My 10-year-old daughter, Birdy, is not nice, not exactly. She is deeply kind, profoundly compassionate and, probably, the most ethical person I know — but she will not smile at you unless either she is genuinely glad to see you or you’re telling her a joke that has something scatological for a punch line.
This makes her different from me. Sure, I spent the first half of the ’90s wearing a thrifted suede jacket that I had accessorized with a neon-green sticker across the back, expressing a somewhat negative attitude regarding the patriarchy (let’s just say it’s unprintable here). But even then, I smiled at everyone. Because I wanted everyone to like me. Everyone!
I am a radical, card-carrying feminist, and still I put out smiles indiscriminately, hoping to please not only friends and family but also my son’s orthodontist, the barista who rolls his eyes while I fumble apologetically through my wallet, and the ex-boyfriend who cheated on me. If I had all that energy back — all the hours and neurochemicals and facial musculature I have expended in my wanton pursuit of likedness — I could propel myself to Mars and back. Or, at the very least, write the book “Mars and Back: Gendered Constraints and Wasted Smiling.”
But it is not one thing or another, of course. My mostly pleasant way might get me more freelance work. And friendliness tends to put people at ease — loved ones, neighbors, waitresses — which is a good thing. Plus, smiling probably makes me feel happier, according to all those studies about self-fulfilling emotional prophesies. I know that our sweet-hearted son, who is 13, has always had the experience of niceness being its own reward. What can I do to help? he asks. Please, take mine, he insists, and smiles, and everyone says, “Oh, aren’t you nice!” and “What a lovely young man!” (Or sometimes, because he kind of looks like a girl, “What a lovely young lady!”) But, if I can speak frankly here, you really don’t worry about boys being too nice, do you? He still has the power and privilege of masculinity on his side, so, as far as I’m concerned, the nicer the better.
Birdy is polite in a “Can you please help me find my rain boots?” and “Thank you, I’d love another deviled egg” kind of way. But when strangers talk to her, she is like, “Whatever.” She looks away, scowling. She does not smile or encourage.
I bite my tongue so that I won’t hiss at her to be nice. I tell you this confessionally. Because do I think it is a good idea for girls to engage with zealously leering men, like the creepy guy in the hardware store who is telling her how pretty she is? I do not. “Say thank you to the nice man who wolf-whistled!” “Smile at the frat boy who’s date-raping you!” I want my daughter to be tough, to say no, to waste exactly zero of her God-given energy on the sexual, emotional and psychological demands of lame men — of lame anybodies. I don’t want her to accommodate and please. I don’t want her to wear her good nature like a gemstone, her body like an ornament.
And, currently, she is not in danger. She is decisive and no-nonsense, preferring short hair and soft pants with elastic waistbands. Dresses get in her way, and don’t even get her started on jeans, the snugly revealing allure of which completely mystifies her. She’s the kind of person who donates money to the Animal Welfare Institute and attends assiduously to all the materials they send her, including their dully depressing annual reports, which she keeps in a special folder. Gender stereotypes, among other injustices, infuriate her. “This is so stupid!” she sighs at Target, about the pink rows of dolls and the blue rows of Lego. “Why don’t they just put a penis or a vagina on every toy so you can be completely sure you’re getting the right one?”
She is tender, fierce and passionate — the kind of person who can stroke our pussycat with gentle fingers while she growls at you, her eyebrows a menacing shelf, about bedtime and her plans to avoid it. Even as a 2-year-old, she had the determined wrath and gait of a murderous zombie gnome — and my husband and I grimaced at each other, afraid, over her small and darkly glowering head. She will lift knife and fork, sighing, only if I scold her about eating with all 10 fingers like a caveman, and I have mixed feelings about that.
“She’s very moral,” a friend said recently, and it was not a compliment. She is the kid who can be a pain the neck at a play date, insisting on the rigors of turn-taking, of fair-sharing, of tidying up before the guests vamoose and leave her with an afternoon of mess to deal with. That said, though, she’s got your back. She is a patron saint of babies and animals, of the excluded or teased. “That’s not right,” she’s not afraid to say. “Stop it.”
She is a beautiful kid, but she is also sure and determined in a way that is not exactly pretty. Which is fine, because God help me if that girl ends up smiling through her entire life as if she is waitressing or pole-dancing or apologizing for some vague but enormous infraction, like the very fact of her own existence.
