Comments on: Boys, girls and the extended order?

By: TimT

TimT — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:37:11 +0000

I don’t know whether games are necessarily always gendered, they tend to come and go in fads. When I first arrived at school, it was at the end of a period of playin with marbles; this fad was ended, I think, when it was banned by teachers for some reason. Skipping was always a popular game at school, but at one point – again, possibly as a result of a few PE classes focusing on skipping – everyone seemed to be performing skipping games; I didn’t see any real gender distinctions. There were other fads for trading cards; the perennial favourite, AFL football, and so on. Gender distinctions weren’t always that important – it was more the personality of people playing these games that was important.

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:27:40 +0000

Pavlov’s Cat wrote:

So, is that a chicken or an egg?

You can see it being played out from birth – boys and girls get treated very differently as babies as you pointed out. Who hasn’t made the ultimate social faux pas (mistaking a baby boy for a girl) despite them being identical when bundled up in a pram? The horror!

I have tried (in a small way) to even things out in my all-girl household by occasionally buying an Action Man instead of a Barbie, but poor old Action Man is generally used as a prop, with his nasty gun carefully put away in a little toy drawer. For a bloke named “Action Man”, he never did see a lot of it.

So (back to the original post) – boys and girls are different (not news), but I don’t see that either of them put less stead into social networks and social problem solving, they’re just expressed in slightly different ways. I’m not even sure you could state “girls are better at it” just because their games are a little quieter. Girls in school grounds can be nasty creatures without raising a fist, although the effects are very similar.

By: Pavlov's Cat

Pavlov's Cat — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:31:35 +0000

I think the socialisation into gender roles starts so early that it’s impossible to tell, by the time kids are this old, whether it was nature or nurture what done it. Parental and other adult approval and disapproval for certain behaviours start getting signalled when kids can’t even talk yet. With the usual proviso that anecdote is not an argument (but surely giving an example is a legitimate part of an argument?), I started observing these things more carefully after the day that a friend of my sister’s brought her two-year-old grandson to visit my mother and the kid rampaged around screaming, throwing things and destroying my mother’s garden while his grandmother looked on fondly and crooned ‘Oh, he’s such a boy.’

So, is that a chicken or an egg? Whatever it is, multiply it by a few billion, and of course you’ll get most ten-year-old boys wanting to tear around crashing into things; they’ve been getting positive reinforcement for it from birth, just as most girls have for being gentle and sociable.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:25:50 +0000

Yes, but I doubt the boy with the father who says “it’s for poofters” is the reason that clapping games don’t catch on with boys. They just don’t have the attraction. Most boys want to be much more physical than that.

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:18:46 +0000

It’s amusing to see the same games of your youth showing up in slightly modified form on the playground – for us the footy cards came with bubble gum, not chips.

However, I there are some similarities in footy cards and the clapping game / skipping songs. Both are collections of different sorts – the girls collection doesn’t involve anything physical just a good memory, but they like to collect the rhymes all the same. Boys don’t tend to play it for long as some kids turn it into a contest of strength and there is a strong tendency for boys to disassociate themselves from “girls” games like skipping anyway – there’s always one kid whose boofhead father says “that’s for poofters” without explaining what a poofter is.