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EBD's portrayal of boys/double standards
http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5091
Author:  Sunglass [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 1:33 pm ]
Post subject:  EBD's portrayal of boys/double standards
(moved to FD, R)

This has probably been discussed before under EBD's portrayal of the male sex in general, but I wondered what other people made of how EBD writes about boys and male adolescents. Do you think she shows them as fundamentally different from girls? Are they considerably less convincing than her girls? I'm thinking mostly of how she writes about Joey's boys, and also Roger and Roddy Richardson, and the apparently lower standards of behaviour they are expected to adhere to.

Ruey in 'Joey and Co in Tirol' remarks on how thoughtful Len is, and when Margot says it's because she's the eldest:

Quote:
'D'you really think that's it?' Ruey asked thoughtfully.'I mean, Roger's the eldest of our lot and I generally have to run around him with things.'
'Oh well, he's a boy!' Margot returned. 'Boys never do think of things - not if our lot are anything to go by!'


Quote:
The three [Maynard] boys had moved off to the door of the engine room – not that they had a hope of being admitted, but it was more interesting than just standing staring at scenery. It was all right for girls, Stephen had said, but chaps wanted something more than that.
('A Future CS Girl')

The boys usually get away with door-slamming, noise, slang and 'bad' grammar - Stephen says 'ain't' and 'No blinking fear!' - and with breaking the 'Mamma' rule, and Joey, in the same breath as she forbids the 15-year-old triplets to smoke until they are 17 ('Joey and Co'), offers the 16-year-old Roger a cigarette! Yet Mike, who is, like Margot, a family firebrand, gets shipped off to Dartmouth to get naval discipline aged 12 - so a harsher treatment for bad behaviour compared to Margot, who stays in a mainstream school?

While poor Ruey is blamed for not prettifying the chalet, and for not caring about her appearance or religion, there's no suggestion Roddy or Roger, with exactly the same upbringing, need to be changed in any way, and they go on being careless and irrelegious etc. (Or are we to assume Jack takes them in hand like Reg Entwhistle?) In fact, Joey seems to do quite a bit of saving male pride in Roger's case in 'Joey and Co', asking him whether his injured leg is all right 'in a tone that no one else heard', so he won't feel embarrassed.

Is EBD just describing a contemporary double standard, or is she actually advocating it? Is it ok, expected, or even admirable that boys are routinely thoughtless, insensitive and slangy in her world, but unlike her girls, who often start that way, never appear to have to change?

But how then do they grow up to be admirable marriageable doctors?
Author:  MaryR [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 2:01 pm ]
Post subject: 
Not sure if it WAS contemporary double standard, but things were exactly like that in my home growing up in the fifties and early sixties. My brother literally got away with murder. But then mum was Irish Catholic and they tended to worship the sons of the family. My sister and I were expected to do the washing up, the cleaning, the ironing (I did all the ironing from the age of 12) etc. He was never asked to do any of it, nor even tidy his room. And he was given a lot more freedom than we two girls. But, if he got into trouble, it was MY fault, being the oldest child - I always thought of myself as very like Len. :roll: And those attitudes prevailed well into our middle age and beyond. :shock:
Author:  Alison H [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 2:13 pm ]
Post subject: 
It sounds pretty typical to me. Even when I was growing up in the 1980s male cousins/friends (I haven't got any brothers) would get away with things on the grounds that "boys will be boys", whereas if girls'd done the same things then there'd've been trouble :lol: .

On the other hand, boys would have been disciplined more strictly than girls, especially in terms of corporal punishment, and would have been expected to cope better with things like bullying at school. I can imagine that Charles Maynard, who seems like the shy sensitive type, would have got some grief at public school but would just have been expected to put up with it.

I think the idea was that it was OK for boys to "be boys" until a certain age, whereupon they were expected to become more responsible. David Russell, although we don't hear that much about him, is portrayed as someone who doesn't really work much harder than he has to, falls out of trees, is more interested in sports (rugby in his case) than work, etc, but once he gets to around 16 (and realises that he has to get good results if he is to fulfil his destiny of Becoming A Doctor :lol: ) we're told that he has "settled down to steady work at last".
Author:  Lexi [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 2:36 pm ]
Post subject: 
Sunglass wrote:
Yet Mike, who is, like Margot, a family firebrand, gets shipped off to Dartmouth to get naval discipline aged 12 - so a harsher treatment for bad behaviour compared to Margot, who stays in a mainstream school?



