quote:(AP) -- Boy or girl? Almost half of U.S. fertility clinics that offer embryo screening say they allow couples to choose the sex of their child, the most extensive survey of the practice suggests.
Sex selection without any medical reason to warrant it was performed in about 9 percent of all embryo screenings last year, the survey found.
Another controversial procedure -- helping parents conceive a child who could supply compatible cord blood to treat an older sibling with a grave illness -- was offered by 23 percent of clinics, although only 1 percent of screenings were for that purpose in 2005.
Will we soon see, as the article puts it, "designer babies" taking over the world? Genetic testing for your workplace? (heartfailure probability? you're out!) Sometimes I really think we're getting way ahead of ourselves in several domains. As Hobbes (from Calvin and Hobbes) once said: maybe we think faster than we talk so that we can think twice. We're not really thinking here... Not enough, anyway.
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Yeah, it's scary. I think this is what the anti-cloning and anti-stem cell people should really be worried about.
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"sex selection" -- umm...meaning death for all the "unselected" embryos.
I'm definitely NOT anti-cloning or anti-stem-cell, but this really has me heart sick. I'm imagining that the child will have a lot of parental expectations to deal with if they're this much of a control freak over an issue like gender.
I knew a woman once who said she was going to keep trying until she had "one of each." I asked her what she was going to do with the extras. Of course, with this, there wouldn't be any extras.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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All the genetic discrimination stuff, which may or may not ever come from this, is scary in a lot of ways. The baby picking is less worrisome to me, but definitely something to think about.
Of course, we all do this sort of thing now, just with less rigor. You pick your mate based on good genes. You hire people based on the perception that they will perform better than the other candidates competing for the job. Health insurance companies give you higher rates if you're higher risk.
I don't think we should make discrimination easier or more acceptable, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If we have the ability to insure that our children can live a life free of cancer, or heart disease, or alcoholism, or simply be healthier and happier, shouldn't we attempt to provide that for them?
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I think there will have to be a major cultural change in business hiring practices before we need to worry about selecting for "designer genes". Right now "fitness for the job" very (very) often takes a back seat to nepotism, cronyism, sexism, racism and a whole host of other isms that we (as a culture) seem to hold in much greater importance than whether a candidate is the best selection for the efficiency and over-all good of the company.
More to the point, if there is a chance that a couple could save the life of their first born by creating another child specifically selected to provide compatible cord-blood for therapy is there anything inherently wrong in this? I think it is a useless reaction to the situation to wring our hands and worry about Gattaca when the simple solution is to work to ensure that regardless of the primary motive for bringing a life into the world it is loved and cherished for itself once it is here. Lord knows children are created the "natural" way with far less noble motives than saving another life in the process.
quote:If we have the ability to insure that our children can live a life free of cancer, or heart disease, or alcoholism, or simply be healthier and happier, shouldn't we attempt to provide that for them?
Most definitely. I think a greater danger than the possibility of "Gattaca" is fostering an attitude that progress is bad if it isn't progress for me. I truly hope we are moving towards the technology to eliminate serious debilitating disease and premature death (or death itself if that is possible). I'm not sure it is possible to do that without the benefits affecting some people before others or even leaving some people at a disadvantage. Rather than prevent the possibility of children free of genetic defects, wouldn't it be more constructive to work to eliminate or ameliorate the effects of genetic defects on those unfortunate enough to be born with them?
I'm staying out of the "extra embryos" issue (because it's essentially the abortion debate re-hashed) except to point out that the "issue" is already here and has been long before and regardless of sex selection or any other specific motive.
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quote:If we have the ability to insure that our children can live a life free of cancer, or heart disease, or alcoholism, or simply be healthier and happier, shouldn't we attempt to provide that for them?
If that "ability" is really only the ability to kill the ones who don't measure up before hand, then no, we shouldn't attempt to provide that to the lucky survivors.
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quote: If that "ability" is really only the ability to kill the ones who don't measure up before hand, then no, we shouldn't attempt to provide that to the lucky survivors.
