I have a plan for my next post on gender, and I am hoping that you will take part in the following exercise so that I don't have to rely only on my experiences.
What I would like you to do is post in the comments:
Games that boys play, and games that girls play (5+ for each of you would be GREAT, but I'll take as many as you can think of.
Keep in mind, I am looking for commonality, not anecdotal experience. So if you were a girl who played football as a kid, that still doesn't count as a girl's game because most girls don't play football as kids.
Imagine that a big group of kids of all ages has been locked into a gymnasium with various sports equipment, balls, and toys of all kinds. What kinds of games/sports would you expect to see the boys playing and what would the girls likely be playing?
I promise, this has a purpose as you shall see in the follow-up post. :)
10 comments:
I'll bite...
I'm thinking of gym class, the girls played basketball, volleyball, badminton, jumprope, kick/dodgeball, softball, walked/jogged the track.
The boys played football, basketball, lifted weights, practiced golf swings.
Is that what you meant?
I liked to play "touch" football, with a little more firm a "touch" than was strictly appropriate - and so did the other boys. I was also very fond of (for lack of a more politic name) smear the queer - mainly because I could usually rescue some of my less than cool friends and inflict heavy damage as the queer. Dodgeball was always fun, because while I sucked at actually catching the ball, I was pretty fucking wily about avoiding them. Hide and seek/tag was good when tackling was the preferred method of tagging. And I absolutely adored climbing shit - the more likely to break something in the event of a fall, the better.
I'm honestly not sure what most of the girls did, except for remembering a lot of jump-roping. One of my best friends was a girl, but we mostly played with her awesome starwars collection, climbed stuff, tormented kids that were bigger than us and, as we got closer to the double digits in age, show me yours etc....
@ Anonymous: Kinda sorta. Rather than such organized activities though, I'm thinking more in terms of things that kids will do when left without adult supervision and direction. So while the girls have no problem playing volleyball in gym, most little girls (in my experience) are extremely unlikely to start a game of volleyball in their neighborhood on a saturday afternoon in the backyard.
@ DuWayne: What in the heck is "smear the queer?" I've never heard of it before.
It's a brutal game, wherein the "queer" is the kid holding a particular object and running away from the other kids. The other kids try to tackle the queer. The kid who actually manages to tackle the queer and wrestle the object away from him, becomes the new queer. Depending how stubborn the queer is, it can get pretty brutal.
I was very, very stubborn. Also rather fast.
This, and other games I liked are why I managed to get rather bloody and bruised a lot.
Isn't that kind of like "Keep Away?"
Kind of the anti-keepaway. A nearly exclusively boy game and inevitably bloody.
anon again...
Take 2: we played board games alot. twister, candyland, hungry hippos, uno. we made those goofy thread bracelets and earrings with beads. played dress up with cabbage patch dolls. coloring books. listened to music and jumped around to Miss Janet, we weren't nasty.
The boys in the neighborhood were into basketball, skateboarding, baseball/catch, football, wrestling, street hockey, kick the can, Transformers and matchbox cars, bikes.
DuWayne, we had "tag the fag" and yes "smear the queer" too... I can't believe I remember that! Kids are so cruel.
I'm going to add a couple of my own here with the hopes of generating some additional inspiration:
Girls: playing house, cat's cradle, hopscotch, school, beauty parlor
Boys: "king of the hill," cops & robbers, cowboys & indians
Come on, commenters! I'm still looking for more!
Sorry, but I've always been something of an introvert and rather non-conforming. Thus I mostly stuck to the more violent games. I was rather fond of playing guns, but with my friends against imaginary bad guys. And we almost always won.....
Honestly, I mostly preferred to play by myself or read - mostly in trees.
You're thinking of strictly boys v. strictly girls - and I think you already noted that a lot of things in reality overlapped. We played outdoors a lot. We played with whoever was around, boys and girls.
Girls: hopscotch, jump rope, watusi (haha), hula hoop; indoors some "games" with dolls/houses/babies but those were all unstructured with no names of the game or rules; dress-up, telephone.
Everyone (most everyone): climbed trees, rode bikes, rode scooters, played war (and cowboys-indians), played tetherball, played on swings, played board games and card games, hide and seek, pogo stick, tag, marco polo, simon says, red rover, red light green light...
Boys: capture the flag, skateboarding, made-up street games involving throwing and hitting things inlcuding each other, tormenting other kids, marbles, snow forts, tug-of-war, arcade games like pinball and others.
I never saw boys playing football except when they were in school or after-school teams, but at home we (mixed groups) played softball, whiffle ball, badmitton, ping pong; in parks mixed groups played volleyball.
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