Corseting

[DonnaT]

http://www.gender.org.uk/conf/1998/farrar.htm

[Susan]

Interesting,

my wife was brought up just around the corner from Salisbury Road Garston. I know it well.

[Erica S]

Donna,

Thanks for sharing with us. I found this to be very interesting reading as well as sparking an interest of what it might have been like to be in those situations.

Erica

[Absaroka]

It's an interesting article. I am reminded of the teachers saying that in elementary school the ideal student is a girl, but that in high school the ideal student is a boy. It has to do with young girls being more manageable, and high school boys being more oriented towards mastery of the subject rather than doing well. Of course it's a stereotype, but one that gets discussed a lot in studies of learning theory.

I was struck by how stereotypically English the whole article was, so much control involved. (Apologies to the Engish folks here, I'm saying it plays to a stereotype only) I also often wonder about all the boys dressed by their aunt for discipline. A lot of times this sounds like covert incest.

The whole article was a great exploration of a certain part of the cultural mythology surrounding CDing.

I'm reminded of an SVU episode I saw the other day. It involved a woman raising her grandson who believes men are just intrinsically bad. Her daughter, the boys mother, eventually returns from banishment and rescues her son. The angry woman destroying men in their boyhood, by abuse or by trying to turn them into girls, or using CDing as a punishment for boylike behavior, is a very old stereotype. It appears in far milder form in Huckleberry Finn among other places.

Thanks for the link Donna