What would you propose doing with all the extra (please avoid negative conotations to the word extra) embryos? Should parents who are going through these types of procedures in order to have a baby be required to take the first fertilized embryo even if it shows Downs Syndrome, MS, and an estimated life-span of less than a day?
Ultimately, who should make the decision on which embryos get implanted and what should be done with the rest?
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I still think that given the fact that there's no early measure for intelligence, compassion, affection, etc. "discarding" a child just because its sex is not the one you wanted is pretty cruel. And even if we find such a measure, do we want "perfection at all costs"? What happens when your girl won't win any beauty contests? Order a boy next time? To me it seems like those parents are reducing their children to the "common" stereotypes about sexes. As Bob said, there will probably be lots of unfulfilled expectations, and very "gender related" ones, like the "beautiful" girl, or the "athletic" boy, or whatever.
I have a problem with keeping only "healthy" children too. What, nobody will study medecine and try to cure people anymore? We'll be perfect from the start? Same as above, how do you know what kind of person that child will be, except possibly sick of something or another? There's so much that depends on the teachings we receive, on the environment we live in, why put that much emphasis on genetics?
There's more to a person than their gender, having cancer or not, being a provider of blood for someone else, etc. I'm all for progress, but technological progress without education doesn't amount to that much in my opinion. It's like giving a gun to someone without giving them any knowledge on how to use it, what can be the consequences, etc. We have more and more options and don't know enough about them to make an informed decision.
P.S. I wanted to take a class in "Ethics in Science" last year, but not enough people were interested so the class was canceled. I'd say it should be pretty much compulsory, darn it. Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Does anyone know if it is likely to be feasible in the future to examine the sperm and the egg prior to fertilization to determine if a combination would produce a healthy foetus? Or, if that is not possible, would anyone have a problem if instead of disregarding an abnormal embryo you could replace the aberrant gene with a "healthy" one at an early stage?
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quote:Does anyone know if it is likely to be feasible in the future to examine the sperm and the egg prior to fertilization to determine if a combination would produce a healthy foetus?
It might be possible, but I don't think it would be feasible. Men contribute millions of sperm during each potential fertilization. It would be quite a feat to evaluate each one and yet another feat to capture and join the selected one with the egg. Additionally, by chooing one sperm cell, you'd be essentially choosing the sex of the child. I think there are ethical issues around sexual selection that go beyond the discarding of un-chosen embryos.
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Further on this issue, the farther removed the process of fertilization is from the natural sex act, the less likely it is to become something wide-spread, at least barring some major changes in human society. In other words, I don't think society will be significantly changed in the near future even if such embryo selection is possible. The vast majority (and I mean VAST majority) of children born in the US (not to mention in the world at large) are conceived without the interference of science. I don't think a large percentage of people are going to unnecessarily complicate their reproductive lives unless they know beforehand there is a significant risk of genetic abnormality.
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Karl, I was thinking of an artificial fertilization situation where one sperm were basically chosen and injected into the egg. It is obvious that this procedure, already today, could be used in deciding the sex of the baby. And I agree that allowing the parents to choose the sex of their child opens its own kind of ethical questions. However, it can be done without having to discard any fertilized embryos. What I was wondering was if you can determine the exact genetic make-up of an embryo by separately examining the egg and the sperm or if the act of combining the two could result in different genetic constellations depending on whatnot.
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quote: If we have the ability to insure that our children can live a life free of cancer, or heart disease, or alcoholism, or simply be healthier and happier, shouldn't we attempt to provide that for them?
Of course any parent would choose a completely healthy baby, and if there was a way to prevent disease they would want to do it. But to me one of the points of Gattaca was how many Van Gogh’s would humanity miss out on because we could prevent schizophrenia. Maybe it’s the lessons a person learns from dealing with their problems which drives them on to success in other areas of life. I hear Lincoln suffered from depression, don’t know if it is true, but if he had always been a normally happy person would he have had the fortitude to go to war to preserve the union?
I am not saying we shouldn't prevent disease when we can. Life has enough hardships without those. It goes back to the slippery slope, if you could pick all the traits of your child, when do you go too far. Should we prevent: short, ugly or bald people. If my parents had fixed all the unwanted things about me before I was born then I wouldn't be the person I am today. If I had been given every advantage would I have any compasion for the less fortunate?
