Thanksgiving: a time to gather with people you love, and try to remember why.
As we gather with our families around tables groaning with food, we’re going to hear things that would have sounded retrograde in the 50s, and as we enact cultural rituals, we’re going to see roles played out that would make Victorians facepalm.
So, what’s the most impressive bit of Thanksgiving gender enforcement you’ve seen this year? Twenty people in the house, ten women in the kitchen and ten men watching a football game? Your grandma insisting that in her day the sissy-boys were quiet and polite, not like today? Your little cousin being shooed out of the kitchen because cooking isn’t for boys? A long debate over dessert about how lesbian marriage is hot but gay marriage is totally queer?
I’m just making these up from stuff I’ve heard; I’m spending today with a girlfriend, a wolf, and a dense, complicated German dish. Seeing the surviving portions of my family tomorrow. I’m sure people’s real experiences can top these hypotheticals.
Alternately, what pleasant gender surprises have you encountered this year? Grandpa understands trans issues on the first pass? Mixed-gender touch football on the lawn? Gay uncles and fundamentalist aunts getting along great?
OMFG, wolf! <3 Noah, you have the awesomest pet ever. :3
Dare I ask what a wolf was doing at your thanksgiving, or was that a metaphor or surname?
@SonofRyan: House pet.
She’s our little cuddlebutt. 🙂
Up until a couple of years ago, we had every Christmas dinner at my grandparents’ house.
Granma did everything in the kitchen, and was vehemently rejecting help of any kind, except for occassionally bringing a pot or a plate to the table.
Nowadays we spend christmas at the parents’, with my brother-in-law (family man with 3 kids) and me doing most of the cooking.
Macronutrient dense foods, I mean… i.e. high calorie.
My brother in law always does the cooking and my sister and I do the cleaning. Gender doesn’t matter to us, we all help out for family meals…..the bonus here is that he spent time in a bakery and makes freakin’ awesome cakes. 😀
I hope everyone had a great holiday. 🙂
My parents gender food. I have no idea why. It’s the strangest damn thing I’ve ever heard, as I realized when I started to pay attention to it. Dad’s more vocal, claiming that, um, vegetables are girl food, which is typical enough (see: Herman Cain), but that Fritos and Slim Jims are guy food. Because guys hate their arteries. The fact that he has several daughters who consider these overprocessed snacks to be obnoxiously delicious does nothing to deter him, and every time a female eats vegetables around him, we hear about it. He’s normally a perfectly reasonable guy and… Read more »
@badandfierce
To be sure, there is a correlation between hormone levels and metabolism, and higher metabolisms predispose one to crave more nutrient dense foods, but yeah, I like carrots and beef jerky, both… though I have been trying to focus a little more on the carrots, with little success.
It’s funny, my parents are/were both total black sheep to their families – both chose to be self-employed classical musicians, whereas the Family (on both sides) was comprised of doctors, nurses, bankers, flight attendants, etc. You know, nice white-collar middle-class types, none of this bohemian hippie crap. The family on BOTH sides is the sort of Ordinary WASP you see on TV and nowhere else. So while I was raised totally non-denominational, non-gender conformist, non-standard in a small hippie/yuppie/blue-collar mixed community and thus rarely have to correct my parents on things the Big Family Gatherings can be…trying. It’s almost never… Read more »
@Schala: I was thinking recently about the gendering of sports and realized that in the main, the sports that are socially acceptable for girls/women to play in the US are the ones, by and large, that are viewed as middle/upper-middle class by non-hispanic whites: soccer, rugby, tennis, golf, field hockey, softball (considering how ubiquitous it is in corporate America, I’d say it qualifies a middle/upper-middle class variant of baseball, which has a decidedly dowdier class background). The only one that bucks this trend, really, is basketball, but I’ve seen a whole lot more people questioning the femininity of female basketball… Read more »
Oh and, to Europe, Association Football is manly, not a girly sport or a ‘sport for tomboys’.
Fun fact: American football is a derivative of association football (aka soccer) from the mid 1800s. It (the American football one) was about Harvard and the likes inter-university competition, and they changed the rules so much that it became what it is today. Originally, it was more like rugby is now in Europe. Rugby is also a derivative of association football. So the US care about American Football and treat Soccer as a fringe sport that isn’t manly enough (somehow it became associated with lesbian or tomboy girls). And Europe cares about their own Football (soccer to the US) and… Read more »
At this time of the year, I always have to give thanks for my parents, true and subtle Gender Warriors who have each supported and subsidized the other’s major career change over the years, both love to cook, and raised my brother and I to have a love of both the kitchen-y and the football-focused bits of Thanksgiving tradition. Especially my Dad who is such a joy in the way that he is his own man without apologizing for any of the ways he doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the family’s ideas about masculinity. Mom explained the first… Read more »
Nope, but I am planning to crash next Christmas. :3
According to my sister, at gatherings on my mother’s side of the family, according to my mom, I apparently have never transitioned, i.e. am still [boyname] and she speaks with me from time to time. So yeah, I’ve been cut out of my family by one person who is ashamed of me.
