| What is that old rhyme? Boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails? But girls are sugar and spice and everything nice?
As our other child socialization processes like two parent families and stories about heroic or virtuous people break down, it is becoming increasingly evident that unsocialized females are extremely vicious and mean, especially to each other. The reason adults didn't used to turn out like animals, as so many seem to do now, is that we used to teach children things like "little girls are made of sugar and spice." Absent this lesson, it turns out they're not. This whole issue of breaking and smashing every form of child socialization we used to have -- from two-parent families, to schools that taught things like morals and ethics, to having spotless heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to look up to -- is part of a truly evil Gramscian-style plot to make the whole society fall apart. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people would want to do this. Their own kids are going to have to live in the mess they make. And an ugly mess it's going to be. |
I am convinced that that nursery rhyme has has become one of our cultural artifacts not because it is descriptive, but because it is useful as part of the socialization process.