Gender Preference

I just had my very first conversation of the “Of course, you prefer to have a boy. No, you don’t? Why??” variety. It was hilarious.

25 thoughts on “Gender Preference

  1. Why would they think that a woman would “of course” prefer a boy?
    I thought the stereotype went that each parent “of course” preferred a child of own gender.

    Like

    1. I don’t want to go deep inside the recesses of the patriarchal psyches. 🙂 Who knows what brews in there. 🙂

      The statement was addressed to both of the future parents. 🙂

      Like

      1. I really prefer a girl, though. But not because I hate penises. 🙂 Simply because I know how to bring them up and have a very good model for that. The only models I know of bringing up boys are horrid.

        N. feels exactly the same. And for the same reason.

        Like

  2. Funny, I thought people preferred kids of their own gender for a first kid because they envision Mini-mes and not their partner or the amalgam of their parents that most kids are. And then when you say if you’re having a boy or girl, people start in with their stereotypes. Nothing annoys people more than you keeping the gender of a kid secret until the kid is born, I promise you. 😉

    Like

    1. In the U.S., boys are preferred over girls, at least according to this Gallup poll asking parents if they could have only one child, what gender would they want it to be:
      http://www.gallup.com/poll/148187/americans-prefer-boys-girls-1941.aspx

      And it’s really men as a group who are driving the results. The women are more divided between boys, girls, and no preference.

      Age of the parents also influences their opinion. And politics (e.g. Republican men and women are more likely to prefer boys over girls if they were in this situation where they could have only one child).

      Like

      1. “And it’s really men as a group who are driving the results.”

        – Since very . . . unselfish, given that girls love their Daddies more and boys love their Mommies more. 🙂 🙂

        Like

    2. I promise to publish the good news on the blog as soon as I know. People started asking me about the gender when I was in week 7. 🙂 🙂 Apparently, this matters a lot to everybody.

      Like

  3. That’s weird. According to my mother, all she heard when she was pregnant was, “You don’t want an icky, badly behaved boy, do you? Of course not. You want a darling little angel girl.”

    Like

  4. If gender is the social construction of sex, then regardless of the sex of the child, you can socialise it into whichever gender you like.

    Like

      1. I think he thought it odd that you used the word gender instead of sex in the header, I can understand why (in terms of random weirdos liable to show up) but it reads alittle strangely.

        Like

Leave a reply to bloggerclarissa Cancel reply