Girls Have Diaries, and Boys Have…???
Monday, September 25th, 2006
Earlier today, I was reading my way around the Internet and I came across the following quote in a post on the fine public health blog, Effect Measure:
“Now I know from what Mrs. R. says and my own knowledge that personal diaries are commonly kept by young girls. They are extremely private, kept hidden and often destroyed post adolescence out of embarrassment or fear of discovery (boys don’t keep diaries; I’m not sure why).” (Full post here.)
The author was writing about blogging in general, and speculating about who blogs, and why. He made some interesting points, many drawn from the Pew Survey on bloggers, from this July.
But the thing that grabbed me was the assertion that young girls keep diaries but young boys don’t. I never thought about it before, but anecdotally in my experience, it’s true.
It got me wondering why. Why do girls but not boys keep diaries? What, if any, are the consequences? How, then, do boys document their experiences, or don’t they?
Are there any men out there who did keep diaries as boys? Ladies? Do you remember why you started, at the time?
I have several diaries at home that I started, wrote one or two entries in, mostly about how I never wrote in my diary, and then abandoned. I usually made the effort around the time that I was reading someone else talking about their diary, or a book that featured a character with a diary. (I seem to remember Strider as being one of the catalysts - now that I think about it, Strider was written by a woman. So maybe that’s why it’s told through a diary.)
Dunno why I was never good at it; could be my raging ADD, or it could be a gender-based aversion to keeping diaries. I do know I always found it a little silly - trying to write to an imaginary third person who was, at the same time, both Me and Not Me. And certainly it always felt forced, though probably that’s because it was.
As for how I document my experiences - well, I’m not sure that I do/did, which may explain why I don’t even remember most of college. But here’s a thought — and I’m just spitballing here — for a lot of things, my experiences are documented through the people I shared them with, that is, what matters most to me about going back to those experiences and remembering them is re-sharing the experience. I wonder if perhaps boys are more about documenting their experiences in a shared way than girls are, that for boys what’s important is the group recollection, whereas to girls it’s the individual recollection, and hence the diary. Or maybe that’s just me.
Hmm…interesting theory. Then again, I think girls do a lot of shared-recollection, too. I remember a couple of years in 7th and 8th grade when the most important activity at our near-weekly sleepovers was to write in a communally-kept book of lists (documenting wishes, crushes, funny and/or gross things, etc) that lived in a white three-ring binder that one girl kept on behalf of all of us.
Back to the drawing board?
I had a diary when I was very young. It had a painting of Yoda on the cover and it was called “my Jedi journal.” I think I wrote in it a total of about 10 times. I just didn’t feel moved too that often, you know? The few entries that are in there are either really intense or completely mundane (like the time I got a high score on the Ninja Turtles arcade game and won me and my budy a trip to the opening of the Ninja Turtles film). I wrote all kinds of other stuff though. Anyway I’m no masculine ogre, so I’m not a representative sample of most guys. I’m not sure why guys don’t write in diaries more often, but it could be as simple as it being a self-fulfilling prophecy deriving from the fact that they’re already identified strongly as feminine. The one thing a little boy never wants to be called is ‘gay,’ and writing in a diary, for a boy, is definitely gay.
Interesting about men, women and personal diaries. I started mine in the 6th grade - my first entry was about western tanagers (an explosively orange-yellow bird) returning to my neighborhood. The next was about my crush on Eric Boswell, despite his farts on the bus, and if he would ever like me back. what’s changed in our world so that guys who once shunned diaries are now comfortable writing blogs? Maybe it’s the form: little books of lined paper with gold locks titled ‘my journal’ on them are gay. laptops that can blast ac/dc are not.
i’m a gay guy, and i don’t keep a diary. i’ve tried it plenty of times, though, only to find that i’m more into living my life than writing about it.
Haha, yeah I used to have a diary when I was a young lad. But at the time I was a young sad boy. My father got remarried, I hated her, she hated me. I think I wrote it so she would now how much. It only lasted a year or so.. Then I burned it for the reason, what an embarrassment. haha. The old days.
Well, my son, now six years old wants a diary like his girl friend, at this age it is nice to see that they just want to write. He likes the lock, kind of like a pirate to him with locked treasure. Hopefully he will grow to be very comfortable with himself!
I’m 16, so I suppose I’m a little older then a young boy, but I recently started keeping… I don’t know, I guess it could be called a diary. I really just got tired of forgetting my good ideas. thoughts, and stories, so I got a moleskin to write in. It’s a third, a third notebook, and a third writing portfolio, with a some use as a sketchbook.
I think a lot of it is maturity and peer pressure. Little boys don’t want to sit down and take the time to write out about their lives when they could be living them, and if they do other little boys would probably make fun of them.
I started my first diary in 1997 until now 2008. I have 20 diaries full of everything that has happened to me for the past 11 years to my first crush, my first boyfriend, my bad habits and embarassing moments to the time i recently got my own room. It’s fun because you get to relive ur moments through th diary. I even have who i hate, dislike and could tolerate. Guys aren’t emotional beings so a diary is the girliest thing ever to them. The last thing they want to be called is a fag
I have had some journals since I was a kid, I don’t know when I started though, I think I write, not only about my life or feelings since I learned how to write. I used to sit on a table, think and then write. Or sometimes draw.
I think the reason boys don’t usually have diaries is that they don’t want other people to know there’s more than that “tough” and emotionless body. I don’t know any boy who has a diary, or at least who says he has a diary (nor girls, though).
Doesn’t anyone think that boys don’t write in journals because we don’t expect or encourage them to? My son said he wanted a locking journal (journal is much cooler than diary), and I had to search the high heavens to find one that wasn’t pink and furry. Girls are trained to think a lot about their feelings and to share them. Boys are taught early on that there is only one acceptable, masculine emotion: anger. I think it’s tragic that boys aren’t encouraged to record their thoughts more. by the way, yeah to the company that makes the locking pirate journal that reads “none shall enter this treacherous land…..”
we keep journals thats why same thing an purpose but thats what we keep
Actually, it’s a common mistake to think that men are trained by society to be less in touch with our emotions than women, but in reality there’s a biological reason. In a child’s brain, the emotional control center is located in the amygdala, far away from the cerebral cortex, the center of higher thought and language. Therefore, if you ask a child about their feelings, they’ll usually be able to tell you what they feel, but they won’t be too clear on the why. However, as girls mature that center moves into the cerebral cortex, allowing them to verbalize their emotions with ease. Not so with men. Their control center never moves, it stays in the amygdala, and so the only thing improving their ability to express their emotions is an increase in knowledge, maturity, etc. that comes with growing up. And as a guy who never kept a journal, there never seemed to be much point to me. I know what happened to me, I have a good memory, why do I need to write it down? Especially if I never intend to show anyone else.
girls have diaries boys have journals.it’s simple.