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A lot of the questions being asked in regards to "What would happen if..." leads me to the nature vs. nurture argument. Why would you (SC Carver) be any less compassionate than you are now if you had been given every advantage? Do you think your parents would have raised you differently or instilled a different set of morals in you?
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If I was born 6'4" with good looks, athletic abilities and a 180 IQ my life would have been different. I wouldn't have experienced a lot of the pains of not fitting in during my formative years. People would have treated me different, even my parents. They would have different expectations. Hopefully they would still just love me for who I am, but my life would be different.
One reason people have compassion is because they have been in similar situations. They can identify and understand. If everything had always been easy then it would be hard to understand those for whom it wasn't.
I am not saying I wouldn't be compassionate, but who knows how that different life would have formed me.
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The title is alittle misleading. In Gattaca it was all about gene manipulation, it didnt have anything about parents choosing to have boys more than girls or vice versa.
You know people in China could probably use this research, as they usually get pregnant, hope for a boy, check the gender mid pregnancy, purge if its a girl, rinse repeat.
If people were able to completely modify the genes their children have turned on, I wonder what would be the equalizing factor to keep populations from exploding.
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quote: I wouldn't have experienced a lot of the pains of not fitting in during my formative years.
Again...nature vs. nurture. Many people come out of similar situations less compassionate. Hopefully compassion was something that was instilled in you prior to your being picked on...
Posts: 1480 | Registered: Dec 2004
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: The title is alittle misleading. In Gattaca it was all about gene manipulation, it didnt have anything about parents choosing to have boys more than girls or vice versa.
Remember when the parents went to the clinic and the doctor told them that "we have X healthy boys and Y very healthy girls?" And they said that they wanted a little brother for their son to play with, so they got a boy.
The movie didn't address the dilemma proposed by gender selection, you're right, but the capacity to select gender did exist in the movie's world.
Anyway, I like the title, but then, I loved Gattaca. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: The title is alittle misleading. In Gattaca it was all about gene manipulation, it didnt have anything about parents choosing to have boys more than girls or vice versa.
Remember when the parents went to the clinic and the doctor told them that "we have X healthy boys and Y very healthy girls?" And they said that they wanted a little brother for their son to play with, so they got a boy.
The movie didn't address the dilemma proposed by gender selection, you're right, but the capacity to select gender did exist in the movie's world.
Anyway, I like the title, but then, I loved Gattaca.
Oh I agree the ability was mentioned, but in the society there is an even balance of men and women, and there was not really an sexism, at least in the movies world.
Then again maybe Ill watch it and see if there was gender disparities in the movie.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Gender selection will lead to death for society.
You need gender parity. This will lead to more boys than girls because our society holds boys as more valuable, even though this is biologically backwards.
Birthrate will fall further. Our culture will no longer be able to absorb and merge with other cultures, but will be consumed.
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Oh I agree the ability was mentioned, but in the society there is an even balance of men and women, and there was not really an sexism, at least in the movies world.
Then again maybe Ill watch it and see if there was gender disparities in the movie.
Oh, okay. I thought you meant that the ability wasn't mentioned, not that the possible effects weren't mentioned. Yeah, I didn't see any of that either.
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Haha, but if you select for boys, there are no little girls for them to marry 20 years down the road! Oh, the bride prices you can command . . .
Currently, the option to select for gender is only available to those who choose to go through in vitro - and going through in vitro just to pick gender would be a very expensive, and physcially and emotionally exhausting experience. If in vitro were to become the norm for wealthy families, I imagine almost everyone would pick the gender of their children. Good/ bad? Dunno. Both, probably.
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I'm definitely NOT anti-cloning or anti-stem-cell, but this really has me heart sick. I'm imagining that the child will have a lot of parental expectations to deal with if they're this much of a control freak over an issue like gender.
