Dana Goldstein says after quoting an honors student from an all-boys school in Maryland who said ““I would be distracted if girls were around. Now, it’s just a bunch of dudes in class. I can pay attention.”
Wow. I wouldn’t try to deny that raging hormones afflict 15-year olds the world over. But what kind of lesson are we teaching teenagers when we tell them we don’t actually expect them to control themselves? When we imply to boys that girls aren’t their colleagues or intellectual partners, but are sexual objects — mere distractions?
Um, yeah. Because, it being the 1950s and all, the only women men will work with when they grow up will be in the secretary pool and at the front desk. So why on earth would you bother socializing them?
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On a semi-somewhat-related matter, from a snippet of Tavis Smiley on NPR I heard a children’s author saying he’d created a hippopotamus character who’s big and smart because, he said, a lot of boys grow up believing they can either be big and athletic or intelligent but not both. Which, as soon as he said it, I realized is of course true.
Which kind of completes the circle of the gender curse: whether you’re a boy or girl, man or woman, we grow up believing we can be the pinnacle of gender-stereotyped physical perfection (strong/agile = “perfect” boys, shapely/graceful = “perfect” girls.) Or we can be smart.
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Charming little con games we’re running on our children, eh? I’m sure they’re all going to grow up to be so well adjusted. And yeah, our ancestors ran them on us too but since when did two wrongs make a right?
Submitted by 2822 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-04-05 18:55.
For girls, the requirement is now to be pretty/sexy *and* smart. They don't feel they need to be Einstein-smart (which would risk geekiness), but they certainly need to be good students. At least, that's what I hear from my students, male and female alike. There's an obvious sample bias since these are kids who made it to college, but I think it's too simplistic to say that girls still face an either/or. It's more of a both/and. Problem is, it's still a rigid norm - and in a crunch, pretty still seems to trump smart.
Submitted by 2822 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-04-05 20:25.
This is also said in urban schools for elementary students.
Submitted by 2822 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-04-06 18:47.
Another stereotype involved here is that boys with raging hormones are distracted by girls. Some significant percentage of them are distracted by other boys.
[And it's not like girls aren't distracted by boys so... WTF? More no-sex class thinking. Thanks, DN! --fl]