I haven't read the books relating to this period for a while but is this right? I thought he went there because he knew he wanted to go into the Navy and it was the most suitable place for him to be educated, not as some sort of punishment? If so, it's probably much more positive parenting and education than Margot receives as she's constantly being compared to her sisters and always expected to overachieve.
Author:  Sunglass [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 3:11 pm ]
Post subject: 
Yes, I was probably being unfair. Mike has apparently expressed interest in the Navy, and is quite keen so he's not being sent to Dartmouth as pure punishment, though the suggestion that he's being sent there to benefit from the discipline because he's a tearaway who needs to shape up comes up more than once.

What struck me though is that he's essentially being entered for a specific career aged 12 or 13 - when in the same novel where this is mentioned, Joey and Jack refuse to let Roddy Richardson, who's only slightly older, make a hard and fast decision for sheep-farming without serious thought. It seems partly as though Mike's bad behaviour leads to a situation where the course of his adult life is already set at the start of his teens, and he doesn't have the luxury Margot gets of making a more informed decision later on. (Not that I assume it's compulsory to go into the Navy from naval college, but I imagine it would limit his opportunities more than if he'd been at public school.)
Author:  JayB [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 3:53 pm ]
Post subject: 
Although I don't think Mike could have gone to Dartmouth at 13 - I believe they stopped taking boys that young some time in the late 1940s. (I only know this because Antonia Forest's Peter Marlow was at Dartmouth as a schoolboy, and AF wrote a short preface to one of the later books, acknowledging that it was by that time an anachronism to have him there, but short of having him expelled there wasn't much she could do about it.)

Would Mike and Peter have been friends, I wonder?
Author:  Sunglass [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 4:04 pm ]
Post subject: 
I was thinking along the same lines re AF's Peter, but EBD seems to be working off the same (relatively minor) anachronism. I suppose if boys only stopped going that young in the late 40s, she was just working off older hearsay. ..?

I think Peter would probably deeply admire Mike's physical fearlessness, even if he didn't like him much. Although I can't remember precisely why Mike gets stuck halfway down the cliff when he goes after the egg and can't get back, leading to one of Joey's lengthy faints - might he have had a Peter-ish moment of fear?
Author:  Mia [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 6:31 pm ]
Post subject: 
Mike doesn't go to Dartmouth when he's schoolboy-aged. I did quite a lot of research about a year ago or two ago for drabble purposes. I think it's in Future when Joey says something about looking forward to when he does go as the Navy will "tame him as school hasn't done".

Quote:
EBD seems to be working off the same (relatively minor) anachronism. I suppose if boys only stopped going that young in the late 40s, she was just working off older hearsay. ..?


There is one reference to fit this theory - in Peggy, Peggy tells Lala and Polly that Jackie's at Dartmouth.
Author:  KB [ Wed Oct 08, 2008 10:00 pm ]
Post subject: 
Sunglass wrote:
What struck me though is that he's essentially being entered for a specific career aged 12 or 13 - when in the same novel where this is mentioned, Joey and Jack refuse to let Roddy Richardson, who's only slightly older, make a hard and fast decision for sheep-farming without serious thought.


Actually I think the objection is not the career itself, but rather the fact that Roddy wants to go to the other side of the world, with people that Jack and Jo have never met, to pursue a career opportunity that may not actually amount to anything.
Author:  Loryat [ Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:29 pm ]
Post subject: 
I think there are double standards which in some ways probably still exist today, although now I would say they favour the girls rather than the boys.

While girls are expected to be clean, tidy, keep their surroundings clean, take an interest in their appearance, etc, boys are expected to more or less repress any anxiety or fear they might feel, protect the weak girls they're with - even if they're younger - and take more physical risks for fear of being branded 'sissy'.

EBD wasn't alone in propping up these conventions. Jane Shaw's Susan books also uphold them; in one scene the girls bring Bill (who is the youngest) in case there is any fighting :x .

