We try, well, not hard, to be pretty gender-neutral when it comes to the kids. We don’t ignore the fact that the kids are biologically different, but we at least keep the culturally-gendered pseudo-differences in suspicious view, and knowing is half the battle. (Go Joe!)
I introduced both Erin and Adrian to hockey early on, trying to overcome my own sexist cultural upbringing that witnessed all the boys in southeastern Ontario being firmly convinced that girls can’t play hockey unless it’s on grass and if they wanted to skate they could play ringette but leave the boys alone with their solid pucks and sticks with blades. My efforts have proven a bit of a failure. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Erin barely notices when hockey is on and her dad would like to watch it so please please please stop asking him to put Little Einsteins on the TV; it’s the playoffs. Adrian, on the other hand, cranes his neck around corners to try to see if the Wings can toughen up a bit on the goddamned power play and keep those goals from going in. (They can’t.) I’m not one to conclude dramatic genetic differences between the sexes based on interest in hockey…but it sure seems like the male Y chromosome is doing some work here, doesn’t it? Oh look…there it is….at the end of “H-O-C-K-E-Y”. I knew it. I knew that our Intelligent Designer was working miracles when he programmed that little bit of DNA to evolve into a Y the way He did in monkeys back on the sixth day. It’s meaningful. There’s no X in hockey, so girls don’t like it. They like xylophones and Extra! and Sweet Valley Hixgh books.
Boys also like trains. I have the video evidence to prove it.
Ignore the little girl in the row in front of him who seems to be enjoying the train as well. That’s just an illusion. Based on the theory that trains are boy-things it is impossible that the little girl is actually having fun. I bet it’s a Hollywood trick. Only boys like trains.
(Editor’s Note: Have you ever just had an adorable video to show off and not known how to intro it so you just keep typing and typing and typing and it stops being funny and slips into weird and then you have to write an explanation about it that also slips into weird as it drags on and you don’t know how to stop and so you just keeping typing and typing but this time all in italics? Look! Bunnies!)