The G.I. Joe vs Barbie Rule

There is this age old stigma that I have always hated. I came to hate it as a child, because I liked Barbies, dolls, and cuddly, stuffed toys. My uncle came over one day, saw my collection of stuffed animals and characters, and told my mother she was going to “turn me funny” if she let me continue having “this girly stuff”. Well, I grew up, I like to think I am quite funny sometimes, but I am not gay. It isn’t for lack of being exposed to the gay community, either. My home away from home in Fort Smith, Arkansas is a “gay” bar. It’s one of my favourite places to be (Kinkead’s, 1004 1/2 Garrison Avenue, should you be curious). The owner Rick Eubank and many of the staff and patrons have fed, clothed, and helped keep a roof over the heads of me and mine for a long time, when the going gets rough. I remain straight. That’s a story for another time, but it brings to bear this stigma. Gender roles and what genders are “allowed” to like, do, and what hobbies they can have.

Gender roles, as defined by Amy M. Blackstone in her 2003 contribution to the text Human Ecology: An Encyclopedia of Children, Families, Communities, and Environments, are:  “based on the different expectations that individuals, groups, and societies have of individuals based on their sex and based on each society’s values and beliefs about gender.”  I like to call it the G.I. Joe versus Barbie Rule.

Boys are allowed to play with the masculine, chisel-jawed, muscular war heroes, while girls play with the feminine, makeup’d, perfect-bodied party girls. That’s just how it is, right? I mean, them’s the rules. Not in my playbook, kids!

This whole thing is brought up because of a Facebook post a friend of mine from college posted. I’m going to add it here, her name blocked out to protect her anonymity.

Should we still wonder why, “There are never girls in the comic/gaming/card/video game store?” Not really.

As I write this, my wife sits on our bed, furiously battling something in Fallout 4 as a few soft curses float out of our bedroom area. She loves shooters and RPGs. She likes RPGs that let you shoot stuff best. If you asked her, and she can correct me here if I am wrong, she’d say her favourite games are the Dead Island series, and that, she IS buying the Dead Island Definitive Collection when it comes out, and she IS going to beat both games for the 437928364th time. Because they are remastered, they are good, and you discover something new every time you play. I don’t really replay games, unless those games are Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, the Pokémon franchise, the Legend of Zelda franchise, or Red Dead Redemption… Okay, so I do replay games, Brooke. I lied. Also, gender stereotypes PISS ME OFF. No, G.I. Joes are not “boy toys”! No, Barbies are not “girls toys”. No, tabletop gaming, Magic: The Gathering, and First Person Shooters aren’t just for guys! AM I LIVING IN THE NINE! TEEN! SIXTIES!!!! It makes me feel like I am going to have an aneurism, guys. It really frakking does. My wife is a gamer, I have a TON of female friends that are just as into tabletop games, TCGs, and comics as you are! This is not some elite club that only the boys can belong to, and I’m sick to death of hearing about this.

So, I am going to speak to a stereotype right now. This will likely cause me to lose all credibility, but, since I belong to this group, I think I’m allowed to address it. It’s like using a racial slur, it’s perfectly acceptable if you do it to your own group, right? WRONG!!!!!! This is a conundroquaglimma, and I probably shouldn’t point this at one group, but, it seems to ALWAYS be this group that is at fault in these situations. Howver it reflects on me, I am now going to address males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Usually heterosexual. Usually uncaring about how a woman feels when walking into one of our geeked-out “man dens”:

Look, guys. MOST of you like girls. By “like girls”, I mean, sexually. As someone with which you wish to woo, court, and ultimately copulate (HOPEFULLY after mutual consent is given!!!!). If you would treat them as equals, not better or worse, but as true equals, THEY WILL COME AROUND MORE! If you talk to them, I guarantee they are more than the sum of their boobies and badonkadonks. They are actual living, breathing, sentient creatures that might like the same things you like, and, if you are decent and play your cards right, might share those things with you for a long time to come. Yes, and they might even make out with you sometimes, if that’s what you both want, but NEVER during good movies or television shows. Making out is for a time when Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, and Marvel/Star Wars/Kevin Smith movies are not on. Also, be quiet about it if you’re gonna do it in the movie theatre. Nothing ruins The Hateful Eight like the sound of someone sucking face two rows back… Maybe that was The Martian… No, that one was people scoffing at my group laughing so hard at the science jokes… I digress.

Ladies and gents, please just stop putting labels, especially gender labels, on everything. If your son wants to play with baby dolls, let him, it could teach him to be a better dad. If your daughter wants to play with Tonka Toys in the dirt, let her, she could learn that women are as viable as labourers as men! If a young woman wants to play Magic: The Gathering, let her, Card Shop Dude. That’s money in your pocket you just sexism’d your way out of, ya idjit!

It’s like we wanna slap these little guys on everything and put existence into a neat little box…

Existence doesn’t fit into a neat little box, folks. It is terrible, wonderful, scary, beautiful, chaos. Every human being, regardless of race, gender, education, creed, origin, subset, label, or hair color, is different. That is beautiful. So let it be, and stop trying to make others fit YOUR expectations of the world, mmmkay?

Featured photo credit goes to Emerald-Stock from deviantart.com (http://emerald-stock.deviantart.com/)

Correct citation for Amy M. Blackstone’s work:
Blackstone, Amy. 2003. “Gender Roles and Society.” Pp 335-338 in Human Ecology: An             Encyclopedia of Children, Families, Communities, and Environments, edited by Julia R.       Miller, Richard M. Lerner, and Lawrence B. Schiamberg. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.         ISBN I-57607-852-3

Of Humans and Gorillas

There has been a lot of talk. People have become overnight zoologists. Actual experts and zoologists have been ignored. Then, there is the question of why we have zoos anyway. That’s what I want to talk more about than anything else, in this post. Welcome back to my brain, guys. Been a while.