Me, too. This is way more of a concern to me than potential discrimination issues, which fortunately, we still have laws to protect against (even though they aren't fail-proof, obviously!). I just feel really sorry for any child whose parents would select them to be "ideal." What kind of life is that kid likely to have?
quote:I knew a woman once who said she was going to keep trying until she had "one of each." I asked her what she was going to do with the extras. Of course, with this, there wouldn't be any extras.
Wow - creepy. Yeah, if you want "one" of each, then what happens if you have a long string of girls before you get a boy? Sell them to the circus?
Posts: 1006 | Registered: Jun 2006
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Gene manipulation scares me a bit. If we warp the genes of a fetus or embryo or zygote, whatever, so it is resistant to all manner of germs, will that effect its ability to fight of new diseases a hundred years down the road? The reason we're the hardy folk we are today is that we've been through the trials of plague and other devastating diseases that have ravaged the earth before.
Does fiddling with our genes now, to cure all manner of diseases today, mean we'd be in trouble in the future? Or are we expecting to cure all diseases for all time, and let little nanorobots pick up the slack? Seems to me it's a huge decision to make for the fate of mankind.
Also, I think widespread gender selection in China would lead to the downfall of the nation. Everyone would pick a boy, with the outcome that all those little boys growing up don't have women to marry when they get older. Either their society would collapse, or, it would change, and suddenly girls would be the best thing since sliced bread, and everyone would rush to have them.
Nature has done a great job of balancing gender over the last few million years, I don't want to fire her when she's kept up a solid job performance.
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Why the heck would everyone pick a boy?! Really, I don't get where that idea comes from... Maybe in the "old days" when "men were REAL men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri" you'd have wanted a boy instead of a girl. To fight for you, I don't know. But now?! Am I missing something really obvious here?
Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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I don't think it'd be as prevelent in America. Despite the perception of America as a male-centric culture, everyone has independent criteria for what they want in children, and for what might make them want a girl or a boy. I don't know if it would balance out in the end, but who's to say it would matter? More and more women (and men? not sure) are choosing the single life, for life, and not getting married or having kids. More women might even mean more babies, or more men might, or it might balance out. America is a screwy country to even try to guess at with this sort of thing.
I'd think Europe would want MORE girls, they're going to experience a population decline in many of their nations in the coming decades.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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China is not the US. I read (and the book that listed this study is out on loan so I can't reference easily), that they have done studies in US looking at which gender the parents would pick and it was pretty evenly split. When I went to China, a lot of the women talked about the improvements the gender imbalance had provided in their lives. The unmarried guys talked about how much it sucked. Before finding out the gender of my baby, my husband and I talked a lot about which one we wanted. We honestly could not decide. I kind of felt bad because when we told people what we were getting and were all excited and people congratulating us, I wanted to point out, we would have been just as happy the other way.
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Gene manipulation scares me a bit. If we warp the genes of a fetus or embryo or zygote, whatever, so it is resistant to all manner of germs, will that effect its ability to fight of new diseases a hundred years down the road? The reason we're the hardy folk we are today is that we've been through the trials of plague and other devastating diseases that have ravaged the earth before.
Does fiddling with our genes now, to cure all manner of diseases today, mean we'd be in trouble in the future?
I asked this question, I am still trying to consider what factors would step up to take the place of disease. War? Crime? Famine?
quote: Also, I think widespread gender selection in China would lead to the downfall of the nation. Everyone would pick a boy, with the outcome that all those little boys growing up don't have women to marry when they get older. Either their society would collapse, or, it would change, and suddenly girls would be the best thing since sliced bread, and everyone would rush to have them.
They ALREADY experience a gender disparity in China. As it is, I have mentioned what they do there. 1: Get Pregnant 2: Screen for gender if its a boy carry it to term and be happy that your family name will continue. If its a girl go to step 3 3: Purge/Abort the fetus and go back to step 1, OR possibly proceed to step 4. 4: Dump your daughter into an adoption house that is 99% of the time overcrowded as it is, there little if any hope your daughter will ever have a chance at being anything.
edit: mentally and physically defective sons are also dumped off at the orphanage because its hard to screen for those things when they are still in the mother. If you could screen for defects I am sure there would be even more abortions in China.
