Friday, April 15, 2011

Toemageddon

I must take a break from my recent series on distinctions to spend a few moments talking about Toemageddon. All you need to know about it is neatly summarized in this report by John Stewart from The Daily Show:




Now this news item particularly caught my attention because I had just finished reading a fascinating Smithsonian article about the transition, over the last century, from gender-neutral children's clothing--where "gender neutral" meant frilly dresses for both boys and girls until around age six--to the current patterns of gender specific clothing. According to the article, pink became established as a "girl's" color not until the middle of the 20th Century. In fact, as the pink/blue convention was being established, there was no clear agreement about which color should be for which gender--some even insisting that boys should be the ones to wear pink because it is the more "masculine" color.

Obviously, this had ruinous effects on the gender identity of boys of earlier generations. Consider this photo of FDR when he was a small child:



Clearly, this goes a long way towards explaining why FDR and his generation of men were all such sissies. I mean, what did the men of that generation accomplish? They were clearly ruined by being put in girl's clothes. Likewise, boys who have joyfully playful moments with their mothers, as we find in the J. Crew ad, can only be harmed by it. Science teaches that a childhood full of affection, delight, and nonjudgmental play turns children (especially boys) into...well, um, FDR may have been an extremely influential President who overcame polio to lead the country out of the Great Depression and through the Second World War, but let's be real: He was a liberal by any Tea-Party-Fox-News standard I know.

And that, ultimately, is why we must stand firm against painted toe nails.

15 comments:

  1. FDR was not deliberately dressed in that outfit. It was custom in his family to wear hand me downs. He had sisters. I agree that painting toe nails pink is a ridiculous thing for the media to focus on. However, I had to clear up the FDR point. It had to do with his family's economy more than anything. My partner, a voracious history buff, showed me this picture in a book last week. It was not related to the J Crew story, he just happened to be reading a book about FDR.

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    1. Whoops! The Roosevelts---all of them---have been wealthy since way back before the Civil War. Your information is poorly sourced, or based entirely on erroneous assumption. FYI the reason boys were still in dresses till around 1910 was that they were the last males to be part of the very long skirt age, to which men as well as women---belonged. Men abandoned skirts due to horseback riding and a specific garment for that activity---pants. Originally they had a pair of separate wrappings for each leg, which is why the single item garment is still called a pair of pants---for convenience the twin tubes were joined together at the crotch and around the waist. Pants however were long regarded as only for equestrianism or the laboring class, aristocratic Italians having laughed at Pantalone---the top clown of the Commedia Dell Arte---in the mid 16th century. Pants are named after a buffoon---a clown. But the only clownish thing about pants is that so many believe they are essential to masculinity. The classical Greeks, Romans and Egyptians knew trousers not---though they were pleased to call others "barbarians" who wore them.

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  2. One last remark. We sure need an FDR right now. He certainly was a hero. I am beginning to wonder if the Republicans and tea party members are actually part of some kind of secret society entitlement program. How any of them could have escaped the Madoff ponzi scheme or the collapse of the housing market in 2007 baffles me and yet they are still full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Except to rant about pink toe nails.

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  3. Eric,

    That was really funny. I saw the video after reading your piece, and I must say I cried with laughter. I mean I often pay a good 7 Euros to watch 90 minutes of comedy cinema, and laugh much less than watching that 6 minutes show.

    Incidentally, I find that you have a knack with satire. You also have a knack to understand why people think as they do. Have you ever thought of writing a book length satire about the relationship between two friends, one a theist the other a naturalist? Or, if you wish to be more risqué, between husband and wife? I think such a story would be both funny and thought provoking, not in moving the reader towards theism or naturalism, but in moving both theists and naturalists to critically rethink their position.

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    1. You have a Greek name, your country has a very obvious SKIRT as a male national costume, and a unit of soldiers who wear skirts, and you agree with this fountainhead of ignorance about skirts on males being deleterious? However, ethnic males like the Scots who wear a skirt are also confused. They think it has to be the same changeless style, lest it become "female."

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  4. As the researcher cited in the Smithsonian article, I must correct Anonymous. I have seen hundreds of similar images from the late 19th century. What FDR is wearing was absolutely acceptable for boys of that age at that time. (The fact that it made cross-gendered hand me downs more convenient should be considered a bonus, and one that many parents might appreciate today.)

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    1. Huh? Are females hermaphrodites that they can't be "cross-gendered" when they wear trousers? Your statement betrays this nagging agenda that restrictions in apparel are only to be targeted at the male, the female having rebuffed psychiatric-psychological prattle that previously confined them into skirts.

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  5. Jo: Thanks for your input here! I found the article fascinating and will be looking for your book when it comes out.

