4 ms·

Your examples are very peculiar in that in the workplace female programmers are the minority, and some google searching shows female head chefs are nearly unhea

by VLM 10y ago

Your examples are very peculiar in that in the workplace female programmers are the minority, and some google searching shows female head chefs are nearly unheard of in the food service industry, therefore sure obviously programming and being a chef are culturally obviously very masculine. I think your point is something like its very Millennial to have no "traditional crafts and skills", low agency, low levels of self help, etc. I'd believe that. You do make a convincing point. See the rebellious response of the Maker movement which decades ago would have merely been called learning to be a responsible "grown up". The problem with your culturally/economically masculine examples of programming and being a chef is you can pull a graph from images.google.com of something like "children living with mother only" and apparently it varies staggeringly with race and time. Such that when I was a kid less than 1 in 10 of my peers grew up with a single mom and no Dad in the picture, whereas half of black kids today have no "Dad" in the house. So it matters not that we're discussing mere subjects like carpentry vs arduino programming, no Dad at all means neither subject will be in the picture. I'm sure there are lost feminine arts in the culture. Sewing homemade clothing. Being a stay at home mom. But those were not article topics anyway. Edited to further point out we're arguing over which binary is the only binary factor to matter, whereas my point is regardless of how much "Dad Hobbies" have cratered culture-wide, getting rid of 40% of Dads from kids lives over the same time period is just going to make whatever decline there is, 40% lower yet. I simply don't understand what could be controversial about that.

ska 10y ago
My examples are very intentional - arguably "programming robots" is today a more normalized "masculine" activity that woodworking, say. This was done to isolate the issue of defining "masculine" activities by a historical, rather than contemporary view - i.e. are we to prefer children learning (arguably) less practical skills because they are either novel or not historically "masculine"? That's a sort of cultural conservatism that biases any further discussion if you aren't very very careful. Cooking and baking was added as a bit of a curve-ball, because it is both a male-identified and female-identified activity under various lights. But this gets into the whole messy subject of normalizing gender identification of activities, which is perhaps best avoided. As is the characterization of Millennials, or superficial analysis of the impact of single parent environments. At the very least, all much deeper waters than I have time to get into here. In short: growing up with a table-saw in the basement is a terribly proxy for masculine involvement in that childhood, today. Thinking about it in those terms is self defeating, and undermines whatever value defining "masculine" activities in this context may have (which is a whole other can of worms).
true_religion 10y ago
I am extremely suspicious of your sudden switch to calling out black single-parents as the doom of masculinity. I'm further more extremely cautious of any approach that wants to talk solely about harm done to men, due to losing 'traditional' masculine hobbies, but not talk about the similar near total loss of 'feminine' hobbies and the cottage industry that widely drove revenue for stay-at-home mothers.
- ska 10y ago
  I tried to entirely sidestep this, but you are probably right to call it out this way. I wasn't sure if it was just awkwardly unintentionally worded, or a bit of semaphore for a load of unpleasant nonsense - so wanted to calling it the latter and burying any discourse about the potentially interesting issue of the perception vs. reality of "masculine roles" (and if that even makes sense).
  - true_religion 10y ago
    I had wanted to give the benefit of the doubt as well, because as another poster suggested---there is a grain of truth within his statements. Then I remembered that 'grain of truth' is how these sort of philosophies continue to survive, and insinuate themselves into common discourse. So I am ignoring that single grain an focusing on the rotten conclusions that veer too closely to the sort of rhetorical landmines that have historically been damning to society. If you are going to call out a specific ethnic group, or push politically sensitive buttons then you need to bring out arguments with a much higher standard than 'grain of truth'. I hope this isn't too much of a rant, I simply wanted to clarify because usually I am the one helpfully playing devils' advocate but I simply couldn't do so this time.

by VLM 10y ago

ska 10y ago

My examples are very intentional - arguably "programming robots" is today a more normalized "masculine" activity that woodworking, say. This was done to isolate the issue of defining "masculine" activities by a historical, rather than contemporary view - i.e. are we to prefer children learning (arguably) less practical skills because they are either novel or not historically "masculine"? That's a sort of cultural conservatism that biases any further discussion if you aren't very very careful. Cooking and baking was added as a bit of a curve-ball, because it is both a male-identified and female-identified activity under various lights. But this gets into the whole messy subject of normalizing gender identification of activities, which is perhaps best avoided. As is the characterization of Millennials, or superficial analysis of the impact of single parent environments. At the very least, all much deeper waters than I have time to get into here. In short: growing up with a table-saw in the basement is a terribly proxy for masculine involvement in that childhood, today. Thinking about it in those terms is self defeating, and undermines whatever value defining "masculine" activities in this context may have (which is a whole other can of worms).

true_religion 10y ago

I am extremely suspicious of your sudden switch to calling out black single-parents as the doom of masculinity. I'm further more extremely cautious of any approach that wants to talk solely about harm done to men, due to losing 'traditional' masculine hobbies, but not talk about the similar near total loss of 'feminine' hobbies and the cottage industry that widely drove revenue for stay-at-home mothers.

ska 10y ago
I tried to entirely sidestep this, but you are probably right to call it out this way. I wasn't sure if it was just awkwardly unintentionally worded, or a bit of semaphore for a load of unpleasant nonsense - so wanted to calling it the latter and burying any discourse about the potentially interesting issue of the perception vs. reality of "masculine roles" (and if that even makes sense).
- true_religion 10y ago
  I had wanted to give the benefit of the doubt as well, because as another poster suggested---there is a grain of truth within his statements. Then I remembered that 'grain of truth' is how these sort of philosophies continue to survive, and insinuate themselves into common discourse. So I am ignoring that single grain an focusing on the rotten conclusions that veer too closely to the sort of rhetorical landmines that have historically been damning to society. If you are going to call out a specific ethnic group, or push politically sensitive buttons then you need to bring out arguments with a much higher standard than 'grain of truth'. I hope this isn't too much of a rant, I simply wanted to clarify because usually I am the one helpfully playing devils' advocate but I simply couldn't do so this time.