In any event, thought provoking article...
I am utterly baffled. Where does this even come from? How do you look at this issue and see even a whiff of anything related to gender?
How about the article's explanation? It requires historical context (that is, can't be looked at in a vacuum).
> Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women.
yes? or no?
No. Until I see some proof that these men were incompetent/useless until they had a caregiver, I think this is complete bogus to justify a role that wasn't really needed. If full-time caregiving was required, you would not encounter single people that could function in society and you would never meet a child with both parents employed.
Then there's the reactions to these (insensitive? ignorant?) pieces. The main take-home point I've learnt reading @freebsdgirl is: just because a few of us rich white english-speaking males have had a good old time and barely any insurmountable problems in our particular corners of the internet... is great, but completely irrelevant to the fact that a lot of women are disproportionately having a bad time.
Back to the article, I still feel compelled though to share just how odd it felt reading that making was a male thing. By the time I was 5, my parents' farm had failed - the next 10 years were a struggle for them, but for me it was a time that cemented my curiosity and creativity by having to improvise everything. I am forced to rethink this: if I was born a girl, what else could I have done with my time? Didn't my own father constantly find ways to express his view that real men didn't sit around all day on computers? Is it just a fluke that my younger brothers' girlfriends could weld better than me? And when we were 14, being shown by a girl I knew how the primer worked (she was fixing a routine blockage) on a quirky, ancient diesel stationery engine? Is being a rich white male warping my perspective that much?
There were terrible gender imbalances at the time. Some too depressing to write about. But being able to make, modify and repair stuff was a universal skill that I hadn't - until now - considered genderized.
My daughter loves helping me take apart and repair things, just as I did when I was her age. But now odd thoughts occur: were the girls I knew growing up so equipped with "maker" skills because we lived in a poorer area? Or was it the rural living? Perhaps both? If this is the case, does that mean my daughter will have fewer opportunities to pursue these skills without the same pressures I grew up with?
I don't know what to think about the gender angle... my mother is sort of a Rosie the Riveter figure. Incredibly self sufficient, creative and industrious. The only point of contention that I remember, between her and dad, was how she would never put his tools back after using them. He eventually assembled a secret 2nd set of tools.
Lol, I just had a flashback of a funny exchange that was the result of my fearless tinkering. I was a Marine infantry machinegunner, in Fallujah 10 years ago, with a broken long range AN/PAS-13B thermal-optic gunsight. The battalion armorer was about an hour's drive away, and the odds of getting ambushed on the road were pretty high at the time, so I really didn't want to muster a convoy for one broken piece of equipment. Instead, I grabbed a headlamp and a leatherman - then headed to the only place where you could get some privacy: the shitter. I had to do this in private, because the Corps really frowns on this sort of thing - PAS-13s are expensive. I'll never forget the look on the company commander's face after he pulled back the shitter curtain to find me in the dark, wrist deep in the PAS-13's guts. "Corporal... are you operating outside your echelon of maintenance?" I hesitated, trying to figure out what the captain wanted to hear. "No sir?" He stared for a couple of seconds, probably trying to figure me out in the same way, then slowly lowered the curtain back into place. I managed to fix it though, one of the few things I ever tore down and returned to a functioning state.
But just as a follow-up to my own post: after surveying the females in my family, they all seem to agree that "making stuff" is a male thing, because males all get the credit... I guess I was just ignorant when I wrote the above post.
However, the main store behind the notion of DIY for men is Home Depot (and the other hardware stores). The inverse is shown here where the décor section usually takes up one isle.
We need to stop assigning gender roles to activities. I have a 20 month old son, and me and my wife try very hard to not genderize behaviours or activities.