Boys Are Selfish

I chose to examine Kate Lyman's chapter entitled "Girls, Worms, and Body Image"(pp. 139-146).

After overhearing some second and third grade girls fret about losing weight, the author decided she needed to make a change to her unit on women's suffrage in order to shed a light on the issues surrounding the body image of girls and women.

She started by asking both boys and girls in her class to brainstorm nine facts about each other's genders. The "facts" she extracted included such gems as: Boys are selfish. Men are mean and lazy and jealous. Girls are bossy, loud, and picky. Girls always complain and they are too sensitive. Lyman wasn't able to get either gender to admit that these truths were not always so self-evident. 

Then it rained and all the earthworms popped out of the ground. During recess, some of the boys were chasing some of the girls with worms and the girls were screaming. Lyman attempted to acclimate the girls with the worms by having them make a terrarium in class. It worked! The girls no longer fell into the "the weaker sex" stereotype. They stopped being afraid of worms!

But they were still making negative body image comments. So Lyman asked them to look at a Barbie. She wanted to know if they thought it looked like anyone in their lives. NO! She asked them to look at magazine ads for cigarettes, make-up, weight-loss products. She wanted to know if the ads were conveying positive messages to the students. NO!

Finally, she set up a participatory activity for the children called "Old-Fashioned Day." She had the girls wear long dresses and the boys wear slacks and long-sleeved shirts and tiny clip-on ties. She changed her curriculum to penmanship, spelling bees, and times tables. Many children got to sit in a corner wearing a "dunce" cap. But another old-fashioned thing was going on. Girls were being treated as if they were inferior to boys. Boys would get called on more often, given more chances to answer a difficult question. Girls were being punished for their "sloppy" handwriting and told they weren't "ladylike." Needless to say, the girls didn't like this behavior and said as much during a class roundtable after Old-Fashioned Day was over. The full immersion exercise helped them to understand just how difficult things might have been in the past, and Lyman hoped it cause them to see how unbalanced perceptions of gender still are. And though she didn't "solve" the body image problem, she felt that she might have at least got her students thinking differently about the topic.

Lyman tried to find a way to show her girls how to face their body issues and to examine some possible sources in culture and media. She had varying levels of success in getting her point across. Admittedly, she doesn't have the budget or reach of Madison Avenue. But she cares about her students, girls and boys, and she wants them all to be healthy and more critical of their environment, more self aware and less anxious about their appearance. She knows from her own experience that body image is nothing new, and so she is doing what she can to try to break the cycle.