(no subject)

[unbibium]

Today's sentence I love from a web article:

One militantly gender-neutral friend who had withheld dolls from her daughter says she once walked in on her daughter cooing to a toy truck she'd swaddled in a pink blankie.

I've got to practice saying a fourth-person version of this sentence aloud, so I can bring it up whenever someone tries to claim that men and women are alike.

Comments

[underwhelm.livejournal.com]

This anecdote proves nothing. Without more information, it's just as likely that the behavior was learned as that it was somehow innate.

[vyus.livejournal.com]

does anyone aside from gloria steinem actually believe there's no built-in differences?

i take that back - steinem doesn't believe it, she thinks we should all be pretending it.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

I think the former pres. of Harvard had that exact same anecdote, except in regard to his own child.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think it's become a FOAF urban legend.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Waah, but it's actually true! Essentially. I guess.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

WHOOP WHOOP SALETAN ALERT

It's funny that, though he does his trademark Saletanian both-sides-are-wrong move, he then rips apart Summers' biological determinism for the same faults that he would himself exhibit when he got completely pwned on innate racial differences a couple of years later.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Men and women aren't alike, but I don't buy this kind of argument. Sam and I are not trying very hard to raise our daughter as a girly girl, but I look at the books and toys she has and without even trying we're actually exposing her to a tremendous amount of gender-normative stuff. Thinking these influences aren't there in the culture is like a fish ignoring water.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, while admittedly this is at the ripe age of 18 months, I haven't really seen her evolve a lot of gendered behavior yet. She likes hugging dolls and playing with toy trucks about equally well. What she mostly seems to be is a little academic in the making--she loves letters, numbers, books and pictures of animals and astronomical objects, and I'm sure that's largely because of what we've emphasized to her, being the type of people we are.

Honestly, I don't think there are a huge number of innate differences in male and female behavior that you can see in society at large. The greater aggressiveness and criminality of males might well be one, since testosterone and similar chemicals are directly implicated there, but I think even that is tremendously exaggerated by social tradition. I remember being annoyed when, on one of the first days of class, my kindergarten teacher loudly mentioned without any sort of provocation that it was usually the boys in her classes who were the sources of trouble. At the time I thought I was being discriminated against, but later I realized there was a certain "boys will be boys" permission-to-act-out embedded in that statement as well. I'm not hugely convinced by evolutionary-psychology post-hoc explanations of things like males' greater tendency to cheat on their spouses and do mathematics.

My take on gender neutrality

[tamtrible.livejournal.com]

I...do not insist that there are no differences between males and females. But I do enthusiastically and emphatically insist that, except for a few narrow defining characteristics (and even there there's... exceptions), gender traits--like those of virtually any human category--are a set of (often heavily) overlapping curves rather than an absolute. There are men who are more "nurturing" than most women, there are women who are less "nurturing" than most men. Just like there are tall women and short men, or women who are bad at multitasking and men who are good at it. There are aggressive girls and pacifist boys. There are female body builders and male 90-pound weaklings. Almost any trait or feature not actually used to determine biological gender, you'll find at least some men who are more "feminine" and at least some women who are more "masculine". (even breast size--there are flat-chested women and guys with boobs--and I don't just mean grotesquely fat guys or she-males, there's a Condition...)

Because of that, we need to be careful that we are not trying to *make* our children fit little cookie-cutter molds predetermined by gender.

Now, I think it's equally wrong to try to force a child *into* a gender-neutral mold, mind.

Except where their behavior will genuinely negatively impact their ability to become functioning, moral adults, I think--we should let our children be who they *are*. Now, mind, I say this to both sides--if your child wants a doll to play with, you should *damn* well have a better reason for refusing than "it's too girly", regardless of said child's gender.