Our gendered world

Yeah it’s funny about that, isn’t it. I think it’s just the only way available to start telling a story about the baby-child-person – in the absence of hobbies, interests, points of view, etc. To start thinking about it and having something to say about it; to start ascribing a personality or character or identity or meaning to it – all loaded words, just as boy and girl, he and she are. Identity (and gender, meaning, etc) are both constricting and limiting, and the necessary condition of not just being a blob of cells.

My god, peter, you know some dull babies. Babies round here have interests in classical music, victorian literature, high fashion, and obscure european movies from the sixties.

At least, that’s what their parents tell me.

Mine weren’t dull, they just screamed every waking second, which I took to demonstrate an interest in heavy metal, but my friends though displayed an interest in opera. Fortunately, I turned out to be right. (Girls, both).

Five comments already and nobody has asked! Does everybody know?

Well, Eszter, is it a boy or a child?

Yeah but that’s just it. Asking about nursing, sleep, etc – naturally people will do that and it’s interesting in its way, of course, especially to people who for instance aren’t getting much sleep and want to vent. But. It’s a different thing from talking about the baby as a person. I’m thinking that the gender thing is the closest we can come (at this stage) to talking about the baby as a person.

Maybe that’s sort of an absurd impulse – like trying to talk about how people are doing at learning to fly or hang upside-down from branches. But I think it’s an understandable impulse. To hurry to move from the eating-excreting phase to the more interesting stuff.

I read a textbook on sociology where the author had dressed his toddler son up in a very pink showsuit.

People would be very uncomfortable when they were told that they were mistaken about the assumed gender of the child.

The author went on to say that this is one of the burdens of being the child of a sociologist.

Then again, maybe they ask whether the new baby is a girl or a boy because they know it’s one or the other.

Without doubt, sexual stereotyping can start early. That doesn’t mean ever instance of “Boy or Girl?” is an attempt to assign value by sex. Sometimes, folks just want to give specificity to the event.

The color scheme for our two kids never included pink or blue. We went with yellow. They had plenty of stuffed animals, ‘learning’ toys, Tonka trucks and books or rhymes. We never once hesistated to call them beautiful, because they were.

Yet we never looked askance at anyone calling them ‘boys.’ Because they were that too.

Calling them ‘it’ however, would likely have earned the visitor a chilly reception.

Also: the first questions I ask when I hear about a new baby are: Gender and Name. Name is usually a good conversation starter. Gender can also be, if the parents had previous children.

Like, what else are you going to ask? I’m not particularly interested in delivery details (experience 4 of my own, thanks), nor in the weight/length/eye color/Apgar score.

My niece recently found out that her baby-to-be was a boy after several weeks thinking it was a girl. She already had beby clothes bought. She says she feels as if her little girl died but she got a little boy replacement.

She is very conservative and sex-roled, but also a National Guardsman (Guardsperson).

Dem,

Nature/nurture isn’t as easy to sort out as you think. You don’t reveal the natural propensities of a child by refraining from socializing it in certain ways. In fact, there is good reason to think that the nature/nurtue distinction is in principle inapplicable to individuals, because the ways of sorting them out require examing populations. In any case, socialization is pervasive; you can’t withdraw your child from society (unless you gve it to the wolves). Good example: your daughters’ preference for pink. If pink preference is hard wired into little girls, how come pink only became a ‘feminine’ color sometime between WWI and WWII?

_Our world is so gender-based that it is hard for people to think about a person without knowing the person’s gender._

Many rules and procedures are defined and written wih no regard to a person’s gender: I don’t think it is so hard at all. We just think of a generic-person who is genderless – just as the baby in the womb is genderless until it pops out and we try to think of something inoffensive to say about it.

Of course, in cases where a male baby is much preferred than a female baby, the question “Is it a boy or a girl?” takes on some very significant issues.

Dem – the reality is that Boys’ brains are hard-wired differently than Girls

That’s a theory, not a “reality”. For every anecdote supporting that idea, there’s another supporting the opposite.

How can you tell which personal preferences are hard-wired based on gender, or on anything else for that matter?

