Here we go again, women and girls being responsible for how men and boys behave.
that’s a good way to put it, it’s victim blaming in a way
It’s quite literally victim blaming. Blaming girls for boys and even adult men from being unable to stop themselves from sexually assaulting them.
American prudishness is weird as fuck.
Europe did ship off their most extreme Christian sects to here
I remember my time as a boy… Back then the rules for us were “whatever dumb shit you’re thinking of doing, fucking don’t!”.
Ever get chased through the fields with the nice, big, beautiful stick you brought back earlier that day? Ever had heavy stuff thrown at you for doing some really dumb shit?
Ever left the home with a deep, resentful glare burning through the back of your skull?It’s difficult to lay down rules for boys because in general, we’re dumb as shit doing dumb shit all the time. So there’s almost always one, unspoken rule for boys: “Just fucking don’t!”
The problem though is that girls are held upon to a higher standard. There are expectations of a higher level of civility and understanding, though undue in my opinion. Some of y’all were as dumb as the rest of us and were treated unfairly due to those higher standards.
But let’s face it, as parents or adults, we all probably tend to have a similar kind of bias towards our own kids. Some of them are dumb as shit and while we worry about them, every time they plan to do something stupid, the inner voice we won’t admit to is saying “please, oh please, just fucking don’t!”. Meanwhile, the kids we worry about less as they know their shit, they have clear, but few specific rules because we believe that’s what they need.
So, in my humble opinion as a formerly dumb boy/kid, the lack of written rules more likely means there are too many, unpredictable rules that have to be managed proactively.
Btw, unrelated question, has anyone managed to get squirrels drunk in those camps of yours? I know it was on a to-do list at one point…
None of that is “rules for boys” though. They apply to all kids. If a girl is acting rambunctious, she’ll get told to stop too. Often for behavior the boys don’t even get called out for because, as you said yourself, girls are held to a higher standard of civility.
I remember being kids and an adult ruined our fun game of throwing spears at each other.
Ever left the home with a deep, resentful glare burning through the back of your skull?
Yes, but that’s on trauma, not on weird social rules on genders. (I’m a woman.)
I don’t really understand how what you’ve written relates to boys being allowed to wear white shirts, but not girls.
I assume they’re responding to the end of the meme that says “Where are the boys’ rules?” - these are the boys rules - “just don’t”, basically
these are the boys’ rules.
No rules about femboys though? I see a loophole here.
Maybe don’t refer to femboys when talking about 12 year olds?
Being a femboy isn’t inherently sexual.
Americans when they learn that cross-dressing isn’t considered adult only in other places. Sure you have RuPaul’s drag race which is very sexualised, but that isn’t the only type of cross-dressing that exists.
Also the rules listed are actually sexualising girls. I would rather mock the rules instead. The femboys are not the problem here.
Honestly, I blame the history of the word and its relation to slurs for trans women. Femboy, trap, and multiple others started as words to describe trans women as actually just being a gay man trying to trick straight men into having sex with them by pretending to be a woman.
I’m glad to see that they’ve evolved beyond that into a very fun way for men to play and express themselves outside of the arbitrary gender binary, but I totally understand the gut reaction of basically “femboy = twink with extra steps.”
Well fuck, when you’re right you’re right.
Just kind of a gut reaction, as that’s how the world treats them, but that’s not really fair.
<3
Genuinely wonder how they’d react to a boy showing up in a two-piece like some kind of gacha femboy.
Like similar to a girls’ two piece? A speedo and crop top? I bet there’d be a new rule next year.
Just normal trunks and a swim shirt? Probably nothing said at all. Though to be fair I bet if a girl showed up in swim trunks and a swim shirt not a word would be said either, but I could be wrong on that.
Just in case the President of the United States wanders into camp.
As someone who was abused, it’s always the girl’s fault. Just existing is enough. This is especially reinforced in Christian and camp circles, because one of the first stories you learn is all sin started with Eve, and women are why we’re all damned.
Men are tempted, women are tempters – that’s how it’s always been.
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I just love wearing a wool full-body suit in the water. That wet sock feeling all over my body, down to my calves, is just chef’s kiss.
This just reminded me of the “self-defense training for girls” we had in 8th or 9th grade. It boiled down to “Every man potentially wants to hurt you.” Someone walking behind you? Turn around and yell at them to stop it. A man standing too close to you? Yell “Back off”.
Of course the situations were all mundane and it was pretty clear you couldn’t just yell at or confront any man that comes within ~3 meters of you. So all that “training” did was give me the uneasy feeling that if something happened, it would be my fault. I didn’t preemptively yell at the man within the first few seconds of seeing him.
This is for a kids summer camp? Who is the no white T-shirt rule for, the camp staff?
Can’t be tempting the paedos that run the place, can we?
It’s for the pubescent kids. Why wouldn’t it be?
What are the enbies allowed or not allowed to wear?
NSFL joke
in America enbies go to a different camp
Oof
yeah, I probably shouldn’t have written that, but it’s on the mind I guess
Nono, this was an oof of appreciation.
You’re either laughing or you’re crying. :D
definitely crying, and also planning my escape routes
damn rare w in a deportation case and for Canada. seems like Canada is mostly trying to still be america-lite and this is a good bit of not-that
Nah, it was fantastic.
