Feministing.com - always entertaining

So, during one of my regular feministing.com sessions, I came across a couple of interesting things.

First, apparently until the 1940s, pink was pegged as the color for boys because it was seen as more masculine, whereas blue was considered more dainty and delicate, and therefore appropriate for girls. I know more than a couple boys who would welcome a return of this notion, but I just can't seem to get my head around it. Pink is so girly in my mind! It scares me when I start to think there may be something to this "societal construct" business... At any rate, this is just an interesting trivia tidbit, but the feminists, of course, are hopping mad, because it proves that gender stereotypes that exist now were slightly different before 1940 but were still gender stereotypes. Clearly, this is evil incarnate.

My favorite line from this post, though, is when the blogger writes "I went to a friend’s baby shower the other day and literally 95% of the gifts were blue. You can guess what the gender is anticipated to be." Anticipated to be??? Because sonograms are magical machines that predict what the sex of a child will be when it becomes a child at birth. Amazing how the warped logic of pro-choiciness applies even to the case of a pregnant friend who plans to have her baby! Because it can't have a gender before it is really a person, right? So how could an unborn baby really have a gender? Well, let's see now...

Another quaint (in a good way) notion that feminists are really ticked off about today is the notion of men paying for young ladies. There is a cute Dairy Queen ad in which a little girl smiles at a little boy, and he buys her an ice cream. Admittedly, when she tells her mother it is "like shooting fish in a barrel," the ad becomes a bit odd, but overall still a cute ad. Well, the feminists are, of course, infuriated. Here are some of the reasons I encountered in the feministing.com comments section:

1. It supports the evil dynamic whereby a man pays for a woman.
2. It sexualizes a little girl because the dynamic is, apparently, that when a man pays for a woman she is expected to sleep with him.
3. It is somehow related to alcohol insofar as bars as the places where men most often pay for women.
4. It portrays all women as manipulative gold diggers.

My responses:

1. Not evil. Antiquated, maybe, but still very much appreciated!! Only on feministing.com will you find nearly 70 women who aren't flattered when their date pays for them. In the rest of the world, that is, the sane world, a girl is a little peeved when a date doesn't pay for them, not when he does!

2. I think this must be a product of the fact that all feminists can think of, apparently, is sex. Everything, everything, everything seems to be connected to sex! In what strange universe does having a man pay for you = being required to sleep with him? Ironically, it is probably the girls who are least likely to sleep with a man on a first date, or even kiss on the first date, who are most comfortable with the traditional gender roles that give rise to this scenario.

3. Again, I can see no other explanation for this other than that perhaps these women who are commenting spend far too much time in bars! Neither sex nor alcohol came to my mind when viewing this ad.

4. Apparently feministing.com commenters live in a booze-soaked, sex-saturated world where men have no other motive than to get girls into bed and all women who don't burn their bras in defiance of gender norms are money grubbing, manipulative witches. As scary as this world can be sometimes, I thank the Lord I live in an entirely separate universe from these nutjobs.

I will resist the temptation to say, "don't these looney bins have something better to do with their time?" (Along the feminist line of things - fight rape, violence and STDs in productive, not destructive ways or help support poor women by offering job training, material assistance, counseling, etc), but, clearly, I am wasting my own time reading their inane comments about mundane things and writing whole blog entries in response, so I would just be the pot calling the kettle black. Nevertheless, I am continually amazed by the quotidian things these women get so worked up over.

I am probably just brainwashed by the patriarchy to not even notice when my fundamental rights as a woman are being violated by cutesy ads and gender-assigned colors!! That is how insidious patriarchal control is - I don't even notice when it is happening!! Ah!!! Nobody is safe!