Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Women in today's society

Via Pharyngula, smallboyonherbike wrote:
My customers often annoy me. They often make me mad, and often I think they are idiots.

However, they seldom make me want to physically assault them.

Today, though, I came very close to hitting someone.

I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says "You can't buy that."

Girl: Why?
Mom: Because it's too big.
Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive.
Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read big books like that. It's too thick. Boys don't like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don't you?

The girl went and put the book away.
My daughter showed me this wonderful cartoon by Shinga in Deviant Art which speaks to this.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ellroon,
I am glad you refrained from striking that person; strangling is more appropriate.
I thought you lived in So Cal USA, not the 19th century.

ellroon said...

If it had been me...I think I would have made some feeble joke and encouraged the mother to get the daughter the book....

Offered to pay or something...

Then jumped over the desk and beat her to a pulp....?

But it wasn't me.

ellroon said...

"When I Was a Boy"? Had to go and google...Thank goodness for Wikipedia!

Anonymous said...

I'll bet Mom was actually freaked out by the word 'pants' in the title.

Gah! Sex! Evil, evil sex talk!! Quick, brain, give me an excuse!

Steve Bates said...

A woman very like the one described turned out to be the perpetrator in an old Dorothy L. Sayers mystery I just read, one of her novels in which Harriet Vane is the protagonist and detective far more than Lord Peter Wimsey. I don't know how that's relevant, but it's very much on my mind.

Sayers was pretty clearly a feminist for her day, and Harriet Vane is pretty clearly her alter ego, unwilling to accept inequality in any relationship with a man. It's amazing that, sixty years later, a real-life mother could still hold such an attitude as the perp held in this novel, but there it is. We have a long way to go.

Has anyone else noticed the increase in the number of sappy, overblown religious books one encounters in bookstores these days? I don't mean serious, introspective texts on theological or moral issues... I mean the kind of things one used to find only on grocery store shelves among the Christian books. I begrudge no one his or her religion, but it certainly seems as if the American mass market for books is rapidly dumbing down. (Am I permitted to criticize really stupid books w/o being considered anti-Christian? Oh. Of course not. How silly of me to ask.)

ellroon said...

'...but it certainly seems as if the American mass market for books is rapidly dumbing down.'

Yes.

And yes, you may criticize really stupid books of any era, at any time. Stupidity is like a fungus and you need to expose it to the air and dose it with bleach.

Loved all the Sayers books, was it Jill Walsh who wrote the last two?...Will go and check...

ellroon said...

Yes, Jill Paton Walsh. I hope she writes more.