Guest post: The technology ratchet
Originally a comment by Sastra on Just a bomb party, officer.
why on earth is the “gender reveal” such a big deal?
I had my two kids in the early 80’s, which was just before learning your child’s sex before birth became easier and more popular. Moms my age “wanted to be surprised.” When it started to change, the most common reason we gave to each other was “I want to know what color to paint the nursery” or a similar variation. In other words, decorating.
Many years ago I read a book on the sudden uptake in “labor-saving devices” for housewives back in the early 1900s. The people (men) who created and promoted them saw their major selling point as adding leisure time for ordinary women. A vacuum or washing machine meant the wife could visit, read, go to concerts, join clubs, or volunteer for noble causes. It was like having a maid.
Instead, the ability to do chores more quickly resulted in higher standards of cleanliness. If doing the laundry didn’t take all day, then doing it every day instead of once a week meant you weren’t lazy. The space to be filled simply raised the level of measuring what was already there, and was filled with more of the same. The labor-saving devices ended up making more housework, not less. Human nature.
And it occurs to me that this may have happened when we suddenly began learning sex before birth. Names, then decorating, then more decorating, and clothes, and toys, and books — all more and more divided along the lines of sex. The opportunity to create a sex-based environment lead to increasing elaborations on that theme. Not just a pink wall, but a pink nursery; not just a pink nursery, but a pink sparkle princess castle playhouse nursery. And the little tiger got the same treatment, but with sports and planes. And slowly, over time, the “gender reveal” became more and more important.
And now we’re dealing with young people who insist that their “true” gender is what defines them as human, the very core of who and what they are.
You forgot to say that the original comment was by Sastra.
Good analogy. This is the book–well worth a read.
https://archive.org/details/moreworkformothe00cowa
@guest #2;
That looks like it.
Finding out in advance whether we were having a boy or girl was supposed to make mothering a bit easier. Instead, it’s as if that knowledge made the significance of either option just that much more important, and more important that you found it important. Comparing the ultra feminine pink or uber masculine blue nurseries of today with those in our ignorant past makes the yellow-and green little ducks and smiling flowers look kind of half-hearted.
I don’t think they were half-hearted. I think they had their heart in much more the right place…and their head. For my son (we didn’t know he was a son until moments after his birth when the doctor told us), we prepared a bedroom done in Winnie the Pooh. Painting the walls and painting the characters on the walls was definitely not half hearted. Of course, I wouldn’t have used pink or blue anyway, unless I used pink for a boy and blue for a girl. Just to be contrarian. And to annoy my in-laws.
I painted my daughter’s room and ceiling with realistic sky and clouds. When we sold the house, the realtor convinced my wife to paint beige over it and the 4 wall mural I’d done in the dinning room in order to appeal to that large segment of buyers who apparently are unfamiliar with cans of paint.
I left her closet untouched as I lost interest. Wouldn’t you know it, after closing the new owner told us that they wished we hadn’t painted over the bedroom as they all loved the clouds they found in the closet.
Pliny cannot win.
One of Betty Friedan’s arguments in The Feminine Mystique was the expansion of unnecessary housework.
The gender reveal elaboration seems to coincide with the wedding extravaganzas which have made them such huge, expensive, draining projects including the awful destination weddings – which demand a huge amount of spending and time off from the guests. Also the elaborate stag and hen parties, which were once a quick bash down at your local pub and now are whole weekends away in Dublin and with activities like go-karting and afternoons in spas and the like. Come to think of it, that’s one thing I haven’t missed in lockdown – the hideous stag and hen parties that would raucously invade my city.
I suppose it’s a feature of human society that activities/ceremonies/decorations become more elaborate whether its rococo churches or tattooing and those from a simpler time lament the decadence.
Pliny, #5:
That reminded me of when my eldest daughter, then a 4-year-old, told me that she wanted an ‘iggledy-piggeldy’ bedroom. An easy job, really, to carry the paint over at an angle from the door to the wall, the wall colours over to the ceiling, some of the ceiling colour down to the walls – basically the entire room looked crooked, as though everything was at weird angles.
She absolutely loved it (my wife – not so much), but as family grew and the time came to move on, I swear the estate agent was almost sea-sick when he walked into that room! The poor bugger could barely speak as he grasped the wall for balance.
Sex-specific baby clothes are also rather recent. My father—born in 1924–wore a dress the first few years so his life. My mother-in-law told me that after World War II was when people began caring that baby boys were dressed in masculine garb. When I had a baby in 1968 the government-published baby care pamphlet my congressman sent me suggested items for a layette that was not sex-specific, but today even rattles and baby bottles are gendered. I have felt that part of this may be the industry requiring more purchases when family sizes were decreasing.
latsot @ 1 – damn, thank you – the most important bit.
When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we were sure we didn’t want to know the sex until the day of birth. But the obstetrician’s office had purchased a new sonogram machine that let you see the fetus move in real time, and the doctor loved playing around with it (“They’re so cute,” she said), and so we learned we were having a daughter. Something about learning that made me feel a real connection with the baby, and so in retrospect I was glad to know. It didn’t make much of a difference, except that we had long agreed on a girl’s name but were having trouble finding a boy’s name. We were living in an apartment at the time, so we couldn’t paint the rooms even if we wanted to, and for the first few months she slept in our room. And in any case, neither of us are fans of frilly pink stuff, so we mostly dressed her in blue overalls. That and her short hair made people in the US assume she was a boy; the fact that we didn’t pierce her ears had the same effect in Spain.
