Customer Reviews

An Unconventional Family

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book really helped our family to recognize what ..... attitudes we were unknowingly bringing into our home. The Bems' autobiography gives a clear guide to raising non-...., non-homophobic children. Though my husband and I consider ourselves to be feminists, we were really suprised to discover that there was so much more we could do for our children, and good examples we could set for them.

The Bems tried an equal marriage that no one had tried before them. They had no role models, no guide books, only their unconventionally gendered past to lead them into finding a marriage that could suit them both. The idea of equal marriage is an old one these days, but it was a scandal only thirty years ago. The subsequent description of their feminist child raising is a look at how difficult it is not to bring gender stereotypes into the home. The results of this genderless child raising is unique insight into how much freer people become when they are outside the constraints of gender. This autobiography is very enjoyable account of a one of a kind life. I recommend it for anyone curious about other forms of marriage/child raising.

Bem is a pretty cool psychologist who lives her life in a way to test the theories she proposed. It really helps those who want to raise their kids in a non-sexist and gender aschematic way to gain more insights of the practical issues in doing that. I really appreciated that being a researcher Bem was able to share her personal life to others so as to illustrate the gender related problems and struggles in our society.

Fascinating look at gender issues in child rearing. Well worth the time, plus engrossing and entertaining.

While this book may have its flaws (I wish its sense of narrative were richer, for example), it hardly warrants the snotty, ad homi/homonem attack by Gender...Gender Troubled strikes me as one of those "scholars"...who will never forgive him/herself for growing up in a bourgeois family and who keeps saying, "I AM a radical, I AM a radical, I AM a radical." Bad manners and purple prose do not a radical critique make. Go get another piercing--perhaps that will make you feel more self-righteous, girlfriend (whatever your sex/gender/sexuality/subjectposition may be).

Back in the day, some people figured out that gender is a cultural construction, and that was important. Still is. Some people, or at least one of them, seemed to go from there to gender doesn't matter, if you don't want it to, unless of course you step out of your comfy bubble. Yeah. If you are really gender subversive, like Ms. Bem, then gender suddenly doesn't have to affect you, you can just be who you are and you can raise your kids like that. When they go to school and the unenlightened lumpen proletariat make "uneducated" and "prejudiced" comments such as expressing confusion that a boy's wearing barrettes, you can just reassure your son that he is superior to the masses, although not because he's living an upper middle class white academic sheltered lifestyle with a (pink) backpack full of privilege, but rather because culture is dumb.
I also enjoyed the security of knowing that, although gender is a construction, biological sex sure isn't. That's Science. And while cultural constructions are dumb, Scientific ones are important. THerefore, while your son sure is a boy, what a boy is can be whatever he wants--except, barrettes aside, a girl. Girls and boys are biologically determined. Cultural signifiers, which mislead the bamboozled and ungifted masses into believing that they actually signify, are in fact completely irrelevant when you can step into An Unconventional Family and just take off those lenses of gender. Give your eyes a rest. Let your brain float free from reality, lock your door and forescorn the people who feel that gender constantly impacts their life whether or not they want it to. Really, it's just their lack of imagination and Science when they are confronted by society's concrete barriers to eliminating gender from your life.
Also, someone missed the pomo boat, and that, apart from the evident theoretical problems raised by Bem's "reify oldetyme stereotypes, knock em down, and then advocate a lifestyle based on an attitude adjustment", more than just a self help strategy, is also only accessible to the privileged few. And completely useless, as well as aesthetically displeasing. I was especially frustrated by the book's second wave tendencies to buy into notions that playing with cultural signifiers is buying into one's own oppression, whereas demonizing them is somehow "subversive". The answer is, of course, Bem's academifrump version of androgyny, which she doesn't seem to realize is just as much of a gendered cultural construction as anything she disses. Also, she should note that "real" gender subversives would be considered, in one way or another, pawns of the patriarchy by her cozy coffee klatch of delensed academics who somehow missed the past thirty years of radical gender theory. However "pro-sex", wacky and transistorized Bem tries to be, she is just as naiively, repressively and uselessly moralizing in her privileged myopia as Catherine McKinnon. Her vision of life outside of the confines of gender is actually just as narrow and paralyzing as that of those explicitly invested in upholding the bianaries she claims to deconstruct. Her ideas for how to build such a shnasty escape fanatsy within one's own home are also actually a blueprint for raising kids unable to cope with or process the rest of the world, let alone construct a productive radical space within it. Thank god if you're a Beminist you have your privilege to protect you as stumbled confusedly through the dumb conventionally gendered world, mixing with the duped masses who believe gender matters, otherwise the ideology would be a recipe for raising a kid who's gonna get [messed] up pretty bad, a kid with elitist mythology and smug retorts to fall back on rather than genuine coping mechanisms.