Gendrefication or power up the Cloaking Device

This morning in the race across town to my now distant cushier job I steal a peek @suefisher and @bonstewart. An excellent dialogue on gender and lego; a happy little mind bending to incisive people I have never met. I reach and think a fine few minutes of those I weave some affinity with -- the luxury of it.

Anyway.. the dialogue.. Gender to lego, enough! Damn how can lego have gender? Well too much has gender now. It is what - or it is one more thing -- that is eating away at childhood in my mind. I think one tweeter put it out as market forces. B*%lsh@t! No I know it is not. Not market forces but the aggression of corporations over childhood.

Remember I have one boy and one girl. I learned early what would and would not go both ways -- toys, clothes even books. It is something I have bucked, if you will pardon the pun. My son wore plenty of track pants just a little bet scalloped on the edge. The kids have abided the rants that there is not such thing as girl music.. even if there is.

I do believe I have become a rantafarian. I freak that we are holding onto childhood by our fingernails that the mania for industrial child corps to extinguish the ambiguity of children in favour of the profitability of mini-adults is winning. Remember I was an administrator for schools so impoverished for resources, begging, brokering and selling to make learning happen. It was a part of my work for a tough three years sick to see the Matrix of learning devices and 'free' software pin kids from the youngest possible ages in a dataset of self that will set them for harvesting for sale in perpetuity. I can't help often to see the black patent swish of a Trinity trenchcoat in each 'it will save us' post of the graces to Ipad in education.

I say this with the intense vulnerability of this space do I? That I have done as much to pin my own children (thinly veiled) on a blog? I don't think so. More than once I thank the test space of this parenting dialogue to allow me to want to hack parenting and fight and differentiate. I have said it before it is the dialogue in these distant spaces that have fueled my (hard come by) commitment and fitting in to to IRL action of being mother-woman. I am not here to tell you how this will end...



So you see I was biting my tongue just a tad....