With our son we found out because my wife had to have an amniocentesis due to her age. Again, it didn’t make much of a difference. We were living in a two-bedroom townhouse at the time, so he slept in our room for a couple of years and then in his sister’s room. I think that was painted pink because she was going through her most “girly” phase when we moved in.
Eventually we bought a house and each had their own bedroom. No pink or blue in either.
Oddly enough, they’ve never questioned their gender (though I can’t say they’ve escaped the ideology).
Our first three, born in the early eighties, were a surprise. We did have an ultrasound for our daughter, because I was having a terribly difficult pregnancy; but it looked for all the world like photographs of the static you get on de-tuned televisions (or used to, at any rate, when I had televisions). They were still pictures, of course. There wasn’t a lot of processing power available in 1984 and it took several minutes to form a picture, line by line. The operator could have told me she could see the wreck of the Titanic, and I would have been just as able to see anything.
By the time the twins came along, though, nearly nine years later, technology had improved enormously. My father drove my mother and me to the hospital for a scan, and Mum came in with me. I was under strict instructions from the older three – if there was only one baby, they wanted the sex to be a surprise, but if I were expecting more than one, they wanted to know the number and sex. It was amazing to see the two little babies moving around in real time, and thrilling for my Mum. We were able to come away with the information that I was carrying twin boys which was good, because our daughter got over the disappointment of having two more brothers weeks before they were born; and by the time they arrived – six weeks early – they had names and she couldn’t wait to meet them. Didn’t make any difference to the clothing, though. All my older babies had white, and other neutral coloured, clothes. The twins got whatever fitted from a huge sack of preemie clothing my husband managed to score from an ad in the local paper.
The technology ratchet applied to office and professional work as well. When computers became common it didn’t result in us doing more projects, it resulted in us collecting more data, cause it was now easier to do so. Reports got longer and considerable effort is now put into making reports pretty, because it looks lazy not to do so. Instead of a report being a brief summary of the work done, hitting the highlights and saying this is the result and why, we know spend considerable time and effort detailing why the work has been undertaken, the context, the methodology, raw data, predictions, comparative analysis and finally the summary and actions for the client.
From a purely technical standpoint the reports are certainly better, but when I compare it to the work we did 30-40 years ago, we actually spend a smaller percentage of our time on technical work and a greater percentage on presentation of that work.
Rob, not to mention teachers. They used to write out their notes in longhand, and often didn’t change them for years. Now we change them constantly, which might seem better, but a lot of it is more about looking snazzy enough for the kids and not necessarily better information. I spend so much time creating graphics to try to get kids to understand what words mean. And just when I get settled in to just do my job, my boss changes learning management systems, so I spend all my time converting files that won’t copy over, and fixing everything that went wrong, and learning the new system. All of that time could be spent on things that make me a better teacher, but they don’t seem to be interested in better teachers anymore, only teachers who use technology in the classroom. I know some of the teachers do nothing themselves in their classes, it’s all technology. And that technology eats a lot of precious time that could be spent honing teaching skills.
So glad my bloodline ends with me…
This talk about baby clothing colours is all very interesting, but when and why did people decide that sailor suits were appropriate outfits for children? What was that about?
I think it was originally to dress their little boys like their military fathers.
When my daughter was a few weeks short of one year old we spent about ten days in Santa Marta (Colombia). Despite her girlish face, pink clothes, longish hair with a ribbon, etc. people couldn’t believe she wasn’t a boy as her ears were not pierced. Ears are apparently the main indicator of sex in Colombia.
My Y chromosome will die with me. My great-grandfather has about 105 known descendants, but I’m the only one with his Y chromosome, and I have only daughters, no sons. I can’t say that I lie awake at night worrying about it.
Catwhisperer, #16. If memory serves, it was a fashion that began with various European royal familes, the ones populated by the offspring of Queen Victoria, early last century. Virtually every ‘informal’ royal photoshoot had at least one of the little princes in a sailor costume, and it caught on with the middle classes. It probably fell out of fashion with them with the advent of cheap, mass-produced outfits that the working-classes could afford. Can’t be dressing junior like the plebs.
@ Catwhisperer – they were popular during Edwardian times when there was a naval arms race between Britain and Germany. The slogan “We want eight and we won’t wait” was a slogan coined by a Conservative MP which caught on – the “eight” being the Dreadnought surface warships that were thought necessary to maintain British superiority.
Thanks for the answers everyone. Now I’ve done a bit of googling I find that I have a new question (I don’t expect answers!) What was the alternative to a sailor suit? It seems that they were popular because they were loose-fitting, practical and comfortable compared to… whatever else they might have worn. I’ve seen breeches mentioned, but nothing else. Popular for girls, too (Yay, unisex clothing!). I suppose I’m still baffled that the sailor-suit-as-child-clothing just won’t disappear. After all, breeches don’t keep coming back. Nor do we dress children in air force flightsuits. I suppose “people are weird” covers it.
Hm, interesting. I wonder if it’s because the sailor aspect is something children can share and identify with? Messing about with boats, you know. Swallows and Amazons and its sequels. It’s not as purely war-invoking as playing army grunt would be. Adults dress a little like sailors at times too – those striped sweaters and jerseys, and/or canvas trousers.