So, everyone is on one side or the other since the news broke that  Isiah Dickerson decided he’d go for a swim-n-cuddle with the Western Lowland Gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo. The one side, staunch animal lovers and activists that blame the zoo, its administration, the mother, God, Zeus, the Eleventh Doctor, and Trump for the death of Harambe. The other side blame animal activists, the zoo, its administration, children (In general, any child…), Tommy Pickles, atheists, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, and Obama. I may have exaggerated a bit here, but now you know the two sides we’re dealing with.

As per usual, I fall somewhere in the confused middle. In a place occupied by God-fearing scientists, spiritual anti-theists, and people who just don’t like labels. Let’s get my views on the whole situation out of the way via bullet points.

• Is the mother to blame at all?
  Of course she is, her frakking kid fell fifteen feet into the enclosure of some wild animals. What do I know about watching kids, though? I’ve never had any.  I’ve SURELY never watched any. More than a dozen. I do know that, when at zoos, everyone in my family always makes sure – especially when their child mentions wanting to go swimming with the freakishly strong, four-hundred pound primates – that they hang on to their kids that are likely not old enough to hang on to themselves. That, again, is only opinion that I am not entitled to, since I don’t have a child, after all. I do have a pug. I know I don’t let her off the leash because she likes to play in roads and run head on at cars, but, that’s not a fair comparison because you auto-magically become exempt from responsibility of your offspring’s actions when you have said offspring. Or something.
• Should the zookeepers have killed Harambe?
  On the one hand, I saw the gorilla protecting the kid. On the other hand, I put my little niece in that situation in my head, I jumped down the fifteen feet myself, and I Tarzan vs Kerchack’d that damn dirty ape.
  Emotions aside, with sheer Vulcan logics, yes. When Jack Hannah says they had to cap Harambe to save the kid because tranquilizers would have just upset him, I accept the fact that there are now only ~94,999 Western Lowland Gorillas in the world. I also accept the fact that Harambe was allegedly on loan from Zoo Miami, and somebody gon’ sue somebody.
• Should zoos exist?
  Isn’t this a loaded question? I think to an extent yes “zoos” of a kind are essential, as they often currently exist, not so much.
  There HAS to be a conservation effort for Western Lowlands. Their population, based on VERY outdated and mis-collected data (According to the IUCN Red List here: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/9406/0) is ~95,000 individuals, in captivity and the wild. That figure is dropping every day, and has no doubt been dropping since that figure was collected based upon available habitat, not actual individual count. That individual count hasn’t been confirmed since 1981, and it is believed, according to the Red List,

  “…recent surveys suggest that since the early 1980s, commercial hunting and outbreaks of the Ebola virus have virtually extirpated gorillas from a great deal of otherwise intact forest…”

  Look up the meaning of extirpated. Ah, hell, here. I did it for you because I want you to see the severity of what’s happening here:

  “Full Definition of extirpate

  extirpated   extirpating

  transitive verb
  1. 1a :  to destroy completely : wipe out
  1b :  to pull up by the root
  2:  to cut out by surgery

  I’ll just let you ruminate on that for a second. Sunk in? In case not, basically, the foremost conservation entity in the world has said that the population of Western Lowland Gorillas is much closer to ninety-five than ninety-five thousand. That means we, as the “dominant species”, have a duty to make sure the Western Lowland doesn’t go extinct. That means that sometimes we are going to have to oversee breeding and make sure they aren’t killed by poachers and Ebola, or poachers named Ebola. That’d be a really good supervillain name. I digress.

  The question is, then, is our current system the grooviest for the animals? The answer, Mr. Powers, is: “Not too groovy at all.”

  Many animals, even in “good” zoos, live their lives in cages, and spend very little time every day in their cool, little, themed enclosures. No matter how cool or themed, can something like a male Silverback reconcile the fact that he is inclined to want to roam a twenty kilometer range (That’s 12.4274 miles, y’all…) and is stuck, variably, in a limited size, definitely not that big, gorilla enclosure, and a cage? Not very healthily can he reconcile. I mean, is a gorilla that has never roamed and migrated really a gorilla? Wasn’t Harambe more a product of his captive birth and raising? I think so. I also don’t think he would have intentionally hurt the child, but, who knows. As Jack Hanna said, a mature male g.g. gorilla can crush a green coconut in hand. That’s not the question here, though. I answered to my opinion on that, this is about my opinion on zoos.

  Conservation and captivity are necessary to the survival of endangered species, but, are zoos the right fit, even the modern cutting-edge ones like Cincinnati, or nah. In my opinion? Nah.

  There are many better options. Reserves in the actual natural habitats. Reserves in more accommodating countries. Reserves, reserves, reserves are always better than zoos. (Sing that to the children’s or seventies tune of your choice…) Reserves that allow the animals to roam large spaces that are actual habitats. Reserves that are minimally monitored and allowed to naturally occur. Reserves that allow mating to be as natural as it can be in captivity. I realize in extreme cases, like the Giant Panda, human intervention has to be stronger, but primates are known for our sex drives! So let nature take its course!

• What’s my overall point here?

  Simple. Humans, while having a duty to conserve, should do so in the least invasive way possible. Laws, protections, and reserves are the answer. Not in jails where the animals are put upon a staged facsimile of their natural habitat for entertainment and profit, and where one unobservant mother and her curious child can get them killed.

  I like zoos because of the animals, but I question if I can go to one again after thinking about it this much. I knew they always kind of made me sad, now they make me angry, too. Thanks,  human race! ;P