Saturday, August 23, 2008

Against parenting.com

I actually don't have anything against them. Except for the immensely imbecile article they wrote, which appeared on cnn (and I saw via Feministing). Title: Boys will be boys, girls will be girls from birth.
They have a list of "scientific facts" none of which is accompanied by even the remotest reference. The nearest they go to a reference is saying that a study was carried out by "psychologists at Cambridge, England" - and it is in fact a study on something strange, namely whether one-year old would rather look at talking faces or at windscreen wipers. Seems totally irrelevant to me.
The few studies (some more are mentioned without a reference, all of a similar kind) are interspersed with the journalist's prejudice, for which no reference is even attempted: e.g., that girls have more interest in clothing and shoes than boys do.
Of course I could make a big case of how I have precisely one child (my son C#2) who really cares about clothing, and especially shoes, and how he has recently (age 5) discovered jewels and is perpetually asking for becklaces and bracelets. But I won't. I'll just sit there and worry about the antifeminist backlash on both sides of the Atlantic, after having learned that Obama chose a 65-year old catholic as vp, and is being increasingly wishy-washy about the abortion issue.

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