Question.

[postingwhore]

This is something I've been thinking about lately.

Was your socialization gendered in a traditional manner?Looking back, I believe the socialization I received during my formative years was very traditionally male. I was taught to be ambitious and assertive, to expect nothing less than the best, to take leadership whenever necessary, to go for

Comments

[edmondia]

That's an interesting thing to think about. I know that part of the reason that I was adopted was that my mother wanted to have a little girl, and this was excessively clear in my younger years - I had a collection of designer dresses that you would not believe a five-year-old should have - but I hated them with a burning passion, and eventually she just kind of shrugged and gave up on that, especially when I kept wrecking them while playing with my brothers. (Eleven and nine years older than me, but surprisingly willing to play with a sproglet who followed them everywhere. We climbed a lot of dirt piles, had a lot of snowball fights, and slaughtered G.I. Joes with a B.B. gun. I got to set them up in their respective camps on each side of the yard, not do the shooting. :P)

This was kind of weird since I was completely not socialized in a traditional feminine manner - my mom took me to a ballet class for a day, I hated it, and then she switched me over to tae kwon doe without any fuss. Aside from that, though, I would call my socialization traditionally male, although I have never particularly thought about it in those terms, as I was raised to believe that ambition and self-assertion were universally a good thing, that any type of work was just work, and that gender had absolutely nothing to do with success in life. So aside from mom's attempts to make me like dresses, I wouldn't really call myself raised in any particularly gendered manner.