Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Men's Knitting

So, my dad was sitting in the store today, minding his own business, when the door flies open and a woman shouts "see, there's a man in here." As it turns out she was talking to her son, who was standing outside the store. She had taught him how to crochet when he was young, but he was so ashamed of being a guy who knew how to crochet that he hadn't taken crochet classes, or told the people at yarn stores that he was buying the yarn for himself. Anyway, he ended up asking dad a lot of questions and was happy to learn that we had a men's night.

Every profession I can think of (the only exception perhaps being midwifery) in our male-dominated society was once, well, male dominated. It seems as if there are a good handful of professions which are now female dominated – teachers, art conservators, nurses, and yarn store owners (Funny enough, although there seems to be a dearth of male yarn store owners, many of the owners of the yarn manufacturing companies are actually male). Knitting was once chiefly done be males (for fishing nets, as the hypotheses go), and is still chiefly done by guys in other cultures, but in American culture a man knitting or crocheting is looked upon as something out of the ordinary. But here we women are, trying to level the playing field, convince guys that it's ok to knit and crochet. We have to convince, in some cases beg, guys to try knitting.

And if there was any point I was trying to make in this blog posting, I've forgotten it. Maybe just pointing out the general idea that gender stereotyping is stupid? Hmmm, nothing original there.

We should have a weekly contest. We can name it the "Try and guess where Thea was going with her post contest."

Or maybe I can just try and post in the daytime, while my brain is still functioning.

In any case, we'll be having our next Men's Knitting and Crochet Night this Wednesday, May 10th, from 5:30 to 7ish, so tell all the guys you know!

Lame post, I know, I can't always be brilliant.

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