That typo is hilarious.
EDIT: Not you, OP. In the article itself.
what typo?
EDIT: I still can’t find the typo, in the article 😭
EDIT2: I see your screenshot, but I still don’t see the typo in the text of that screenshot - maybe you could cirlce it in red or otherwise communicate which part is the typo, maybe I’m like the dumbest person in the world 😅
Oooh snap, I feel that.
the scary thing is that those rules were probably put in place because of the grown up councillors 🤢
These rules sound like the intention is to not enforce stereotypical sex roles.
Not saying I agree this is the right approach. I think people should be able to wear anything they like.
aren’t they modesty rules that perpetuate the idea that girls’ bodies are sexual while boys’ bodies are not?
I get the feeling that the intention is to use clothing to make both sexes plain and put them on the same level. Like, not lean in to societys expectation that women should wear sexy stuff. But I guess your takeaway is just as valid.
Perhaps they should have included some clothing guidelines for boys too.
right, but saying that exposes your thinking that girls are inherently sexual and require clothing modifications to make them “plain” and “equal” to boys - this is the same mindset of modesty and sexualization of girls that the OOP is calling out, the whole point is that it doesn’t have to be this way, it’s a social norm but you’re treating it like it’s natural
We don’t need clothing guidelines and modesty for boys, we need to not sexualize girls and then impose modesty guidelines to moderate that sexualization.
We might have fundamentally different views on how we see people around us.
I think as humans, we are sexual beings. Men are conventionally drawn to women and vice versa. 12 year old boys and girls may or may not be awaken to that. I’d say chances are that they are. And they like to copy people older than them.
I’d say sexuality is about as natural as it gets. Unless you are cloning yourself, it is a deeply ingrained characteristic and behavior of any species. And it is not a perfectly symmetric affair.
I think clothing choice can help enhance a persons sexual characteristics. Society is perpetuating the norm that women and girls should wear a specific set of clothing. Biased toward the sexual characteristic enhancing options. Why this is, can be discussed in perpetuity by intellectuals.
The organizers have a choice to let people dress ass they wish, which includes anything society perpetuates as normal. Or they could, as in this case, try to change the norm, if only temporarily. I don’t know if the organizers approach helps in any way. As I said earlier, I think personal agency weighs heavier. It’s possible they are just trying to address some specific problems that happened in the past. And are not taking any stance on gender norm issues.
Solutions: If we agree that clothing is a variable in sexualizing the wearer and we want to stop the sexualization of girls; one option is to change the mind of our entire society and somehow make people unified in what they want to wear, just to influence younger people in the same direction. Sounds hard to me.
I agree, that we should avoid sexualizing girls and boys. And I agree that we should moderate bad behavior. I believe this should be done through quality education. I think the asymmetry of how one sex is more sexualized than the other, is a very hard problem to solve.
to be honest, I think we probably share fundamental views on how we see people around us - the difference is in how I relate to and understand my views
You have naturalized sexism, you think because humans are naturally sexual beings that the situation of girls being sexualized is natural too.
I don’t disagree that humans are generally sexual creatures (though obviously asexual people exist as well), and I agree also that children have sexualities - but we are talking about why girls have a bunch of extra rules like not being able to wear white shirts, not being able to wear two-piece bathing suits, and requirements of wearing shorts … this isn’t just because humans are naturally sexual, this is because in our society we see boys as wanting sex, and as girls as having the sex that the boys seek.
The rules are seen as protecting the girls from the boys, which positions girls as sexual prey and boys as sexual predators. It views girls as having a virginity that must be protected.
Even within this view, the idea that the solution is to police the girls puts the responsibility on the girls for the boy’s perceived predatory behavior.
Why is sexuality “bad behavior”? And if we agree it’s bad, why do the rules focus on regulating the girls, why not have rules that regulate the inappropriate behavior of the boys instead?
And of course you’re right that the asymmetry of how girls are sexualized and viewed as prey from whom boys “take” sex is a very hard problem to solve, not a problem we will solve individually or in our life times, but big cultural problems have shifted before - we used to not think of women as human at all, Aristotle posited that women were malformed, defective men who were unable to wield their will and require a man as a master to control them for their own good. Hegel opined that women are essentially like plants, whereas men properly belong as animals. Women were excluded as belonging to “humanity” in the ways Enlightenment thinkers articulated it, and were structurally treated as subhuman - unable to vote, own property, etc.
It’s only very recently that in the West women were permitted to get an education or have a job, these were huge cultural shifts that occurred due to feminist activism, including violent campaigns of bombings and arsons by suffragettes.
Despite the progress made, there is much more work to do - and the feminist movement is far from reaching the gender egalitarianism it aims for. One of the problems that stand in the way is the continued belief that our socially arbitrary and sexist norms are actually entirely natural (something Aristotle said about his views of women, too - mind you, his views on women were explained through biology, as were the dismissals of women experiencing PTSD from sexual trauma as “hysteria”).
If you wanted more to read on this topic, I recommend Julia Serano’s Sexed Up for the way it analyzes both the gender binary and the predator / prey mindset.
Maybe?
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