I picture her at the prom in stripy cotton pajamas, eating potato chips with both hands. I picture her slapping a patriarch-damning sticker on her jacket. I picture her running the country, saving the world, being exactly the kind of good bad girl that she knows herself to be. And I think: You go. I think: Fly! I think: Take me with you.
登校拒否の少年は、ご両親に守られていた〜！
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ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
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ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
ゴーヤーはいつまで実をつけるのだろうか。先日最高温度が25度になって急に葉が黄色くなり枯れ始めた〜！
2日前
琉球大学長に、私はOkinawan nativeと自己紹介する英米文学の後輩喜納育江さん！今朝のいいニュース！
3日前
琉球大学長に、私はOkinawan nativeと自己紹介する英米文学の後輩喜納育江さん！今朝のいいニュース！
3日前
少女たちに微笑んでやさしくかわいくあってほしいと願うが、お行儀のいい女性たちはめったに歴史に登場しない？？？←面白い考えだね。
同じパスワードでメールにアクセスできないが、なぜかブログはＯＫのようだ。
Monday 5 August 2013 18.52 BST Last modified on Thursday 22 May 2014 02.51 BST←ちょっと古い記事だ。
In case you missed it, Catherine Newman put the world on notice last week in her New York Times parenting column titled: "I do not want my daughter to be nice".←このコーナーの後ろに貼り付けました。
Newman lamented that despite being a feminist herself, she still "smiles indiscriminately, hoping to please not only friends and family but also my son's orthodontist, the barista who rolls his eyes while I fumble apologetically through my wallet, and the ex-boyfriend who cheated on me". In other words, she just can't seem to get beyond the convention that females should be pretty and sweet in just about every situation.ニューマンは彼女自身フェミニストだが、無差別に微笑んでいるという。友達、家族、息子の歯科矯正医、コーヒーの専門家バリストなど財布を手探りすとき目を回すのだが、そして彼女を裏切った以前の恋人など、みんなに快適に振舞いにこやかに笑う。つまり女性たちはどんな状況でもかわいくてややさしくという常識を超えられそうにないと嘆いている。
This explains why Newman is celebrating her daughter's seeming ignorance of the "nice girl" norm:それゆえにニューマンは彼女の娘の「素敵な少女」の規範を無視するような振る舞いを祝福している。なるほどです。
The column reads like a girls' version of Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" movement, which advocates for females to speak their mind more often. In fact, Newman's piece was endorsed on the Lean In Facebook page with a note encouraging people to read it.女性たちにもっと自らの思いを語るべきだと推奨している。そうですね。Ｌｅａｎ ＩＮも見なければー。
We've heard some of this before. Harvard University historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich popularized the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history" in a 1976 article about the lives of colonial American women. The phrase became a rallying cry and went on to be put on everything from T-shirts to liquor flasks as women tried to break glass ceilings and stereotypes. But journalist Lisa Bloom has also pointed out how easy it is, even for feminists, to start telling little girls how adorable they are instead of asking them about what they're reading and what they think about the world.アメリカの植民地時代に「お行儀のいい女性」は歴史に名を残さないのだった。このコピーはスローガンにまでなったのだね。凄い！少女たちに何を読んでいるの？世界について何を考えているの？と聞く前に少女たちになんと可愛いのだろうと賞賛のことばを発しているとの指摘も面白いー。かなりのコメントがあるようだ。読んでみたい。
What advice do you have for your daughters or little girls that you know? Is it time to stop encouraging them to be cute and nice?可愛いやキュートではなくスマートさが、問われる時代だね。人間としての真摯さと賢明さの時代へ？しかし変わらない現実。経済不況にアメリカの女子大生の愛人志望の記事が踊っていた。
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I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be ‘Nice’
My 10-year-old daughter, Birdy, is not nice, not exactly. She is deeply kind, profoundly compassionate and, probably, the most ethical person I know — but she will not smile at you unless either she is genuinely glad to see you or you’re telling her a joke that has something scatological for a punch line.
This makes her different from me. Sure, I spent the first half of the ’90s wearing a thrifted suede jacket that I had accessorized with a neon-green sticker across the back, expressing a somewhat negative attitude regarding the patriarchy (let’s just say it’s unprintable here). But even then, I smiled at everyone. Because I wanted everyone to like me. Everyone!
