Sneak Preview of "Age Appropriate"

11/18/2015

I know it has been quiet here. Forgive me. Besides the usual day job distractions, I have a new role as undergraduate director in my department. Thankfully, it is temporary; I am just filling in for a colleague who is on leave. But it not only eats into my writing time, it also shatters my attention into tiny splinters. I can get little things done, but the big things tend to drift.

While I have not been writing, I have been reading and thinking. The "Age Appropriate" book is taking shape and there are now little sprouts of organization. By spring, I hope to have a proposal and a couple of chapters ready to share with my publisher, with full-time writing to commence over the summer. (Autumn promises a sabbatical leave and a true descent into the writing rabbit hole.)

At any rate, here are the little chapter seedlings. They already have roots -- articles, books, and media that inform them. Would love to hear your thoughts about this direction.

6 Comments

Jill R. Hughes link

11/18/2015 12:11:55 pm

I'm wondering if you might address the concept of "she was asking for it by the way she dressed" in this or any of your other books. Or is that heavier than you want to get into?

11/18/2015 03:35:46 pm

Great question!

I can see it in two places. First, I think that girls learn early lessons about sexiness that make it hard to discern the boundary between "looking for love" and "asking for it". I suspect the ambiguity is not accidental; it serves a purpose. Nor is it benign.

Then, I think the conflation of femininity and sexiness comes back to haunt us as we age.

I have also written about this in an article on dress codes that is currently under review for a journal. Will post a link to it eventually, when it happens.

Jill R. Hughes

11/18/2015 03:40:50 pm

Thanks! Will the new book talk more about the sexy beauty pageants for little girls and the KGOY trend?

11/18/2015 09:13:20 pm

Probably not, except in passing. My focus this time will be on women over 50 and how we negotiated femininity over the course of our lives. I think Peggy Orenstein has a new book coming out soon that will address KGOY directly.

Jo Paoletti

11/19/2015 08:41:58 am

Here is a sneak peek.

http://ow.ly/i/dJzR0

Jenny jones link

11/30/2015 11:03:49 pm

I can't find much about how material such as nylon got in the gender roles. Women took nylon and ran while men seemed to give it a gender only category.
Men never graduated in to a soft comfortable material but stuck with baby materials such as thick cotton and anything that tried to be introduced to them was becoming more of a gender article of clothing. Anything that attempted to change was branded as something a feminine male would wear made them gay and their styles reversed and become the same wool,cotton and style great grandfather wore.
All this time females were having a great and free run to wear pretty clothes, colors,styles, new materials. We're men so insecure about mixing gender and sexuality.so afraid if they wore a pink shirt people would think they were gay.

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