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10 February 2010

uh... it's magic?
posted by Joe Beese 10 February | 09:34
I'm most convinced by the reasons given under the header "Hobby for Geeks."
posted by Hugh Janus 10 February | 10:23
I honestly can't think of a single woman magician. Seriously.

Now I feel bad.
posted by gc 10 February | 10:25
try to understand,
try to understand,
try try try to understand,
he's a magic man, momma.
posted by flapjax at midnite 10 February | 10:37
I gave it a serious shot at reading it, but I'm overwhelmed by the lack of sophistication in the analyses, particularly the men's analyses, sort of underscoring the cluelessness and haplessness of the magician male when it comes to gender relations. Things like:

Boys begin magic when they are powerless. Boys who seek to become magicians believe that the arcane and esoteric knowledge compromising the secrets of magic will enable them to wield power over others; girls don’t pursue power as a means to influence others.

I mean, bwahahahaha.

Of course girls pursue power to influence others! All humans do, for Isis' sake. It's just that the way socialization works for most girls, being able to do sleight-of-hand tricks as a ten-year0old is definitely not going to result in the kind of power and attention kids that age seek from their peers; it's going to result in negative attention - for being a dork. But a girl ages 8-12 who can tell you how to make your boobs grow, knows the embarrassing secrets of others, excels at sports or music or dance, knows about sex, etc - those are avenues to the kinds of power that mean something among their peers.

In this respect, I think it's much like some other things that have tended to fascinate males more than females - superheroes, comic books - the obsession with power sets in at an age where expressions of power are really different. Girls at that age are in a world in which power is gained and expressed mainly through social contacts, social awareness and knowledge, and social controls. For boys at that age, power is gained and expressed through action or demonstration - sports, skill at drawing or joking around or, why not, magic.

I'm being extremely reductive and making sweeping generalizations and not noting the frequent exceptions and individual variations that are as real as the stereotypes, but I don't think there's anything special here about magic. It's a developmental question, and a question about what power and mastery looks like in the preteen social world.

Plus, magic is dorky. Even though I really enjoy seeing a good sleight-of-hand trick or two, there's no denying it.
posted by Miko 10 February | 10:37
When I was a kid I was fascinated with magic -- there was some kind of "world of magic" show that aired in tv from time to time, and I just loved it. Unfortunately I was very uncoordinated and unable to learn most of the tricks, so becomming a magician was never an option. I also loved Bill Bixby in The Magician tv show. I don't think magic is dorky at all.
posted by JanetLand 10 February | 10:43
At the age of 8 or so a child realizes they have the power to deceive others, which inevitably leads to a fling with two things: Magic tricks or shoplifting. Maybe the girls are just doing another kind of slight of hand.
posted by The Whelk 10 February | 10:43
Heh. I certainly fell prey to that, The Whelk. Great observation.
posted by Miko 10 February | 11:05
But a girl ages 8-12 who can tell you how to make your boobs grow, knows the embarrassing secrets of others, excels at sports or music or dance, knows about sex, etc - those are avenues to the kinds of power that mean something among their peers.

Beautifully expressed.

I'm being extremely reductive and making sweeping generalizations

Technically, yeah. But this is a post on a discussion board, not a grad school paper. A little bit of condensing is inevitable.
posted by jason's_planet 10 February | 11:12
its a conspiracy by the male magicians . they are cutting all the women in half !!!
posted by rollick 10 February | 12:24
I think there is a sizable untapped market that would like to see women cut men in half.
posted by Obscure Reference 10 February | 13:07
Lengthwise.
posted by JanetLand 10 February | 13:45
They are also truly magical mystical creatures: Women can deceive you without gimmicks. They are magical in and of themselves. The ability to create life from seemingly nothing is all a woman needs. They can perform the greatest miracle of all — giving birth to a live person. Woman can command men with that power. Men must resort to trickery to suggest such power residing in themselves.


Oh fuck off, you condescending nerd.

I think that there are probably less female magicians because magic itself is a rapidly dying field. We're all so jaded by special effects that standard on-stage slight of hand just doesn't have any "wow" anymore. That's why you see this move toward Criss Angel's "street magic" or David Blaine's endurance stunts. I don't think women doing that kind of stuff would be as widely accepted. Watching a woman trapped in glass box or getting run over by a car would be perceived as overly disturbing, I think.
posted by jrossi4r 10 February | 13:53
I thought it was because they all became witches. *ducks*
posted by warbaby 10 February | 13:59
The “good old boys” kind of lock women out of the loop. There is plenty of “boys club” attitude among magicians.

