On girl children

Just a couple of things that piss me off. And then we can go back to all that grace stuff.


I've recently realized that I HATE, with all the blunt, traumatic force of that word, HATE it when fellow females say anything like the following:

"I'm soooo glad I never had girls because they're sooooo much harder (or) so much more emoooootional than boys"

"Wow, you have two girls? TWO? Wow...must be really exciting at your place, sometimes...*chuckles, slaps knee, winks at Jeffrey*"

Um...I'm sorry. I never hear anyone say, "Wow, you have two boys? TWO? Wow...raw deal. Sorry."

I have two things to say about this:

1) Why don't you just come out and say it to my round freckled face: "Boys are more valuable, STILL, to my part of society, and this fact is handily proven by my personal theology which is (handily) based in large part on the writings of a man who A)was totally fine with the owning and using of SLAVES; and B)was never married, certainly never the father of a girl-child, and still carried inside him a rather tribal and angry image of god." I happen to (audaciously, perhaps) believe that I was just as equally made in the likeness of god and so were my girls. When you put down girls this way you're engaging in behaviour that is only STEPS away from the following: believing that girls don't need to be (as) educated, believing that a woman's place is ONLY in the home, believing that women are valuable only or mostly as sexual objects (thank you porn industry, the plastic surgery industry, and all the American businessmen who make child sex trafficking a real moneymaker), and (my personal fave) believing that being raped is the rape victim's fault.


On a side note- It's my experience that women who are most fearful of having girls have yet to resolve their own value, having been brought up to believe that boys/men are naturally: smarter, stronger, or better at whatever it is she always wanted to do/be or has a serious disconnect with her own (usually intellectually as well as emotionally) disconnected mother.


2) When you make sexist statements like this you are JUST as demeaning to boys/men as you are to girls/women. Boys have hormones. Men have emotions. Boys can be difficult. Men can be hard to deal with. Those old-timey charts of "boys are strong, hairy and cannot be civilized" and "girls have delicate constitutions and were made for the shade and smelling salts" are just plain dumb. And you know it. Women regularly and since the dawn of time have been pushing living human beings out of their vaginas, and some of the biggest, most intense-looking men I know are stellar fathers and partners and teachers and caretakers and nurses and husbands. All by choice.


Summary?


I LOVE being a girl. I LOVE being a wife and mother. I love being a woman. I happen to LOVE having girls. Two of them. One of them already shows incredible athletic ability and strength of will. I see no reason to re-direct this behaviour into more "feminine roles". She is feminine by plain virtue of being female. She bears the image of her creator--a creator who happily wears the disguise of both father and mother as the need or occasion requires.

In a nutshell?

Stop it. And PLEASE stop saying these things around my daughters.