[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 10/22/2006 8:43:53 AM Pacific Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > it is a truism* that historically most artists, sculptors etc. are > also men, and men are supposedly more visually-oriented than women. So > a non-gearhead explanation could be that men are more likely to want > to go out and take pictures. > ====== > Phsaw, phooey, and crap. Double crap. > > Culturally over the centuries women were held back from becoming artists, > etc. Had to have babies and feed the male hordes, including male artists and > sculptors, etc. Their place was in the home, they had smaller brains, they > were > illogical, all emotional, couldn't manage complicated tasks, understand > technical things, etc. For instance, I grew up when there were no women news > anchors > on TV, and the most available jobs for women were: teacher, teller, > stewardress, nurse, and social worker -- the helper fields. It hasn't been > all that long > since gender prejudices were socially acceptable and active. And in some > instances still are, although women have made a lot of progress since the > 1960's. > And I am still only talking about Western cultures, since those prejudices > are > still quite active, barring women from jobs, in other cultures. > > So now that Western women are supposedly "liberated" and supposedly can hold > any job, get back to me in another 200-1,000 years and see if those > artist/photographer percentages haven't changed. > > If you want you daughters to grow up enjoying photography, hand them a camera > young. >
I have three daughters. The two older ones took a photography course when they were 15 and 11 respectively. I bought them both a nice P&S 35mm film camera for the course. At a birthday, I passed on one of my Pentax SLR film cameras and some lenses to the oldest, she has contributed to the PUG and in PDML discussions in the past. The youngest then got interested and I got her the Optio-S when she turned 10. After that initial enthuthiasm, she has not picked up the camera in years. The middle daughter got herself a PZ-10 + 2 zooms on eBay, and uses it occasionally, and now wants to go digital. I may get her a K100D for her birthday in a few months. > As a female programmer, a very small minority in that field in my age group, > I am pretty familiar with gender stereotypes and unconscious assumptions and > prejudices. I know what some of these assumptions and prejudices are, and in raising my girls, we avoided any bias towards any gender specific toys. They still gravitated towards dolls, role playing, etc. They all have had difficulty mastering advanced math past puberty, but have done brilliantly in literary arts. Of course this is just a datapoint and I'm not making generalizations, but I was surprised by this trend in my own girls despite our heroic efforts to tutor them Trig, Calculus, etc when they were having an extremely hard time. > > Arts and Crafts, quilting, needlepoint, lace making, sewing, etc. were > socially acceptable visual fields for women for centuries. They couldn't lift > a > brush, not appropriate for most past eras and places, but, boy, they were > allowed > to lift a needle. > > Have a Nice Day!, Marnie aka Doe > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