By the time kids can physically play and interact with toys (and with one another), they have inevitably picked up, directly or indirectly, a lot of assumptions about how they should behave, and so many of those assumptions relate to their gender, so it’s impossible to tell if their preferences are just individual, instinctive, or influenced by expectations and cultural models (picked up from parents, school, tv, mates, anything surrounding the child), or a mix of both.

I don’t think there should be an ‘effort’ to ignore gender at all costs. I just think that individual identity comes before gender, so there shouldn’t be _any effort_ to influence a child’s preferences in that sense. You just try and provide them with things to stimulate their curiosity, regardless of gender. A person is a person before being female or male. If they don’t like playing with cars, they may just not like playing with cars.

Sexual differences exist. But I don’t believe that gender in its biological sense is the first and main thing that shapes entirely one’s way of thinking, especially as kids, when sexuality is still not as relevant to behaviour. In kids, it’s individual differences that stand out, and they trascend gender.

But, she and her friends came to realize that they just couldn’t force the girls to play with toys the way the boys did.

Just like you can’t force boys _not_ to play with “girl toys” if they want to.

I didn’t really notice big gender differences in tastes with the male kids I grew up with. I was not a tomboy strictly speaking, but I didn’t much like dolls either, except the Barbies because it was fun to dress them up, and it was fun also for the boys. When I was older and wasn’t playing with Barbies anymore, one of my male cousins asked me if he could have my Barbies, he wasn’t embarassed at all, he didn’t think there was anything strange about that. He loved playing football and doing all the more “typical” boy things. But he didn’t have a problem with barbies, because a) he personally liked them, and b) no one had told him it was wrong for a male to play with barbies. And before you ask, he’s grown up to be a totally average straight young male. He’s just always had an interest in clothes and fashion, to the point of vanity, so I guess the barbies appealed to that trait of his personality. Is vanity it an exclusively “female” trait? I don’t think so. Not in my experience.

I can’t think of a gender divide in those matters that’s so stark as to be called “hard-wired” really – in which sense, genetic? a gene influencing colour and toy preferences? I have a hard time picturing that.

The games we had access to as kids were mostly determined by the era and social environment we grew up in. We didn’t have a lot of toys and our parents certainly didn’t spend a lot on them. They didn’t even spend a lot of time with us because they all worked full time, so they didn’t supervise our playing. We did a lot of playing outdoors, football, volleyball, races, cycling, hunts, challenges, pranks etc. We made up a lot of role-playing games too, so I don’t see where the idea that role-playing is a mainly female thing came from, I’ve certainly never observed that. Indoor games were things like lego’s, card games, toy cars, monopoly, again, if there was a gender divide for those games too, I never noticed.

I never even thought of a male-female divide in relation to games. I only though of a children-adult divide. Adults didn’t play with legos, we did. Girls, boys, we just had the feeling of belonging to the same club and doing things together and having secrets we kept from adults. We were all equally mesmerised by the first videogames and techno-gadgets and such. We loved the same tv shows and cartoons and music, we had the same heroes and idols. We even wore a lot of the same clothes. My mom had me wear a good deal of my older brother’s clothes when they no longer fit him. I wasn’t forced to wear them, I just picked the things I liked. It was practical.

I did get the conditioning and stereotyping later on, during puberty, because that’s where, on the one hand, sexual differences show more clearly, obviously, and on the other hand, social and cultural assumptions on gender become more overt. Parents (esp. the old-fashioned kind like mine were) freak out because you’re growing up and starting to be a sexual being, and so they try and somehow control that. But I didn’t get much of that before.

I do believe there is a lot more gender stereotyping for younger kids today, because there is a much more massive industry catering to them than just twenty years ago, and if you look at the advertising for toys, it’s so stereotyped because that’s the way they can best market those products. That’s where a lot of the so-called “hard-wiring” takes place. It’d be naive to ignore that.

Again, there’s all sorts of evidence that makes it clear that at least some gender differences are partly biologically based. It isn’t social construction “all the way down.” Wouldn’t it be really odd if natural selection had designed biological gender into our genome, without it leaving any trace whatsoever on our psychologies, for example?

That’s not to say that biologically based gender differences are intrinsically large. Indeed, that’s part of the magic of culture. it can take small biological differences and ramify them into differneces that are hugely culturally significant. Of course, it can probably also do the opposite to some degree.

