Thank you! This was a lovely comment to read. I have to agree with you on all points.
I do want to explain that when I was growing up, my quietly feminist parents raised me to look past gender and sex when reading stories and watching movies. This was literally my thought process as a small child: "Okay, that person with a penis has more testosterone, hormones, etc, that make him physically stronger, but he's not looking at the person with the vagina and thinking that she is weak because she has more estrogen, etc - he sees her as an equal as a person. Male people and female people have their various differences, but they're people, and people do things like people." Nobody told me that playing in the dirt and having short hair was "a boy thing." I loved to bury my Voltron toys and turn them into zombies and then have my Ninja Turtle action figures save the day. I would take half my Barbie dolls and chop off their hair and have them be the lovers of the other Barbies, although I may have been influenced by my neighbor Sue and her girlfriend, Susan. When I played with my She-Ra toys, the female figures always rescued the male figures, but I never "compartmentalized" genders. I was aware of how "boys and girls were different" but I never saw the big deal about it. It wasn't until I got into middle school that I realized the weird gender/sex gaps that people place on each other. Girls do this, boys to that. Why are you doing boy things if you're a girl, and visa versa. I didn't tell anyone that I used to have lesbian neighbors and that one of my elementary school classmates was trans (born female, presented as male). Because I saw that a lot of the other kids didn't like knowing these things. My favorite creative writing teacher got teased by students for having a girlfriend. So my world got jolted for a bit.
When I watch Buffy, I am keenly aware of all these issues, but the little girl in me shrugs it off and says, "But they're all people. So what?" And when I read some blog posts by people who blasted Whedon and Spike, etc, that little girl in me thought, "Seriously why all the man hating? They're PEOPLE."
I think my childhood issues stemmed more from being disabled and shunned than being a disabled female and shunned.
I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'll stop now. I hope I got some kind of point across.
no subject
I do want to explain that when I was growing up, my quietly feminist parents raised me to look past gender and sex when reading stories and watching movies. This was literally my thought process as a small child: "Okay, that person with a penis has more testosterone, hormones, etc, that make him physically stronger, but he's not looking at the person with the vagina and thinking that she is weak because she has more estrogen, etc - he sees her as an equal as a person. Male people and female people have their various differences, but they're people, and people do things like people." Nobody told me that playing in the dirt and having short hair was "a boy thing." I loved to bury my Voltron toys and turn them into zombies and then have my Ninja Turtle action figures save the day. I would take half my Barbie dolls and chop off their hair and have them be the lovers of the other Barbies, although I may have been influenced by my neighbor Sue and her girlfriend, Susan. When I played with my She-Ra toys, the female figures always rescued the male figures, but I never "compartmentalized" genders. I was aware of how "boys and girls were different" but I never saw the big deal about it.
It wasn't until I got into middle school that I realized the weird gender/sex gaps that people place on each other. Girls do this, boys to that. Why are you doing boy things if you're a girl, and visa versa. I didn't tell anyone that I used to have lesbian neighbors and that one of my elementary school classmates was trans (born female, presented as male). Because I saw that a lot of the other kids didn't like knowing these things. My favorite creative writing teacher got teased by students for having a girlfriend. So my world got jolted for a bit.
When I watch Buffy, I am keenly aware of all these issues, but the little girl in me shrugs it off and says, "But they're all people. So what?" And when I read some blog posts by people who blasted Whedon and Spike, etc, that little girl in me thought, "Seriously why all the man hating? They're PEOPLE."
I think my childhood issues stemmed more from being disabled and shunned than being a disabled female and shunned.
I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'll stop now. I hope I got some kind of point across.