Gender Roles in Collecting & Collecting vs. Consumption

I feel that the board is pretty evenly weighted with collecting in gender roles. The people I know go from my grandfather (on my father's side) to my mother to any number of men and women I can think that collect things. Some of them are obsessive, while most of them are reasonable. The readings seem to suggest that the different in collecting between the different genders deals a great deal with WHY people collect things. Men seem to collect things to own the object. It is a power play, a sense of masculinity and control. Meanwhile, women, so it seems to suggest, collect as a way of revering or protecting the object, preserving it for it's beauty.

I'm sure this reading would offend many a feminist and probably a few other people. I can't really say if I agree. Both of my grandfather's collected things. One had a collection of ships in bottles. Most of which he built himself. I'd say that this collection was less about owning them, than admiring them. The same can be said for the other grandfather, which had a collection of blueprints, engineering documents, and similar papers. Though their beauty was lost on a lot of people, my grandfather enjoyed their logical and aesthetic values.

Meanwhile, my mother collects everything, though in moderation. I was raised in a pack rat household, which is not to suggest that my life was ever harder due to the amount of stuff that had been collected, but rather, there was always excess of something available. I'm not sure why my mother collects. She has butterflies and insects, which is likely for the beauty, but also books, lots of books. We literally have a library at home. My mother has even Dewey Decimal'd the whole collection. But she hasn't read it all. Not even near 50%. Which leads me to believe she enjoys the idea of owning this knowledge. She is intrigued by the knowledge offered by the books, for sure, but the actual knowledge needn't ever be released from the pages because she owns the book know.

For similar reasons, she pursues our family tree, delving ever further into books and records most people have forgotten about to find some name, or marriage, or death. Of all of her collections, I find the family tree most intriguing and most fruitless. The knowledge gained by exploring our genealogy will be utterly useless in almost any regard I can think of (barring some GATTACA future where jobs and performance are based solely on your genes). I think the temptation of knowledge that only she can figure out is tempting in a way.

There is a lot to be said for the collection of books. It ties directly into the discussion of collection being tied to consumption. The ability to buy something and literally own it is definitely an attractive portion of collecting. It is possible to collect without purchasing something, such as pursuing butterflies, beetles, receipts, or grocery lists. But on the whole, our modern world seems to find such thing as creepy or some juvenile or perverse behavior. The standard has moved away from hobby pursuits to shopping pursuits. I'd say in this way, many people in the US suffer from this mind set. The ability to buy and own things allow people to pursue objects that serve no purpose other than to entertain themselves. Given people's general lack of time to have a personal life, money becomes the new exchange tool for your collection. At one point in time, pursuing your collection wasn't a monetarily pursuit, but one of a hobby or something to do in your free time. Given the paradigm shift focusing on the gathering of money in exchange for less personal time, it is a relatively simple matter that collecting would change as well.

That being said, I think the collect and consume approach takes something away from the collection. I can personally say that my personal collection is easily expandable, all I need is money to do so. But it's not nearly as interesting or exciting as finding or making something to expand my collection. This though also depends on your collection. My collection of watches isn't something that is likely to expand on my skill level or in any monetarily free way, since every watch requires money. But if my pursuits were more based on insects or stories, finding them myself would provide more meaning and detail to the collection than just purchasing something ever could.