If that’s right, there can be cultural variability even if there is some degree of biological “fixity”. Culture and biology are often interactive.

Read Eleanor MacCoby’s The Two Sexes: Growing Apart, Coming Together for a very fair, systematic and nuanced integration of evidence from a variety of data fronts.

This post sounds like feminist paranoia to me.

As a comment above said:

”
Like, what else are you going to ask? I’m not particularly interested in delivery details (experience 4 of my own, thanks), nor in the weight/length/eye color/Apgar score.
”

Of course, people usually *do* ask for weight and length, something I’ve always thought a bit peculiar, since nobody is really interested. Is it because these are fundamental to our identity, and we want to start training the baby to be a proper Fat Person or Tall Person from birth? No– it is because babies are all pretty much alike, but it’s polite to inquire about *something*.

The one really important question is “Any birth defects?”, and one can’t politely ask that one.

I’m reminded of the song “It’s only a weewee,” some of which go something like this:

The day that you’re born
To find out what you’ll be
We look in your pants and
We check where you pee
That’s how we find out
What in life you will do:
Be a girl soft and pink, or
a boy tough and blue

But . . . .
It’s only a wee-wee
So what’s the big deal?
It’s only a wee-wee
So what’s all the fuss?
It’s only a wee-wee
And everyone’s got one;
There’s much better
Things to discuss!

Joan Roughgarden, author of Evolution’s Rainbow, would argue that the problem with question of “is it a boy or a girl” is that it presumes that those are the only two options.

gee, here come the really intelligent contributions:

“This post sounds like feminist paranoia to me.”

Really? cause that phrase itself sounds like anti-feminist paranoia. Hmm. I wonder which claim is closer to reality.

“Only a hyper-intellectual and somewhat solipsistic new parent/aunt/uncle/friend of baby would fret over her/his/its own ideological hobby horses instead of just answering a few direct and well intentioned questions.”

I must have missed the bit where Eszter was “fretting” and not even replying to the boy or girl questions at all, and instead proceeded to shower the askers with the kind of discussion that goes on on this weblog.

But I guess the annoying thing must be starting a discussion on gender at all. Cos that’s totally unheard of!

If you don’t like “hyper intellectuals” and “ideological hobby horses”, you can always go back to reading the tabloids.

As you can imagine, it was shocking, absolutely shocking to see those kinds of comments on this thread. I mean, what kind of feminist viewpoint ever receives reactions like that?! I guess next time I’ll have to think twice before posting a gender-related entry, ’cause, you know, it’s so embarrassing to be called a feminist anything.

Aargh. I always tried not to ask the “boy or girl?” question until much later, mostly to convey real interest by asking a non-automatic question. Oddly enough, people really appreciate it when one thinks of something slightly more original, or connected to the friendship – “blue eyes like daddy?” or “tall like mommy?” or even “have you seen them yet?” when it’s news from an aunt or uncle.

This afternoon a close friend called to say that his child had been born and the words “boy or girl” were out of my mouth before I knew it. Aargh. Power of suggestion, no doubt, since I read this thread yesterday, but should I blame the feminists or their (ahem) clever critic above?

“This post sounds like feminist paranoia to me. ”

There was little of either feminism or paranoia in the original post, which was simply a reflection on the nature of sex differences. Your comment reveals more about your tendency to find feminist paranoia everywhere you look rather than about the topic at hand.

BTW, momo you write:

“I just think that individual identity comes before gender, so there shouldn’t be any effort to influence a child’s preferences in that sense. You just try and provide them with things to stimulate their curiosity, regardless of gender.”

We’re in total agreement, and I’m sorry if you thought otherwise from my post. All our children are encouraged to try all activities. And they often cross “gender-stereotyped” lines in doing so.

I’ve also seen what peer-pressure can do to kids. Our son played mostly with girls, based on availability, until kindergarten. At that point his tastes radically changed based on peer pressure. I was sad to see that. He had some real potential talent in ballet but wouldn’t be caught dead in that class now. I tried to explain that when he got to dating age those skills would make him very popular, but it didn’t convince him. :)

We take lots of steps to get the gender biases out of their environment as much as we can. For example, when reading to the pre-school age kids I intentionally make half of the gender-neutral characters in the kids books girls (for most books, except recent ones, the characters are predominantly male).