Some sociologists postulate that within 30 years there will be 1 man to every 20 females in China at this rate, revolution will be imminent. Either the 1 child policy has to become more lax (it is in some respects, the forced abortion of yesteryear are gone, but now the government will only pay for the schooling of ONE child.), or something else has got to give, they won't have space for all these people forever.
quote: Nature has done a great job of balancing gender over the last few million years, I don't want to fire her when she's kept up a solid job performance.
I agree and disagree. How do we save a single life from say disease and NOT say we are interfering with the way nature set things up?
Anybody else getting Pastwatch vibes form this thread now?
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Nature set it up so that we got really smart. Why shouldn't we use our brains? 'Specially since they've become a crutch to our physical survival?
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Hasn't China already begun changing their policy? In certain areas, depending upon the population, if your first child is a girl, in 4-6 years, you may try again for a boy. If it was a boy, that's all you get. Benefits are equivalent.
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by scholar: Hasn't China already begun changing their policy? In certain areas, depending upon the population, if your first child is a girl, in 4-6 years, you may try again for a boy. If it was a boy, that's all you get. Benefits are equivalent.
Let me do some research and Ill get back to you.
edit: Wikipedia covers it pretty well from both sides. I tend to be found on the more critical side of the policy but its not QUITE as rigid as I had supposed. But I would also advise readers not to dismiss the human rights violations that still take place and were even worse few decades ago.
I feel very sad for the women who were forced to abort their babies.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I don't think it'd be as prevelent in America. Despite the perception of America as a male-centric culture, everyone has independent criteria for what they want in children, and for what might make them want a girl or a boy.
Like my dad, who from a young age, wanted to have two boys and two girls.
...which is exactly what he got. What a lucky guy.
Anyways, I think selecting gender is a LONG way from selecting, say, personality or predisposition to heart disease or mental illness. Which is how it was in Gattaca.
quote:What would you propose doing with all the extra (please avoid negative conotations to the word extra) embryos? Should parents who are going through these types of procedures in order to have a baby be required to take the first fertilized embryo even if it shows Downs Syndrome, MS, and an estimated life-span of less than a day?
Ultimately, who should make the decision on which embryos get implanted and what should be done with the rest?
No one should make that decision, because procedures that produce "extra" embryos shouldn't be performed.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:You need gender parity. This will lead to more boys than girls because our society holds boys as more valuable, even though this is biologically backwards.
Birthrate will fall further. Our culture will no longer be able to absorb and merge with other cultures, but will be consumed.
I see a lot of holes in this argument. First, a male-female discrepancy wouldn't necessarily lead to falling birthrate if artificial wombs were available (which they will be). Second, one might think our culture would become wealthier and more powerful as a few young people inherit the combined property of a larger number of their elders. Manpower is becoming less and less important in the modern economy and on the modern battlefield.
What might become a problem (and what is becoming a problem in contemporary China) is social unrest due to "broken sticks," i.e. hetero men faced with a very small pool of available women.
Sounds like grad school to me...
quote:No one should make that decision, because procedures that produce "extra" embryos shouldn't be performed.
This neatly allows the believer in immortal souls to dodge the question. For the rest of us who believe that a person is a physical mind and a mind needs somewhat more than 150 cells to support it...
Well, this is a tough issue. I'm naturally inclined to say that children should be as free as possible from the unfair influence of controlling parents. But if that's your worry, social indoctrination of the sort that happens all the time should bother you much more than gender selection.
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quote:This neatly allows the believer in immortal souls to dodge the question.
I'm not dodging it any more than an abolitionist would be dodging by refusing to answer questions about what slavery should be like.
I have actually written a fair amount about the dangers of valuing human lives based on other people's wishes.
Let's start by examining attributes that are generally believed to not be pluses or minuses for the person with the trait (hair color, gender, etc.), as opposed to traits viewed as disabilities (blindness or having a missing limb).
As soon as we start wishing for such non-disabling traits, we are placing value on other people based solely on our own desires. I think this is an ultimately destructive attitude, even when an individual expression of the attitude seems frivolous or harmless.
