Free to Be, or Not to Be?
March 12, 2014 4:23 AM Subscribe
‘Free to Be’ Boys and Girls: 40 Years After the Failed Gender Revolution — Time, Christina Hoff Sommers, March 11, 2014.
This post was deleted for the following reason: This is a short op-ed that seems to rely mostly on just-so stories and gender essentialism and it will not go over well here. -- goodnewsfortheinsane
It gets worse -- Julia Child was on the air for years and after all that, 95% of people in the US do not cook coq au vin on a regular basis.
What a pathetic waste of celluloid.
posted by PlusDistance at 4:33 AM on March 12, 2014
What a pathetic waste of celluloid.
posted by PlusDistance at 4:33 AM on March 12, 2014
Victorian boys wore dresses like the girls. Just say'n.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:37 AM on March 12, 2014
posted by jeffburdges at 4:37 AM on March 12, 2014
The NY Post story on FTBYAM is ... ridiculous.
It ends like so:
No wonder that the girls of the “Free to Be” generation would grow up to buy millions of copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Forty years of gender re-education later, the only place they could find masculine men anymore was fiction.
I am hoping (against hope really) that this piece is an amazingly subversive piece of parody.
posted by chavenet at 4:40 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]
It ends like so:
No wonder that the girls of the “Free to Be” generation would grow up to buy millions of copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Forty years of gender re-education later, the only place they could find masculine men anymore was fiction.
I am hoping (against hope really) that this piece is an amazingly subversive piece of parody.
posted by chavenet at 4:40 AM on March 12, 2014 [1 favorite]
There is a huge difference between recognizing that gender-based tendencies exist and maintaining a rigid social system of gender that is unforgiving of deviation from those tendencies. To my mind, the "genderless ideal" is really about fixing the social system of gender to be less restrictive. Or to put it another way, that I am a boy might mean I am more likely to want to play with toy cars, but it should not mean that there is something wrong with me if I prefer dolls.
posted by Nothing at 4:41 AM on March 12, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by Nothing at 4:41 AM on March 12, 2014 [3 favorites]
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Which explains a lot about why she considers the "Free to Be You And Me" thing as something that "failed" and why it "got it wrong". I can trace a hell of a lot of my thinking - some of which thinking I like and am grateful for - directly to that album and its message.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:28 AM on March 12, 2014 [3 favorites]