fully human. And also, trying to refuse the seeming requirement to live in strict and old-fashioned gender-role expectations, while still enjoying everything fun that happens between genders -- finding the really good things that are part of each gender role and give you a little vive la difference. Because there are some wonderful things about them.

I'd just like to see a culture that raised kids with more emphasis on their common human nature and spent less time on reinforcing archaic stereotypes that serve no one well. You can't tell me there are no kids in those groups that wouldn't, in their deepest hearts, like to do what the other gender is going. They're just learning already: blend in, quash your individual nature, or be ostracized.

And whoever asked about the adults in that camp was right on. That was my first thought, having done lots of work with kids. Kids deliver on expectations. The camps and schools where I've worked haven't given rise to that sort of division because we were just not having it. For it to happen, adults have to support it. Kids then pick up on what's expected of them and carry it out. Maybe a camp with a philosophy and value system closer to your own, if you can, jrossi?

I wish I could blame it on the camp, Miko, but they're not at fault. They really don't do anything to reinforce this stuff. It's an age thing, really. It only takes that first little boy to declare girls "icky" and all the other little boys will follow. (And if I find out which little boy it was, I will egg his parents' cars!)

Today she managed to convince one of the other girls to play Lion King and when the boys saw how much fun they were having, they joined in. She's so cool.

I love hearing the parents here talk about their kids. You should be a bit freaked out that you'll be my role models when we start trying to procreate soon...

I shall keep a copy of Free to Be You and Me on reserve for when the time comes, gaspode.

It's an age thing, really.

I have to respectfully disagree somewhat, based on my experiences teaching kindergarten and first and second grade for 3 years.

There is a strong polarization effect at that age, which a lot of psychologists link to identity formation, it's true. But it can get excessive and negative. That's why it's up to adults in the lives of children to keep challenging and encouraging them, to provide them with a full range of playthings, to encourage and accept exploration and create organized structures that allow them to try many ways of relating, and to consciously and assertively break up gender overidentification (just as we also tried hard to do with racial and religious self-segregation).

In both the progressive school I taught in, and the Quaker camp where I worked for eight summers, this sort of division was really pretty minimal because the world the kids were part of had a larger value system in place that discouraged it. Left to nature alone, kids don't always make enlightened, bold choices; they make safe ones, and revert to simple mechanisms. It's up to the adults to create a world that really shines light on all the potential choices for identity and actively seeks to integrate differences. Better to err on that side, since there is a degree of natural gender division that will occur anyway. Hey, I'd be miserable if I'd never learned my handclapping games and jumprope rhymes. But I'd also be miserable if I had felt like Icould only stare through the chain-link at the boys when they played keepaway.

I spend a lot of time talking to my friends who are parents about this sort of thing. If you haven't worked a lot with a lot of different children, it's hard to believe it can be any different. And when you start to study the unconscious gender training children receive from us from the moment of birth (first question - 'is it a boy or a girl'? We have to know.) it's easy to realize that we're creating and re-creating this ourselves in each generation -- but we have a degree of choice about it.

I myself wouldn't really believe this if I hadn't seen it working in any number of places.

quick two cents from me : art supplies are gender neutral, and playdates situated around them are a boy/girl free for all...for the most part.