For example, I don't think someone wanting* a boy, or a blonde, or a tall child, is necessarily a brutish person who thinks others exist only to please him.
I do, however, think that such a person has taken the first step on a road that leads to that philosophy. I don't think it's inevitable on a personal level. I do think that a society that condones that first step will likely travel to the end of that road.
*Here I'm using "wanting" in a much stronger sense than merely wishing, or having a preference. I think it would involve taking positive steps to acquire a child with such traits to demonstrate the level of desire I'm speaking of above.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I find it absolutely ridiculous that your unborn child, regardless of whether it's a girl or a boy, cannot become the child you want.
I think many people think that if they have a girl, they're going to have to decorate the room in all pink or something. Alternatively, if it's a boy, they think that the child will be sports-mad and everything will be have to be car-themed.
That kind of idea makes me furious. I hate to see girls who are totally girly and boys who have to be masculine and love hockey in order to be chummy with their fathers. In other words, a strong pink/blue division.
I hate to see a division in play where the girls and the boys will not play with one another. I hate to go babysitting and find a girl's room decked out in nothing but pink and purple and Barbie and Disney princess paraphanalia. I hate to find nothing but sports books and pictures in a boys room. I hate seeing every boy at summer camp having a blue or red Spiderman or Power Rangers bag, and every girl having a pink or purple Disney or Barbie one. You don't have to pre-determine such enforced gender recognition in that way.
Parents who chose their baby's sex in this way are, to my view, worried that they won't be able to control their child's life in the way they want. If they don't "get a girl" how will the mother ever be able to dress said girl up like a little princess? If they don't "get a boy", the father worries, how will he have man-to-man talks with him at the hockey game? How will he ever go out for a beer?
I find that sad and infuriating and completely misguided. This is not about gender equality any more, it's about gender freedom. Freedom from commercial and parentally-created gender images.
Parents should not care about the gender of their unborn child because their child is not their little doll to dress up into whatever they imagine. A child is its own person. A father may end up going to his daughter's hockey games and a mother may end up watching her son dance in a ballet recital and there shouldn't be any reason why not. The mixture of families makes the world interesting. Unlike Fourties books say, you don't have to have a boy first and then a girl and then a boy and a girl. You can mix things up and still have a great time.
Regardless of whether their child is going to end up as a lawyer or a doctor or a sports-car driver or as an actor, many parents seem to think that as children they should wear and carry paraphenalia that constantly reminds them of what is important to their gender.
This is not to say that they shouldn't own the occaisional Barbie bag or Power Rangers t-shirt. It's the complete inundation of the child with pink or blue that is the tell-tale mark of a parent with strong specific ideas about girls and boys.
My parents did not know the gender of the children until they were born. When they were born, there was no complete drowning of any of us with "girl" or "boy" things. I grew up with a wide-ranging interest in all sorts of things, both "male" and "female". That is the way I (when and if I have my hypothetical children) want it.
I think the need to choose gender and enforce it postnatally is a human trait that should be strongly encouraged to fade.
People: Do not pink or blue your children! You do not need to!
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Teshi, you're so right. I remember being little and ordering a Hot Wheels Happy Meal instead of a Barbie one once, and the lady at the counter laughed about how, "She wants the boys' happy meal!"
posted
So, this article didn't go into it, but there are also people who choose to have disabled children. For example, deaf parents may wish to have a deaf child (though many in the deaf community do not like deafness to be classified as a disability).
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I had a Superman lunch box when I was little, and my classmates were confused. "You have a boy's lunch box!"
::smacks forehead::
I am also very anti-pinking and anti-blueing. It is the marketing companies of the world creating such a split in the genders! It is what happened to create the Teenager! It is the Hot Topic effect! Blech!
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:. I hate to see girls who are totally girly and boys who have to be masculine and love hockey in order to be chummy with their fathers. In other words, a strong pink/blue division.