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  6. Jo, thanks for the additional information. The book my partner was reading did not indicate the fact many children were dressed in similar clothing. I agree with the other writer as well, the Stewart segment was so hilarious I had tears in my eyes. Stewart and Colbert are keeping me sane these days. -Anonymous

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  7. One last comment, I must again correct myself. The book my partner is reading is about John D. Rockerfeller. This further supports the notion boys were dressed as they were in the photos. He reads so many thick history books I sometimes get the names mixed up! Again, fascinating issue and I too look forward to reading your work, Jo.

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  8. And lastly, that would be John Rockefeller, not Rockerfeller. I have made all kinds of errors in my posts. LOL Oh well. I would like some pink toenail polish though and would like to liberally distribute it to boys and girls alike.

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  9. http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report.aspx

    I know this is not completely related to your blog, but perhaps you know someone in your academic circles who can speak to the damage done to girls by the media who sexualize them as young as eight years of age. This came from an article on cnn.com and the author was pleading with readers not to sexualize their daughters at a young age. I know this is off topic, but I think it is an important topic. Of interest to me, is the study in which girls dressed in bathing suits perform poorly on math tests compared to girls in sweaters. I agree that the media is destroying our girls with grotesque images. The images are not even real, but done in photo shop. Traverse MySpace and you see a horrific number of girls posing like Victoria's Secret models. It breaks my heart.

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  10. Anonymous,

    Yes, this is a very important topic, and one I have some thoughts about. In teaching business ethics--especially when exploring the ethics of advertising--I've been led to explore with some care the effects of media portrayals of women and girls, and the forces that motivate such portrayals. I think it may be worth devoting a post to this issue in the near future.

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  11. Thank you Eric. I am glad this is an issue you are considering. I have seen it destroy the life of my partner's teenager. Like many teens, the images she has posted on sites like MySpace can never be removed from the internet. Many young girls are not taught safety by their custodial parent and the ramifications in this case are drug abuse, dropping out of school in the ninth grade, a boyfriend who overdosed and died last year and serious psychological problems that will likely be a part of her life for the rest of her life. She is now older than eighteen so all the interventions tried with no assistance from the custodial parent failed. We only have prayer left which very often does work. Namaste!

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  12. For someone billed as a scholar your ignorance is abysmal. You have no historical background as to how clothes came to be so sex typed. And where is your worry over girls in pants? When in 1851 women started wearing bloomers you'd have framed the issue of "Punch" out of London that asked "when does the lady start to shave?" and the NY Times editorial about women in pants suffering from "permanent mental hallucination" (5/27/1876, page 6) entitled "A Curious Disease." In 1664 King Louis XIV of France sent 4,000 troops to help Austria repel a Turkish invasion. The Turks were defeated. The French soldiers were wearing "Rhinegraves" known in England as "petticoat breeches," and again in World War 2 when Italy invaded Greece, the invaders were defeated by---men in skirts. In 1943 Evelyn Bross was ordered by Chicago judge Jacob Braude to see a psychiatrist for six months after cops arrested her for wearing pants. The FEDS pressured the dummies on the Chicago City Council to amend their asinine 1851 ordinance, because winning the war was thought more important than blindly agreeing with imbecilic psychiatric dogma about sex typing clothes. The most recent presidential contender to have worn a skirt as a boy was Mike Dukakis, who is Greek. I hope to see you commit a cultural genocide by slamming what he wore and that the OKC Greek community will come and picket you. Social forces---horseback riding---put men into pants---not male chromosomes. Social forces also put men into plain, drab clothes---the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was directed against aristocrats because only they could afford lace and such. The Industrial Revolution later placed men in the habit of wearing somber colors, because smudges and stains from factory work wouldn't show up so drastically. Before those two social forces there were the Puritans, who decided bright colors are "of the devil." It does so happen that the snip of my little fingernail I discarded last night has hundreds of times more documented facts in it on this topic than yourself and all your ho-hum colleagues. Your masculinity would compare poorly to the skirt wearing Maximinus Thrax, who was Roman military governor of Mesopotamia and was well into the eight foot range. It took eleven soldiers all hitting him with spears to guarantee he would not get up. The only thing you have right about male appearance is the facial hair. The rest is mythology. Are you arriving at your lazy, academic idler "job" on horseback every day? Your view on apparel is not supported by anything in scripture. Deuteronomy 22:5 says nothing about skirts vs pants nor fancy vs plain clothes. Did Jesus not understand its meaning? If so, why did he tell the skirt wearing Roman in Luke 7 that his faith was the greatest around? Stop this zero operator act and learn some history. I wish I could make you publicly recite my 403,041 word research on how sex typing apparel is wrong on every score. I shudder for your students because you demonstrate no qualifications beyond broadcasting social mythology, associative reasoning, and mass hypnosis with this trouser theology you have.

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