My acknowledgement of the role genetics plays in gender behavior is more academic than practical.

Sometimes other concerns trump gender: when my (white) second cousin had a baby whose father was black, THAT information made its way through the family at the speed of light. To this day I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a girl or a boy — apparently all we needed to know was that it was black.

dem: thanks for the reply, I had indeed slightly misunderstood your views, sorry about that. And about your son giving up ballet. Maybe it’d have worked if you’d pictured fame and financial success as advantages, instead of dating? :)

Just a couple more thoughts:

…while one cannot say “all girls this” and “all boys that”, there are differences between genders that show up in aggregate as tendencies.

Yes, but, the way _we_ choose to aggregate those tendencies are girlish or boyish is based on a lot of assumptions, habits, traditions, etc. so it’s a lot harder to distinguish the nature/nurture elements. In other words, I just don’t think there’s any indisputably and unequivocally “male” vs. “female” social behaviours that are encoded in the genes of one gender or another.

genetics plays a major, major role. Not the long ago psychologists tended to blame mothers (not fathers, interestingly) for their children’s autism. Now we know better.

True, but it’s the opposite case, in a way. Autism is a specific syndrome, caused by a neurological dysfunction. People thought it was psychological because its manifestations are at the level of behaviour and there was just not enough research into it as there is today. Sexual differences are not a dysfunction and have always been know to be physical first and foremost, but the way we associate certain behaviours to a certain sex is mostly arbitrary, and I don’t think any research has shown certain behaviours to be “typical” of a gender or another in such an exclusive, fixed way as the link between autism and behaviour x, say.

With gender, the “now we know better” most often applies in the opposite direction – now we know a lot of the things we assumed in the past were biologically hardwired into one sex or the other are often the product of social and cultural factors, or just unfounded assumptions. Say, the idea that women tend to be more monogamous than men because as child-bearers they tend to prefer a stable partner to raise children with. There’s an opposite theory saying that women actually tend to be more promiscuous because, as child-bearers, a bigger choice of partners ensures a better genetic selection for your offspring. But before asking why, who decides _if_ women are, as a tendency, more monogamous or promiscuous? There’s definitely evidence of both! In modern societies, women’s sexual behaviour is no longer limited by child-bearing. Hasn’t the pill had more of an impact on that than any possible biological factor, or atavic patterns of behaviour that supposedly still act on our brains? And what could be more related to gender than sexual behaviour, yet, that’s precisely the area that has been most transformed by cultural changes. So who knows what else we assume about gender is also just our own projection and would be changed by different circumstances.

I do agree genetics strongly shapes individual traits, but the environment that surrounds us is very relevant to how we learn to manifest those traits according to certain expectations, certainly more relevant than supposed hunter-gatherer patterns from prehistoric ages.

I really don’t think about any of this stuff when it comes to dealing with kids, though. I just think of childhood as a neutral place itself, it’s with puberty that the mess of pressures and expectations and assumptions can become too heavy.

Thanks for the discussion, people. I’ve learned some and will spend more time reading on this topic.

Ken: your comments about children socializing other children make sense. I’ve seen this a lot. For example, my kids on their own accord invented the concept of “girl colors” and “boy colors” and segregated toys that way. We stepped in to explain that any kid can play with any color.

Something that factors into this is that the kids themselves are very interested in sex differences … fascinated in fact … starting at bath time.

momo: I respect your viewpoint. I don’t claim to have the absolute answer, and acknowledge that the majority, perhaps vast majority of gender-based behavior differences in children are environmentally based. Before I had kids I, like you, thought that ALL such differences were due to environmental factors.

What I’ve seen, though, indicates that there are different tendencies from very, very early age. I’ve read some research to indicate that boy’s brains are different at birth. Where this comes out is not in absolutes but degrees. Such as the fascination with spinning wheels or magnets (more pronounced in boys), or the tendency to engage in or initiate role-playing games (more pronounced in girls).

The thing to keep in mind is that every child is very, very different in terms of the things that fascinate them, even if they share the same parents. The variation is so wide that you can’t make any assumptions about an individual girl or boy.

momo: thanks for the follow-up.