I hate to see a division in play where the girls and the boys will not play with one another. I hate to go babysitting and find a girl's room decked out in nothing but pink and purple and Barbie and Disney princess paraphanalia. I hate to find nothing but sports books and pictures in a boys room. I hate seeing every boy at summer camp having a blue or red Spiderman or Power Rangers bag, and every girl having a pink or purple Disney or Barbie one. You don't have to pre-determine such enforced gender recognition in that way.
Parents who chose their baby's sex in this way are, to my view, worried that they won't be able to control their child's life in the way they want. If they don't "get a girl" how will the mother ever be able to dress said girl up like a little princess? If they don't "get a boy", the father worries, how will he have man-to-man talks with him at the hockey game? How will he ever go out for a beer?
But, from the first part, you run into the hyper-feminist "house wives are all brainwashed" thing. What if the girl chooses to be all girly (Woah, Rodgers and Hammerstein flashblack) and the boy chooses to be really err...boy-y.
That being said, I totally get where you're coming from and I agree. Of course, this could be because I only have a neice to work with and I myself and very boy-y.
When I was shopping for her Christmas present, lat year, I was trying to get her an Incredibles costume (she loves that movie). Disney had boys, but not girls. So I ordered her a pair of "boys" Incredibles PJs and made her a couple sets of super suits myself (with Hatack's help, thanks). The main benefit of this being, that they have capes, which she just loves.
Anyway, I have to admit I was suprised that in 2005 you'd still see something like that. You could get Mr. Incredible costume, complete with pectoral musculature for boys, but all Disney was offering for the girls was like their Princess costumes.
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quote:What if the girl chooses to be all girly (Woah, Rodgers and Hammerstein flashblack) and the boy chooses to be really err...boy-y.
The point is that this does not need to be enforced. Aged seven, I picked the pink paint out for my new bedroom. The point was that before then, the fact that I was born female wasn't shoved down my throat in the form of bright pink everything. I was myself.
quote:But, from the first part, you run into the hyper-feminist "house wives are all brainwashed" thing.
I tried to make a note of making the difference between 'equality', which I am not discussing, and 'freedom'. Freedom to be yourself as a human being instead of 'a girl'. [EDIT: I think what I believe is that people should be human first and everything else (male, female, gay, straight, black, white blah blah blah) second. If you knew somehow your child was gay from day one, you wouldn't bring them up as "gay", whatever that means, would you? You'd bring them up as you would anyone else; their sexual orientation would fall naturally into place as you went along.]
I would like to get to a place where a girl having a Superman lunch box doesn't incite comment. Where ordinary non-themed Lego isn't considered just for boys. Where toys in children's homes are less gender-specific. Where boys and girls are more comfortable playing together so they grow up with a general understanding of the other sex and less of a "EW! Cooties!" thinking. (I think the "EW!" thinking is grossly overemphasized by our culture and that it does not actually have to be that way.)
I mean all of this in a moderate way. There's no feminist ravings here. I'm not suggesting boys and girls are exactly the same (they're definately not). I'm not suggesting that boys and girls should dress the same or do exactly the same things, only that the differences should not be enforced from day one.
Relating back to this thread, I'd like to get a place where parents do not feel pressured to pick a certain gender in order to get "what they want", because "what they want" shouldn't be seen as so determinable by gender.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I loved hockey as a young lad, and still do, despite the changing face of the game!
That said, I also played with my little ponies with the wings on them. Battle chariots for my GI Joes.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:The point is that this does not need to be enforced. Aged seven, I picked the pink paint out for my new bedroom. The point was that before then, the fact that I was born female wasn't shoved down my throat in the form of bright pink everything. I was myself.
When a child is too young to make decorating, wardrobe, and other shopping decisions, exactly what can a parent offer them that cannot be construed as having been "enforced"? If you buy all unisex stuff for your kids, are you "enforcing" a lack of gender-specific items, and would they be right to resent you if later they decided that they hated unisex stuff?
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Sometimes I really think we're getting way ahead of ourselves in several domains. As Hobbes (from Calvin and Hobbes) once said: maybe we think faster than we talk so that we can think twice. We're not really thinking here... Not enough, anyway.
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I'd say it should be pretty much compulsory, darn it. ![[Mad]](mad.gif)
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