This. I've heard that there's a lot of condescension and out-and-out sexism in the field. I read one account of a professional female magician who would get ignored in magic shops while the staff focused on a twelve-year-old boy who was just starting out.

I think that there are probably less female magicians because magic itself is a rapidly dying field.

This too. Why invest time and energy and money in a career that's not only not welcoming you with open arms, but isn't offering much in the way of a career to the ones it does favor?
posted by jason's_planet 10 February | 14:39
I'm sorry for saying magic is dorky. People do enjoy it, and I'm not eager to tear down stuff like that. I've enjoyed watching magic. I think what I'm getting at is that there there's something a little obsessively intense about how kids train themselves to do magic.
posted by Miko 10 February | 16:07
I was a 4th grade magician.

OK, not really - I never got to the level of doing little magic shows, but as a kid I was enamored with magic acts. My parents wouldn't spend too much on hobbies unless I was really committed, but I did own a few books and I practiced palming coins and the different kinds of drops and passes. Card tricks were a lot harder at that age (even today I have relatively small hands, which makes most of the deck grips sort of hard for me) but my little deceitful heart loved the types of tricks that involved preparing props in advance and casually coming upon them in the course of a little "routine".

I gave up magic for a couple of reasons that are really all the same reason: it IS really dorky, or actually geeky. It's an intensely lonely pursuit, followed by a brief moment of (hopefully) impressing your friends or family. And the worst part (for me, who was so vulnerable and needy like all kids) was that I couldn't share afterwards. I mean, that's the whole point of magic - to show the trick without really revealing it. Like my kindergarten teacher wrote on my report card, "MuddGirl is a bright girl who loves to learn, and loves to share what she learns, usually at inappropriate times."

So anyway, I much preferred other performing arts, like dance and acting and violin, and then I eventually got a bit older and MUCH more awkward (seriously awkward), so I stuck with violin, and that's that.

Of course, this is one individual decision that explains why I gave up the hobby of magic. It doesn't really explain why women in general don't pursue magic (honestly, my first thought was "Why would they want to?")
posted by muddgirl 10 February | 16:33
And also yes, I had no role models, even in historical books on magic.
posted by muddgirl 10 February | 16:34
I was a 4th grade magician.

Aaaaand suddenly I have the title and inspiration for a children's book.

muddgirl, what you wrote speaks to me with such insight. I went through a stage of magic practice, too; I relished the learning of new tricks, the chance to show them to my friends and family, but I always always always felt torn, because the really interesting part was the how of it.

On the rare occasions when a trick went well, I wanted so much to dissect it for the audience (and by "audience," I mostly mean my geeky dad).
posted by Elsa 10 February | 17:32
I'm sorry for saying magic is dorky.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that magic is necessarily dorky.

But, uh, the way I did it, it was.
posted by Elsa 10 February | 17:35
... the cluelessness and haplessness of the magician male when it comes to gender relations.

FTFY ;-)

I think I have seen female magicians, but can't for the life of me remember where or when. I think it really is the geeky thing, myself. There are girl geeks, but nowhere near as many as boy geeks, so the pool to draw from is much smaller.
posted by dg 11 February | 06:27
I would love to learn how to pick locks, dirty-deck, palm coins, and do sleight of hand tricks... but not to be a magician.

Because it's cool, not because I want to commit any crimes. Why, that would be pre-meditated, if that were true! Which it's not. Totally.
posted by TrishaLynn 11 February | 07:59
Aaaaand suddenly I have the title and inspiration for a children's book.

That's absolutely great!

Interestingly, since my take basically draws on the Carol Gilligan stuff on stages of moral development of girls vs. boys as seen through childhood play, what Elsa and Muddgirl are saying makes complete sense in that light. You learned the skills, you mastered the presentation, and you performed the tricks: but what you really wanted to do afterward was share the delight you felt in the elegance and cleverness of the tricks themselves. In other words, the place where you would have drawn the most pleasure would have been in creating a shared social experience of mutual admiration about the trick's logic. Whereas magicians that don't share the secrets of their trickery (which is, as we know, the Prime Directive in Magic-Land), are rejecting the opportunity to have that shared delight in favor of creating two separate experiences of delight: the magician's delight at successfully decieving and thus entertaining the audience, and the audience' delight at being surprised and presented with an intriguing mystery.

There's a thesis here for somebody, though not me at this moment. But it is interesting how fundamentally anti-social magic is, when you look at it that way.

I recently read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, in which he discusses some of what he was trying to get from magic (it was what he started out doing), and some of his disappointments and frustrations with its limits.
posted by Miko 11 February | 10:23
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