Boys And Girls, Men And Women
The Ineluctable
I raised nine boys and girls to adulthood. While that’s an admittedly small sample, I did notice some gender-specific behaviors over the years that I considered significant.
Whenever they did free drawing, my daughters would draw flowers, smiling people (they would often depict the members of our family), trees, grass, the sun, and sometimes animals. My sons, by ages 4, 5, 6, would reliably draw elaborate scenes of combat—people shooting at each other, planes firing on people, ships attacking other ships.
We didn’t have books in the house that depicted warfare, we didn’t have a TV, and we didn’t have a computer until my oldest boys were 12 and 13. I guess my sons saw enough of that stuff when they visited friends’ houses, and it made enough of an impression, or resonated with them in such a way that it became the go-to archive they consulted whenever they sat down to draw, which was often.
When my oldest boys were little, we had a no-toy-guns policy. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) But when they were outside, they would hold sticks as if they were guns, and they would play out scenes of battles and various violent encounters. My daughters played with sticks, too, but they would use them to build intricate fairy houses with soft leaves for beds and acorns for cups. It was a very different activity.
When, one afternoon, I watched my oldest sons chew their sandwiches into the shape of crude handguns that they then pretended to shoot each other with, I knew this was a losing battle, so to speak.
My point is this: I don’t think my husband and I were socializing our boy and girl children in vastly different, gender-specific ways. Which suggests that they came with certain tendencies that differentiated dependably along gender lines.
I’m not saying anything radical here. Anyone who has spent time observing girls and boys playing will have noted something similar. Anyone who is a former girl or boy may remember such play tendencies from their own biographies.
Of course, there are exceptions to these “rules,” and there are outliers and children and adults whose proclivities defy this. But I would suggest—and I base this not exclusively on my observations of my own children, but on watching many children grow into adults over decades—that you can see that girls and boys are different from a very early age. They are different physically, yes, but they also think differently, and see and move through the world differently. They play differently, and they work differently.
One of the things that the feminism of Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem would have us believe is that distinctions between genders are a product of socialization. Such feminists would argue that the tendencies I’m describing, observed through millennia, are a result of environmental influences, not of inborn mandates. Women can do anything men can do, if socialized properly. There are no innate differences between the genders, only socialized differences resulting from wrong-headed expectations. If we were all to raise our little girls with toy trucks and our little boys with baby dolls, to dress the boys in pink and the girls in blue, we could flatten those differences, or so says that particular feminist narrative.
We know that men tend to be bigger and physically stronger than women. We know men and women have different hormones coursing through their bodies, which affect an individual’s physical traits as well as the way he or she experiences the world. We know there are differences between male and female brains. Women are more risk-averse, especially when under stress; men tend to gravitate toward math and science and are more likely to express high aptitude in those subjects; and women outperform men in social connectedness.
And yet, for decades, certain strands of feminism sought to discredit this. Regarding the field of research on sex-based differences, Gloria Steinem is quoted as saying that it’s “anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research.”
I get the concern: For a long time, feminists felt that any biological, anthropological, sociological, or neurological evidence of gender-based differences could be used to argue that women are inferior to or less employable than men. But with more women than men currently graduating from college, and many more women becoming doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, and other high-powered professionals, it doesn’t seem like we have to be quite so hung up on this. That concern may be outdated.
None of this is to say that women in certain settings aren’t discriminated against or overlooked or exploited or underpaid. It is to say that there are many ways that men and women are different, and it behooves all of us to acknowledge that and to understand how. And to work with reality.
If you are willing to entertain these ideas—that girls and boys are different from the get; that women and men are different in a variety of biological ways; and that those differences translate into different strengths and proclivities—why does it get so tangled and complicated to accept a division of labor in the context of the family or the community? The understanding and acceptance of gender difference was part of our human reality for millennia. Why does it rankle now?
