WSJ Discovers That Some Knitters Are Men

The act of knitting is not gender-specific!To their credit, the Wall Street Journal tries very hard to focus their story on the fact that truckers across the country are facing massive cut-backs in their work hours.  Due to reduced consumer demand, and smaller items (thus requiring fewer loads), the number of loads driven by truckers fell by 15% in 2009.  

This results in a lot of long-distance truckers sitting in their trucks waiting for work to come in.  "Down time" is the industry term.  Although it isn't down time in the way most of us think about it.  It's down time in the middle of nowhere, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, just sitting at a truck stop for days at a time.  Living in a mobile apartment that's basically about, what, fifty square feet?

Let's just say, this is not a good time to be a long-distance truck driver.

Faced with all this free time, some truckers have decided to take up a hobby.  As a knitter I can attest that knitting is perfect for a situation like this.  It's portable, and requires little in the way of equipment or set-up.  You just need a bit of yarn, the right needles, and a pattern.

(I'm not so sure about the quilting, though.  The quilting trucker must have a lot more space in his truck than I always imagined was back there!)

The article manages to tutt-tutt the sexist attitudes of the trucking world, while making some gendered moves of its own.  This is what I think Franklin Habit once called the "Aren't you precious?" form of social commentary.  (This is an issue with which he is all too familiar.)

Because knitting is so strongly identified as a female activity, any man who knits is seen as unusual.  In order to neutralize the threat to accepted gender behavior, great pains are taken to A) comment on it out loud, thus bringing it to everyone's attention, and B) infantilize the person who is performing the transgression.

The formula can be summed up as:

"Well look at you, a ______ doing ______!  Isn't that adorable?  Did your _______ teach you?"

I have literally heard women say this to men who are knitting.  Those very words.  Now let's mix it up, Mad Lib style:

"Well look at you, a woman doing math!  Isn't that adorable?  Did your husband teach you?"

Feel free to fill in the noun with any male gendered activity - repairing a car, using a table saw, shopping at Home Depot, fixing the plumbing, driving a car, earning a business degree, being a CEO... use your imagination!

You can see where I'm going with this.

It is no more "okay" to coo and trill over men who do crafting than it is to pat a woman on the head for changing her own oil.  The fact that people - including the Wall Street Journal of all places - still find this to be acceptable behavior is nothing short of appalling.

I realize that "burly truckers knitting" sounds like the kind of "man bites dog" reversal story that newspapers go gaga for.  Well, get over it - men DO knit, there's nothing about knitting that requires the use of ovaries, and anyone who's patronizing to a male knitter should be ashamed of themselves.