On today's special episode of New Kinds of Gender Essentialism Fail we bring you... handwriting.

[cimorene]

In today's discussion of ADHD, the hot lecturer expressed her sympathy for boys who were forced to be inside, learning penmanship, when they should be out "fishing and climbing trees". Girls, she said, in contrast, like penmanship, and you can just see how they all get into it and they have better fine motor control and they start trying to create their own "style", when boys "don't even have a concept of" personal handwriting.

Yes, Hot Lecturer. You got me. I'm a girl, which means I was born with a genetic fondness for legibility and curlicues. That must explain how only women wanted to be scribes in primitive societies - oh wait. Well what about the way that only female animals indulge in ornamentation - no. Well, the way most artists are women - no, okay, the way women are inherently better at writing than men - no... gosh, well, apparently this inherent characteristic magically vanishes after third grade!

By the time I had convinced myself that yes, that WAS actually what she meant, the conversation had moved on, and I was left speechless with rage. WHAT? I mean SERIOUSLY? WHAT?

Comments

[msilverstar]

That's the kind of gender stereotypes that fuck everyone up. What girls and boys like is a set of overlapping spectra. Both nature and nurture count, and reductionism does not. This is supposed to be a class???

[morningfine]

Yeah, I tried to be surprised but it's hard when most teachers I've had had the attitude that it's not the boys' fault that writing neatly is so hard for them, poor dears. I distinctly remember more than one teacher saying how much nicer it was to mark girls' exams because of the handwriting thing! All that was missing was the implication that girls must try extra hard to make up for the boys' (natural and unchangeable) shortcomings.

[alexseanchai]

Wonder what Hot Lecturer would think of me. I'm female. One of the reasons I prefer to do all my communication via keyboard is, if I'm writing by hand and making sure it's legible, I can write ten words a minute. Maybe fifteen. Making sure it's legible is a frustrating process, and if I'm trying to write down thoughts as they come into my head, either the thoughts end up lost in the ether or the legibility goes to shit, because as best I can figure I think at eighty words per minute. This estimate is based on the fact that my train of thought hardly ever has to halt on account of typing too slow and I type eighty words per minute. Bonus with typing: as long as the font's not one of the fancy ones, there's no problem with legibility. Other bonus with typing: rethinking my phrasing and correcting my spelling involve ctrl-shift-arrow-type, not flipping the pencil around and erasing and rewriting or scratching out and rewriting or crumpling the page and tossing.

[laughingrat]

I'm a girl, which means I was born with a genetic fondness for legibility and curlicues.

It's true! They've totes found the DNA that controls that!

Is she just so feckless that she doesn't understand that the "research" conducted on this, and on which so much of this current "Poooooor boys" BS is based, was inherently flawed? Unless she's using a totally different BS piece of research than the one that gets parroted over here, or is just mindlessly repeating boring sexist cultural dogma.

Point is, BOOOOOO.

[cimorene]

I don't think she actually thought she was talking about research there. Her anecdata about handwriting lessons was a very minor tangential side-point to a lecture about the types of learning/school difficulties experienced by different children with different neuro conditions and learning disabilities. She started with ADHD children and how tasks like handwriting are difficult for them to concentrate on and then just unexpectedly swerved into girls and boys.

[cimorene]

Because she deals with very young children, she's actually talking about the age where they first learn to write cursive in school, maybe 3rd grade or something, and extending that argument to its natural conclusion (beginning?) about how girls have good handwriting because they are naturally interested in making their writing ~pretty~.

Actually, the point about girls having finer motor control is the only part that could potentially have any value, although I don't know if it's true or not, but at least since there are some slight differences in mean developmental age (although the differences between men and women are always smaller than the differences within-group for things like this), it's possible, unlike the idea that boys are naturally incapable of coming up with the concept of personal handwriting while girls just can't wait to ~express~ themselves via curlicue.

[anglepoiselamp]

There's a definite division between how boys' and girls' handwriting is perceived. A man with nice, clear handwriting is so often said to have girly or feminine handwriting. I was surprised to see that stereotype pop up on a recent episode of QI. Shame on you, Stephen Fry.

I don't even know. It's definitely a socially enforced division, but in addition I do think it's possible boys have less developed fine motor control at that stage.

What really annoys me is how hard it is for girls with bad handwriting. With boys it's not their fault because it's just the normal order of things, but girls? What's their excuse?

It's also worth noting that Finnish schools have (or used to have, anyway) a grade for 'behavior and neatness', and I could never get the full 10 because of my slightly sloppy handwriting (and possibly also because my teacher from year 3 to year 6 had no idea how to deal with me and one other Aspergic kid). The grade never went lower than a 9 but I was still deeply embarrassed by it every time.

[msilverstar]

My daughter has hugely better handwriting than my son. She is also naturally dexterous, which shows when she tries beading and calligraphy and computer games. They are very different kids.

[jamjar]

That's just bizarrely wrong.

[cimorene]

I hate being knocked speechless. And I hate the language barrier, cause I could have pithily and scathingly demolished that in English, but in Swedish I get stuck going "Dammit, what's the word for mental conditioning?!"

[lanjelin]

Indoktrinering?

Sorry, I just stumbled over this post while looking at your recent entries (was originally linked from metafandom). May I subscribe?

[cimorene]

Subscribing is free! You may want to see the introductory post 10 things I assume you know about me if you read my journal or the other comments in my profile.

Indoktrinering would probably have worked, although it wasn't the word I was looking for at the time.

[lanjelin]

Huh, I see that we're practically neighbours! And I can't believe I missed that introductory post. Handy thing to have, that.^^

[cimorene]

That was a meme that was going around and got my attention something like 3 or 4 years ago, and I decided to keep it because it's actually kind of handy! My life somehow seems much less self-explanatory nowadays with, you know, no, I'm in Finland - no, I'm not Finnish - oh, so do you speak Finnish then? No. Why? Well, I speak Swedish actually - Oh, why? Etc etc...

[lanjelin]

Hm, the more I think about it, the better it seems, actually! Though my circumstances are a lot less complicated than yours, heh.

[stewardess]

I loathed penmanship with a fiery passion when I was in elementary school in the 60s. I taught myself to type at nine, and switched to printing instead of cursive when I was ten.

Whenever I look at a lowercase cursive Z, I think, "What the fuck was wrong with those people?"

[cimorene]

I've noticed that US "cursive" teachings changed over time! But I think the lowercase changes less. The z is supposed to be like a 2 with a loop at the pointy part, and then the tail of a g looping down under the line, right? It looks nothing like a Z, but at least it's not as silly as an uppercase capital Q or F!