the-radical-buzzard-of-discourse:

thou8hts-and-ideas:

floralsbian:

any space that allows males automatically becomes a male space.

that is why female-only spaces are necessary, thanks

I see this in preschool classrooms. I LOVE that little boys and girls play so well together, most of the time. But if there’s a set of toys out: blocks, lego, cars, finger puppets, role play; something involving construction, testing or making; if the space is “for everyone” the boys will absolutely dominate it. The girls are very capable, and excited to use the materials too, but intentional strategies have to be implemented by their educator to ensure everyone gets a chance. Without intervention these areas inevitably become boy-zones.

If I may add my own experience: A few years ago I had to have surgery at a children’s hospital even though I was 24 because that’s where my surgeon preferred to do operations. Luckily I was by myself pretty much the whole time in recovery (screaming kids are not conducive to a healing environment) but on my last day there they ran out of room and had to bunk me with two little girls. They were perfectly nice though, quietly reading or doing schoolwork or whatever.

So the nurses take the not-too-sick kids to a bigger room for some group playtime, but neither of the little girls seemed thrilled to go. I’d been talking to them for most of the morning so I asked what was wrong. “Then we’d have to hang out with the boys,” one of the girls told me. I was like, “Ah yes, boys are icky, I totally get it.” But turns out that was not the issue.

I ended up getting dragged along with my roomies to the playroom where I see exactly what they meant. Of maybe 15 kids, every single boy, minus one quiet one, was screaming and crying and throwing toys and arguing with their parents. All the girls, on the other hand, are reading, coloring, or watching TV. I get that it’s not always so black and white like that, but it was seriously split right down the middle. Like have you ever seen a cheesy sitcom where the character’s like “Ok, now if everything just stays perfectly calm like this, it’ll be ok!” And then he leaves the room for literally two seconds and returns to find everything on fire? That’s kind of the boy and girl sections of the playroom looked, perfectly fine and then a disaster area.

I wasn’t even thinking in terms of males vs. females at the time; I just saw well-behaved kids vs. loud obnoxious kids, so I asked the nurse on the way back why they didn’t separate the overactive kids from the ones that wanted play nicely. She just sighed and said they used to do that by splitting up boys and girls, but the boys were such rampaging little monsters that having the girls there with them actually seemed to calm them down a bit. The girls, evidently, would just have to make do with babysitting a bunch of brats their own ages.