It's hard to know where to start expleining everything that's wrong with this. An excerpt
Campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Campaigning requires lots of travel, enormous amounts of time in the public eye and months and months of sitting down quietly listening to the same guy talking while wearing your good clothes. It's like 11 straight months of being in church when you're the preacher's kid - with long car rides in between. It's torture on adults, let alone children. But it's worse for boys. Try this experiment: next month ask your son to be on his best behavior in front of other people, from now until November 2009. See how far you get."Boys are generally more competitive, risk-taking and defiant, which makes them less manageable," says Meg Meeker M.D., author of Boys Should be Boys and Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. And the 24/7 scrutiny of the modern campaign makes every small risky and defiant act a public affair...
The Obama campaign was noted for its discipline, its rigor and its self control: three things most young boys are not noted for. Of course, Obama didn't take Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, everywhere he campaigned. But long fatherly absences may make the boys even more likely to be unhelpful. "If dad's away on the campaign trail a lot, [boys'] tendencies towards defiance and impulsivity are exacerbated," says Meeks.
Young girls, on the other hand, can be an asset to a candidate's image. "There's definitely something in the father daughter-relationship that makes being in the public eye much easier," says Meeks. "Girls want to please their mothers and particularly their fathers. Their dads can take their daughters places and do things with them and the girls won't act out."
The author's suggestion?
In tough times like these, it would be nice to have a bit of that harmless White House mischief. And the Obamas are still a young couple. With ready access to government-sponsored childcare. No pressure of course, but would it be too much to ask to give the ol' dice another roll? Maybe you can't campaign with a son, but it sure sounds like fun to try and govern with one.
Yeah, they should have a boy, for our entertainment, since boys are so much more interesting than girls, and so that we can continue to cling to and perpetuate this ridiculous, antiquated gender ideology. Puke.
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I really don't know what to do about gender essentialism and my increasingly repulsed reactions to it. I live in the U.S.--in a major city, no less--and everywhere I turn, I come smack up against a teeming hot mess of GE. From Swiffer WetJet and gendered toy TV adverts, to absurd self-help/relationship manuals (uh, HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS, by that 9-year old lothario?) to religious doctrine to informal "jokes," the false idea that there are widly different female and male Natures, borne of biology, has never seemed this powerful and omnipresent to me.
Everybody and his or her cousin is trying to sell me a line of GE, and I'm not buying it. As a social scientist, I likely never will. When people open their mouths about NatureblahblahBIOLOGYblahblahNature, I politely let them finish.
And then roundly trounce their arguments.
I'm surprised that it hasn't occured to this author that, perhaps, more intelligent, ambitious men are genetically predisposed to produce more sperm with X chromosomes and, therefore, have statistically more daughters than sons. I mean, maybe there are more Presidents with daughters because men who have daughters are just better people?
Maybe the US should make having exclusively daughters a pre-requisite for government office? It would keep Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee out and that's a good thing.
Stupid is as stupid does.
I feel waves of rage pulsing through me as I read this.
What doesn't help is that I've been trying to detox after dealing with rampant sexism, racism and overall ignorance for 21.5 hours during "requisite Christmas family time" with my SO's parents, I apologize that I can not string together more coherent or intelligent thoughts...I'm having flashbacks and it's making me absolutely nauseous that I KNOW people who would find this article "interesting" and "scientific".
That books like this are being published by a female with an MD, articles of bile such as this are being read in 2008?! I just...there is so much work to be done.
I feel weary.