I also read one absolutely awful book (which started out quite normally but finished up rabid anti-communist propaganda) where the single mother of two, hotel managing only adult reflects on how grateful she is to have her seventeen year old nephew about as it is good to be able to confide her fears to a man! And this was written by a woman! :evil: :evil: :evil:
Author:  Nightwing [ Thu Oct 16, 2008 5:37 am ]
Post subject: 
Something that struck me as particularly odd is during one of the holiday books (er... can't remember which one :oops: ) there's a description of the Maynards passing time during a lengthy car journey, where the boys know the recent pop songs and teach them to the girls. It just made me wonder why the girls don't know any modern music - did EBD disapprove of anything post the 19th Century for girls? :lol: I've never forgotten Joey's disparaging remarks about jazz when she first encounters the Balbini twins!
Author:  LizzieC [ Thu Oct 16, 2008 9:23 am ]
Post subject: 
Nightwing wrote:
It just made me wonder why the girls don't know any modern music - did EBD disapprove of anything post the 19th Century for girls? :lol: I've never forgotten Joey's disparaging remarks about jazz when she first encounters the Balbini twins!


I suspect in the case of the book in question (sorry, I don't know it either!) it's worth remembering that the boys were significantly less sheltered than the girls, who barely ever left the platz or met girls who may have known about modern music - girls at the school seem to be carefully vetted so they're "our" sort and must come from a pretty upper class environment for the most part. I also suspect, given the glimpses we're shown of the girls relaxing that if someone had brought up modern music they would have been shushed and told that it was a forbidden subject.

On the other hand, the boys travelled to Britain for school and as a result would have been less sheltered than the girls.

That's my theory anyway.
Author:  Sunglass [ Thu Oct 16, 2008 10:37 am ]
Post subject: 
The boys and pop songs mention comes in A Future CS Girl and I remember noticing it and thinking it was interesting. Yes, it seems another instance of how slang, pop culture and a certain amount of noisy behaviour is acceptable for boys but not girls.

But LizzieC is entirely right to make the point about the boys going to school in the UK - it's not just that they are less sheltered (though what with going to school next door, and essentially having their mother and teachers being Bestest Frends, it's hard to see how the Maynard girls could be any more sheltered), it's that the boys must be far more culturally British than their sisters on a day to day basis. The Maynard and Richardson boys get to be teenagers in Britain, whereas the triplets get to be teenagers on a very quiet mountain shelf in Switzerland, where there appears to be nothing but a school, a San, their home and a bunch of chalets.

I spontaneously thought of the CS and the Platz when I was visiting friends in a very quiet little lakeside town near Lausanne last year - there was a bunch of vaguely goth-looking teenagers hanging about a bus stop, looking like they desperately wished they were somewhere urban and grotty, with graffitti and seedy pubs... not of course that even Margot at her most rebellious would be allowed by EBD to be caught swigging gin behind a hedge...
Author:  Mel [ Thu Oct 16, 2008 1:12 pm ]
Post subject: 
The Maynard boys would have visited other boys' homes at half-term perhaps (unless they had to go to Madge's) There they might have experienced pop and even - television!
Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Sat Oct 18, 2008 4:55 pm ]
Post subject: 
Mel wrote:
The Maynard boys would have visited other boys' homes at half-term perhaps (unless they had to go to Madge's) There they might have experienced pop and even - television!


And even if the Maynards had television themselves - they might have done, just we weren't told that - Swiss television in the 1960s stopped at about 9:30 every night!

I have been thinking a bit recently as I've been reading Rose Wilder Lane's "Free Land" and some biographical material about Laura Ingalls Wilder - and it has become clear how much Wilder suppressed about the worst aspects of frontier life, given that she was writing for children; Lane, writing for adults, even in the 1930s, does not gloss over the darker side!

And EBD, writing for children, does gloss over things - has to. Mademoiselle's serious illness and subsequent death (thinking of MaryR's excellent drabble). Or if Margot were to have been caught drinking gin behind a hedge, or Ted Grantley came back dressed as a beatnik (1950s fore-runner of the Goths and so on), we would probably not have been told.
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