Masculinity and its bullshittiness (future children edition)

I can has?

Hey kids! Did you know that I am writing a thesis about masculinity, energy drinks, and militarism? Because I am! I often don't write about my academic work on here because a) I'd be tempted to just copy and paste my class or thesis work into a post and/or b) I don't want to talk about it anymore after writing a fucking proposal in which I have to very clearly justify why I am doing such a project and/or c) I assume that I just talk about it a lot and all y'all know me in real life and are tired of hearing about it or will be soon and/or d) I would like my blog to not feel like homework. But anyway, I have a master's degree that I will hopefully be finishing up in the next six months with a submitted proposal and many PhD program applications in the works. I am an aspiring/partial cultural studies academic and it is awesome. I miss money because it is nice and I don't need food stamps when I have it or have to carry a frightening credit card balance or anything; however, the real job I had before was soul-sucking. Good pay and benefits, an awesome boss and coworkers, and working at my alma mater, a cause to believe in. However, data entry just isn't the career path I wanted to pursue. I am far too nerdy for that. Besides, I'm going to get married now, and he's going to graduate from the doctoral program soon and maybe get a job and maybe someday we'll have money (ha!), but at least we'll be able to combine incomes and that will be cheaper. I hope. This is all to say that maybe I don't address my particular beefs with masculinity enough on this here bloggity blog, even with it being my main focus of study. So here's a linky to a post at Sociological Images that shows girls playing with 'boy' toys. But we won't be seeing boys play with dolls or kitchen sets or anything! Heaven forbid! As if recognizing the fact that male persons will and do have home lives in which it should be required for them to participate equally in domestic tasks and child rearing would cause their little boy penises to fall off. And I just made you think of little boy penises, you perv! Anyway, Isaac and I plan to have three babies (no more, no less) as of now, which I know is a silly naive grad school fantasy that I'm totally going to pull off with no trouble with him staying home and us somehow still eating with my academic job and blahblahblah. But what I am confident of is that despite their skinny, neurotic, nerdy, possibly bearded tendencies, our kids are going to probably be inundated with anti-gender training. Please let us be the parents with the boy who likes to play house and the less-problematic but still slightly transgressive girl who wants to race cars. If my baby girls want to play princess I will try not to cry, because god knows I liked girly shit as a kid, but I will also warp them with prematurely critical feminist skills. Boy and girl kids. Fucked up they may be in social situations, but far less fucked up than the binary gender paradigm as it stands now. Love, Lauren "the future parent who is getting old (26) and serious enough to think about this shit way too much and maybe my biological clock has been ticking for several years and BEING A LADY IS COMPLICATED"