I am a radical, card-carrying feminist, and still I put out smiles indiscriminately, hoping to please not only friends and family but also my son’s orthodontist, the barista who rolls his eyes while I fumble apologetically through my wallet, and the ex-boyfriend who cheated on me. If I had all that energy back — all the hours and neurochemicals and facial musculature I have expended in my wanton pursuit of likedness — I could propel myself to Mars and back. Or, at the very least, write the book “Mars and Back: Gendered Constraints and Wasted Smiling.”
But it is not one thing or another, of course. My mostly pleasant way might get me more freelance work. And friendliness tends to put people at ease — loved ones, neighbors, waitresses — which is a good thing. Plus, smiling probably makes me feel happier, according to all those studies about self-fulfilling emotional prophesies. I know that our sweet-hearted son, who is 13, has always had the experience of niceness being its own reward. What can I do to help? he asks. Please, take mine, he insists, and smiles, and everyone says, “Oh, aren’t you nice!” and “What a lovely young man!” (Or sometimes, because he kind of looks like a girl, “What a lovely young lady!”) But, if I can speak frankly here, you really don’t worry about boys being too nice, do you? He still has the power and privilege of masculinity on his side, so, as far as I’m concerned, the nicer the better.
Birdy is polite in a “Can you please help me find my rain boots?” and “Thank you, I’d love another deviled egg” kind of way. But when strangers talk to her, she is like, “Whatever.” She looks away, scowling. She does not smile or encourage.
I bite my tongue so that I won’t hiss at her to be nice. I tell you this confessionally. Because do I think it is a good idea for girls to engage with zealously leering men, like the creepy guy in the hardware store who is telling her how pretty she is? I do not. “Say thank you to the nice man who wolf-whistled!” “Smile at the frat boy who’s date-raping you!” I want my daughter to be tough, to say no, to waste exactly zero of her God-given energy on the sexual, emotional and psychological demands of lame men — of lame anybodies. I don’t want her to accommodate and please. I don’t want her to wear her good nature like a gemstone, her body like an ornament.
And, currently, she is not in danger. She is decisive and no-nonsense, preferring short hair and soft pants with elastic waistbands. Dresses get in her way, and don’t even get her started on jeans, the snugly revealing allure of which completely mystifies her. She’s the kind of person who donates money to the Animal Welfare Institute and attends assiduously to all the materials they send her, including their dully depressing annual reports, which she keeps in a special folder. Gender stereotypes, among other injustices, infuriate her. “This is so stupid!” she sighs at Target, about the pink rows of dolls and the blue rows of Lego. “Why don’t they just put a penis or a vagina on every toy so you can be completely sure you’re getting the right one?”
She is tender, fierce and passionate — the kind of person who can stroke our pussycat with gentle fingers while she growls at you, her eyebrows a menacing shelf, about bedtime and her plans to avoid it. Even as a 2-year-old, she had the determined wrath and gait of a murderous zombie gnome — and my husband and I grimaced at each other, afraid, over her small and darkly glowering head. She will lift knife and fork, sighing, only if I scold her about eating with all 10 fingers like a caveman, and I have mixed feelings about that.
“She’s very moral,” a friend said recently, and it was not a compliment. She is the kid who can be a pain the neck at a play date, insisting on the rigors of turn-taking, of fair-sharing, of tidying up before the guests vamoose and leave her with an afternoon of mess to deal with. That said, though, she’s got your back. She is a patron saint of babies and animals, of the excluded or teased. “That’s not right,” she’s not afraid to say. “Stop it.”
She is a beautiful kid, but she is also sure and determined in a way that is not exactly pretty. Which is fine, because God help me if that girl ends up smiling through her entire life as if she is waitressing or pole-dancing or apologizing for some vague but enormous infraction, like the very fact of her own existence.
I picture her at the prom in stripy cotton pajamas, eating potato chips with both hands. I picture her slapping a patriarch-damning sticker on her jacket. I picture her running the country, saving the world, being exactly the kind of good bad girl that she knows herself to be. And I think: You go. I think: Fly! I think: Take me with you.
Catherine Newman, the author of Waiting for Birdy, writes at www.benandbirdy.blogspot.com.