It’s that time of year again: figuring out what to get people and whether or not those are people you really need to get things for. I’ve started keeping a list inside my calendar of people’s names followed by links to things I think they might like. I then run them by my husband to see if we want to get something for that person and want to get that something for that person.

We generally split families: it’s his job to figure out what to get his family and it’s my job to do mine. There are a few crossovers but in general, that’s how it works. Except for his brother and sister.

I’ve never had a younger sister (my cousin and I are like sisters but she’s really only a year younger than me, so it doesn’t really count except that I got to beat up on her when we were kids), so I’ve adopted his. Meanwhile, he barely relates to her. So we divide his siblings’ gifts by gender: I worry about the one with the vagina, he worries about the one with the penis. And I completely wash my hands of any gift for his brother: I don’t know him, I don’t know what he might like, and really, I don’t care.

As I was getting things for his sister, it got me thinking about this gender-division of gifts. Now, this is nothing like the hideous Discovery Channel Store thing…but it feels like it’s close. I love my sister-in-law; and I love molding her little personality. Her mother has given me free reign to do so, too: she said that she’d love it if her daughter turned out like me which caused me to threaten to take her to get a tattoo (which she (the sister-in-law) was interested in). In any case, things I thought about getting this year included a subscription to Bitch and an eraser (you have to scroll a bit to find it). She’s well on her way to being even more radical than I: she’s become vegetarian and a humanist on her own, she likes tea and fountain pens and stationary. I couldn’t ask for a better clone. But the more I think about what she might like (or what I might like to give her), the more it makes me wonder if I should be taking as much of an interest (if not more?) in her brother.

Question 1: does my apathy about the gifts his brother gets him (Warhammer) signify misandry on my part?
Question 2: is his feminist upbringing more important than that of a girl?

Answer 1: unfortunately, possibly. I’ve often thought that, if I did have kids, I really don’t want a boy. I love guys, especially once they’ve been raised properly. But I’m not certain I’d want to deal with one before that. I’ve no problem with my sister’s kids (all boys) but is that because I don’t have to deal with them?
Answer 2: this one, for me, is even more problematic (things I don’t like about myself can be fixed more easily than things I don’t like about society). I think that it may be. It is very important to raise girls to belive that they can do whatever they want, be whatever they want, and accomplish whatever they want. It is just as important to support them if they want to be a mother or a teacher as it is if they want to be president or an astronaut. But giving girls the self-confidence they need is, I think, only about a third of the solution. It is twice as important to raise boys to believe that girls are their equals, that they can be astronauts or parents and don’t have to embody machismo. Unfortunately, I think that boys’ education in feminism is twice as important as girls’ since it’s so much easier for a man to slide into misogyny than it is for a girl to slide into self-hatred.

Maybe I’m wrong (I’d love to be, esp. about my answer to Question 1…); but maybe next year for V-day, I should get this book for my brother-in-law, instead of for his sister. Because she might pick it up on her own but I doubt that he would.