This article was so amusing to me because a lot of what the author discussed made so much sense. The author explains in detail how different girls are than boys even as babies. Their minds act in completely different ways and I thought that every example Angela Phillips made in the article was so interesting.

First of all, she talks of how mothers tend to not treat their children of different sex any different. Then she also talks of how girls realize very early own what their role in life is to be, which is that of her mother's. For the boy, it is different. He learns that he is supposed to be like his father, very powerful, and that his mother is the most important person in his universe, but he knows that he is not supposed to take on the role of her.

This all makes sense to me because whenever I see parents with young children, they are often more concerned with raising their children that are boys to be masculine. No one wants to see their little boys playing with dolls or other "girlie" things. But when it comes to the little girls, it's seen as okay for them to be a little bit tom boyish and for them to play baseball with their brothers or cousins. My sister and I always played ball with my brother and cousins, which may have something to do with the fact that they were all boys, but no one in my family was ever concerned with this and concerned with the fact that we should be doing girlie things. But I feel that if my brother would have wanted to dress up, or play with dolls with my sister then he probably would have probably been encouraged not to. But anyways, I was just wandering what everyone else thought about this and about the article?

I thought the same thing as a I read the article. Me and my sister were both very tomboyish as children because we only had "boy" cousins to play with. But my boyfriends nephew wanted to watch Care Bears on tv last week and his daddy discouraged it strongly, saying it was for little girls. I dont understand it sometimes. It's almost a double standard to me. I think if little boys explore different things it's okay. It may lead to a more sensitive side as an adult man....which could be a good thing. I think both sexes need to see the other....whether it be girls being tom boys or boys watching Care Bears!

I dislike Phillips article.

There's a lot of anecdotal evidence and many assumptions in the article. It sounds like masculinity is developmentally retarded and femininity is learned behavior, which sounds like preferential treatment. Boys are labelled by this article as stereotypical aggressive beasts: "loud and silly", 'little anxious explorers', frustrated, fighting, "wild and out of control", etc.

On the other hand, feminine behavior also sounds extremely conformist, as if daughters simply mimic their mother's behavior instead of developing their own identity. Homebuilding, "person-oriented" (aka. socialization) and other ideals from the 50's and 60's pop-up in descriptions of what daughters learn instead of balanced, less gender-specific activities.

Fathers are also demonized as unavailable. I thought that mother's now shared the workload in coupled, middle class families? so their availability would be similar to working fathers'. In disbelief I checked the date of copyright and the article is from 2000 so this should reflect modern households but I don't think it does.

I found Kimmel's article more critical of the subject.

The article right from the get-go criticizes articles like Phillips by saying "boys and girls are on the same side in this struggle, not pitted against each other." Kimmel is "challenging those stereotypes" that I mentioned above. "Fatherlessness" is not necessarily the current issue because many single Mom's have to work more; she usually budgets half of the two-parent household's income. And I agree with the cultural source. Other Western nations are not having the "boy problem", as I have also noticed, so this is something for American culture as a whole and as a people to examine. The article concludes:

I agree with Courtney about it seeming like a double standard for boys and girls. I'm not sure what my opnion on this is and I'm not sure that it will ever change but it seems like in society, it ok for girls to do "tomboy" things but never ok for boys to do girly things without people looking down on them or wondering what is wrong.