Ovens are fun! I’m still trying to find a nice non-pink kitchen set for the boys. It feels impossible.

sorry, borked that link: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2014/03/10/whats-wrong-with-this-picture/

My point is, as the father of a daughter I’m all in favor of not stuffing little girls into a pink box.

Also, I liked your comment about your boy friends liking your Easybake Oven. As I man I still think one of the most beautiful sights in the world is a dish coming out of an oven.

All you commenters above: you are awesome and give me hope for humanity.

We have to get rid of the aggressive and violent gender enforcement against kids.

We’ve been in a backlash period for so long. Those of us who are children of the 70s grew in perhaps the least gendered period in a very long time, and we need to push things back to where they were then, and beyond. Not surre how.

(I was one of those boys who wanted long hair and styling and dresses. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was a girl, and I didn’t want to be “girlish”. I just wanted those things to be gender neutral.)

I’m a middle school science teacher. If I didn’t respect and value young people I’d have given up in despair a long time ago.

I very much value their potential, but at the same time, I am faced every day with the reality that they are not grownups. Besides teaching them science, a big part of my job involves helping them to become mature, responsible adults. At that age, there is a huge range of maturity levels, and some of them are indeed more responsible than many adults. That was my point – that we all need to be as grown up as possible, including those of us who have reached legal adulthood. Sometimes we fail.

Lithified @ 7,

I don’t like the idea of using ‘grown up’ either because it disrespects the young just as ‘man up’ disrespects women.

“…what society tends to label as “girly” or “boyish” usually isn’t either of those things when one looks at what kids actually gravitate toward instead of looking for confirmation of gender bias.”

When I had Eldest, it was back in the early 90’s, and my request to not have explicitly gendered baby items gifted to us was fairly easy to accommodate and also went unquestioned. By the time my second child was born in 2001, it was getting harder to avoid the pink/blue washing, and by the time my youngest was born in 2004 it was nigh on impossible, especially for someone on a tight budget. Pink cheetah print onesies with purple ruffles or blue onesies with trucks are my only choices, really? Of course I could always find less gendered items in the high end stores but we were not on a high end budget. Apparently plain yellow is on the color palate of the upper class.

When I was a little kid back in the mid-70’s I explicitly remember getting for xmas one year an inexpensive tin tea set that was trimmed in green and had apples on it. I went looking for something similar for my second kid’s fourth birthday, and all I could find at the chain stores was pink, or pink and purple. I wanted something that wasn’t explicitly labeled “this is for girls” because I knew my boys would also want to play with it and I didn’t want anyone telling them that they couldn’t just because it was a girl color.

Memory around the same time of a park mom from a church group spanking her preschool aged son for trying to play with his sister’s doll stroller, yelling at him that that is for girls and he needs to act like a boy. The look on his face broke my fucking heart. Beating a young child for merely trying to explore his nurturing side, and we wonder as a society why boys can be so closed off. This is why, in a hundred different ways.

My favorite photograph of my younger three is of them sitting on the sofa in their jammies, pig-tailed every one, grinning ear to ear. I printed out that photo with a quote from one of my friends about taking joy in the little things. It has been on my fridge for years.

Actually having experienced the whole Brony community from where it started online I can say that gender confusion, exploration, and discussion has been an constant part of it. I suspect the community that I help moderate includes a larger proportion of LGBT members than the public at large and conversations that touch on gender, what it is, what it means and more constantly pop up.

Yet strangely enough the Brony community has it percentage of anti-feminists as well and I’m still trying to figure out how that is possible. The creator explicitly says that she used feminist ideas in the series. I suspect it has to do with agreeing with equality but opposing any actual analysis of gender roles and responsibility for who is maintaining what and where.