This is two years and three months since I came out to her, by the way.
Oh and the clincher? This is as conservative and christian a family as you’ll find.
Gender enforcement in my family… lessee… 1) My stepdad is in the kitchen making stuffing and dressing and mixing drinks along with my aunt and grandmother… the aunt having no business being in the kitchen. 2) My mom and my other aunt are talking about things in Forbes magazine and business investments with one of my uncles. 3) My uncle is working with the kids, building lego structures with them and generally policing their activities to keep them from getting too rambunxious and hurting themselves. 4) I am watching football with my grandfather, everyone keeps trying to engage me in… Read more »
Not a lot of gender enforcement at my Thanksgiving (myself, my mom, my stepdad, and my grandmother were present). As usual, my stepdad (otherwise fairly conservative and stereotypically masculine, though he has gotten into chainsaw carving of late) did most of the cooking (with my mom contributing a pie). When the football started on the DVR (pro-tip: if you don’t start the Detroit game until about 2 hours after scheduled kickoff, you can go through the Detroit and Dallas games without watching a commercial; you’d have to start Detroit about 4 hours late to accomplish the same feat but with… Read more »
No thankgiving here, but just this last week I heard the heartwarming tale of all of my Dad’s stereotypes exploding at once,
My youngest sister is going out with a guy with two mothers, and much to my surprise my Dad expressed a rather homophobic attitude. Last week, he met them and enthusiastically commented later about how welcoming they were and how they were just like a regular married couple. Didn’t expect him to be homophobic in the first place (he’s the person who taught me to be open minded about people), so hooray for experience shattering stereotypes and assumptions!
It’s amazing, but there was no gender enforcement routine at my family things. There was a lot of “work is important”, but that’s coming from people who view work as their lifelong goal. I played with toy kitchen sets with my female cousins when I was a kid, no one cared as far as I remember. Played house too, not certain how I played. This was during birthdays and during Christmas stuff where lots of people were around. By the time I was 18, people had given up on me ever bringing in a new generation of kids. I was… Read more »
I’m in New Zealand so we don’t do the thanksgiving thing, but I’ll chime in with my most dreaded gender enforcement routine which comes up regularly at family things: Female relative: So, when are YOU going to start having babies? [Because my younger sister has a baby and my older sister is pregnant.] Me [24 years old and female]: Probably never. Everyone in room: What!? Never? Why? Oh come on, you’ll change your mind. [Thrusting baby in my face] look how cute he is! Don’t you think you’ll regret it? Don’t you think it’s the reason we’re here? Your biological… Read more »
The two men did almost all the cooking, gossiping, dancing, and drinking… mostly because the two women both had to work the next morning. Best holiday ever.
My holidays are now all about making sure my daughters don’t destroy the house we are visiting.
I don’t help out in the kitchen, although I never really thought it was about gender. The thing is, my mother turns into an unbearable brute, shouting out orders and getting angry at everything everyone else is doing wrong, basically using anyone whose there to amplify her yearly freak-out fest. She’s only nice if my girlfriend is around, who then lectures me about how to be a better son. I swear it’s diabolical. Then I spend the rest of the weekend doing heavy yard work, pulling tree stumps and readying my mother’s rather extensive vegetable garden for the winter while… Read more »
Spent Thanksgiving with my (adult) son and my husband (not his father). Years ago, my son told me how grateful he was that I raised him without bigotry, religion, or sexism. He extrapolated from “no sexism” to “no gender fuckedupness” himself. My husband was that way when I found him, and two years later, I married him. I’m very thankful.
As AB said, we don’t celebrate thanksgiving over here (I seem to have gathered you’re from the UK AB? Please do correct me if I’m wrong). But this does make me think of other family gatherings I’ve been to. A couple of years ago it was my cousin’s wedding, and when we all found our seats from the table map, all the women had little boxes of chocolates and all the men had little bottles of booze. I found the whole event incredibly bizzare.
I recognize all those things Noah lists more from other people’s stories than from anything I ever saw in the 50s or 60s. In my dad’s family my grandfather always roasted the turkey both at thanksgiving and at Christmas. I always thought it was simple praticality since he was stronger than my grandmother and lifting a turkey around can put a real hurt on you, but in later years my dad said no, he just liked cooking. Apparently his soda bread was especially good. But we always had dinner with my mom’s side and there too the kitchen work was… Read more »
I spend last night with my roommates. And yes, the two girls did all the cooking aside from one amazing Caribbean dish that a friend of ours from Queens made and brought. Back home, though, we’re all pretty liberal. Everyone’s a cook in that family– a 12 year old boy cousin got an easy bake oven for xmas a few years back, and the dudes are generally in the kitchen as often as the women are. The 3 younger boys of another cousin are all being raised with the belief that boys that like boys and girls that like girls… Read more »