Doing Gender, Buying Cars

So, we went car browsing today.  I like calling it that, because it’s really not an option.  You can’t “browse.”  If you pull in the lot, you’re “buying.”  We only visited two dealers and we knew we weren’t going to buy anything today.  We really just wanted to test-drive the cars we’re considering.  And we did.  We drove the cars.  But we knew we’d have to put up with everything else that comes with this process for the privilege of the test drive.

Car sales are really a micro-sociological gold mine in terms of interactions.  The salespersons have to keep interactions from getting awkward.  If multiple people come, as was the case with us, they have to quickly assess who’s going to be doing “the talking.”  My wife and I didn’t talk about it beforehand, but we both knew it would be her.  I know next to nothing about cars and my wife subscribed to Car & Driver when she was younger.  Her dad’s a mechanic.  In fact, the first time I met my father-in-law we were under the hood of her car.  He tells her to “pop the hood” every time he sees her.  He’s a wonderful man and I can’t even imagine him intentionally trying to intimidate me.  But I remember feeling that he wouldn’t have had to try hard that day.

Men are always “doing gender” when cars come up.  And buying a car is, I think, thought of as something men do.  This is because buying a car involves a set of interactional skills with which we assume men are better equipped.  Short-story-long, this is an assumption that does not hold for me.   I have my wife call to cancel magazine subscriptions pretending she’s me so that I won’t feel bullied into subscribing for another year.  But, I love the interactions at dealerships.

As a buyer, you try to not act overly interested.   Though of course, sellers know that few people would subject themselves to the kind of interactions you have to endure when you actually open your car door, step out onto the lot, and commit to “looking,” unless they are, in fact, interested.  And then there’s the fact that, really, everyone’s interested in a new car on some level.  Sellers are aware of the stereotypes about car salespersons.  We don’t call them “salesmen” anymore, though all of the salespersons we saw at both dealerships we visited were men.  At the second dealership, we weren’t approached immediately, but someone was called out quickly to “take care of us.”  When someone tells a car salesman to “take care of you,” it feels more like the mob’s use of the phrase than how it’s used by, say, doctors and nurses.  Sellers know this.  So, they have to be careful not to appear too polished, too eager, etc.

You Are You – Bending Gender at a Children’s Camp

Slate ran a story last week about a camp for boys who prefer to bend gender.  Photographer Lindsay Morris has created a photo-documentary of the boys at camp.  She gives the camp a pseudonym (for obvious reasons).  She calls it “You Are You.”  I like avoidance of gendered pronouns in the title she selected.  The images are wonderful.  They depict an space in which playing with gender boundaries, meanings, and more is the norm, not the exception.

Children become socialized into the world we know in various ways.  And I believe that if we want the boys, girls, and more from our children’s generation to live in a world with less gender and sexual inequality, we have to not only teach them to question and push boundaries, we have to be willing to let them teach us.  Children still ask questions about things that we might have learned to accept without thinking.  And we can learn a great deal about gender and the potential for change from examining the aspects of life they might be better positioned to question than we are.

In a recent post with D’Lane Compton, I shared a story of a young girl coming up and pointing at my son in the grocery store, asking her mother a series of questions about him that ended with, “Will he always be a boy?”  The mother assured her daughter that he would, and I couldn’t help but think, “Well, with repeated acts like that over the course of his life, he’d certainly think twice before deciding otherwise.”  I didn’t share these thoughts with her or her child, but it was an experience that left a mark (on me anyway).  At You Are You, it seems as though that’s not a question considered worthy of asking or answering—at least when they’re at camp.

Contemporary Fathers as Both More and Less Involved

The thing about single fathers is… there aren’t that many of them.  But, there are a lot more than there used to be.  In 1960, about 1% of households with children were headed by single fathers.  In 2011, this proportion jumped to 8% (here).  While it’s still a minority of households, an 800% increase in 50 years is nothing to shake a stick at.  Single parent households also increased significantly during this period.  Single mother households jumped from just under 1 in 10 households with children to about 1 in 4.  And while this is a much larger share of households with children, the percentage increase is less extreme.

SIDE NOTE: If you’re anything like me, you might wonder, “Who’s included in the ‘single father’ category?”  It’s an important question.  About half of all of the single fathers here are those that you might think of when you read the term–they’re either divorced, separated, or widowed and are not living with another partner.  This group accounts for about 52% of “single fathers” today (which accounts for about 4% of households with children in the U.S. today).  A small group of “single fathers” (7%) are married but living away from their spouse.  And about 41% of the “single fathers” reported here aren’t actually single–they’re living with a non-marital partner.  This last statistic includes same-sex couples living together as well.

None of that means that single dads aren’t on the rise.  It’s just qualifying what we mean by “single dads,” which helps us decide what kind of rise we’re actually talking about.  Single fathers are a growing phenomenon – regardless of how we measure the population.  But, here’s a fact less often mentioned alongside the growing trend of single fatherhood: the proportion of children living apart from fathers made a big jump over the same time period, too.  In 1960, about 11% of children lived apart from fathers; by 2011, 27% of children did.  So, while there are dramatically more single fathers today than a half century ago, dads are also more likely to not live with their kids at all today.  It’s what the Pew Research Center called “A Tale of Two Fathers.”  Simply put, dads are dramatically more likely to be the exclusive parent, but they’re also much more likely to be absent parents.  So, they’re both better and much worse than they were 50 years ago.