In a functional heterosexual dyad, there will be an acknowledgement that each party’s perspectives and strengths complement those of the other party, and that weaknesses or blind spots can, at least in part, be mitigated by including the viewpoints of the other. A woman may get a clear read on the character of her man’s potential business partner—that guy is not to be trusted—and he might then do well to heed her intuition. Larger portions of men’s brains are dedicated to aggression and action, while women outperform men in various measures of social smarts. So it might be okay if a dispute with a neighbor gets addressed by a man, while remembering the birthdays of friends and relations might reasonably fall to a woman.
Of course, we can all do all these things. It’s more a question of what’s in our wheelhouse and thus done more easefully, of how to utilize natural strengths and tendencies for the good of the whole, of the family organism and the wider community. In Ivan Illich’s Gender, he discusses what is lost in a world that forsakes the reality of gender difference, of gendered work, and of the complementarity of the genders. One thing that’s lost is a way of being that orders the world and helps it to make sense.
Every gesture and action undertaken for the health and well-being of the family and its children, of the community and its members that results in more harmonious intrafamilial relations and more robust community relations, is nurturance. Earning money to keep the project afloat, making sure the children have baths and get read to and sung to, keeping the kitchen knives sharp, vacuuming up the dog hair—it’s all caring for the comfort, security, prosperity, and protection of the family. It all counts, it’s all important.
Circling back to the innate differences, strengths, and challenges of men and women, I’d like to land on the idea of conformation. My parents raised and showed Doberman Pinschers. When you show a dog, it’s evaluated on how closely it conforms to the standard of its breed. Winners at dog shows are those animals that come closest. The nearer a dog comes to the breed standard, the more likely it will be to produce puppies that will meet the standard. Conformation comes up in 4H competitions, in the American Livestock Breed Conservancy, in the American Dairy Goat Association. It’s a common idea in show animal, breeding, and livestock circles.
Conformation in the animal world has to do with adherence to certain physical characteristics. What if the idea were applicable to humans in a different way? There’s a lot of ways we could parse this, but for the purposes of this conversation, let’s say that we could identify characteristics that were desirable and that might represent a natural expression of the tendencies of men and women.
I know I’m on thin ice! Watch me running across the barely frozen lake!
Here’s what I mean: Conformation in a man might mean that he understands and embodies the role of protector. That would mean that he protects his family members, but conformation would assume that he would also protect anyone vulnerable in the larger community who needed protecting. Conformation in a woman might mean that she sought to understand, respect, and tend to the emotional needs of the people in her world—her family and friends, yes, but again, if someone in the larger community needs comforting and nurturance, she would offer it.
People are different. We’re all individuals, and we exist and operate on various continuums of all these tendencies and traits. But there’s also this: If a man wants a queen, he’s gonna have to act like a king. Our gender-based tendencies—they’re not universal, there are exceptions to the rule, all that—are real. They have the potential to bring good to families and communities. We would do well to acknowledge and celebrate that. We would do well to make that understanding available to our sons and daughters.
I was brought up, back in the '70s, to be a good little feminist and I never once questioned the idea that it was all societal conditioning that made the differences between men and women. We were interchangeable, aside from some minor differences in plumbing, and the fact that women were usually smaller than men, right? The fact that I liked girly stuff like makeup and fashion was totally due to society telling me I liked it. And the reason I thought stuff like arguing about which superhero would win in a fight or working on cars was excruciatingly boring was clearly societal pressure as well. If I had lived in a less sexist society, no doubt I would be excited to rebuild a fuel injector. Never mind that my boyfriend was a car guy, and was constantly trying to get me to gap my own spark plugs and share his excitement about V-8 engines, it was SEXISM THAT MADE ME FIND THIS SO BORING.
I remember watching pro skateboarding with my husband back in the early '90s, and it was apparent that the female skaters didn't do the harder tricks or skate as aggressively - we actually had a bit of an argument, because I said it was all societal conditioning, and that women would totally be outskating Tony Hawk in the future as they were raised in a less sexist environment. He laughed at me and said "yeah, sure..."
I was a committed blank-slatist right up until I actually had children of my own. Our first child was a daughter, and I was determined that she would be raised in a non-sexist way. She had dolls and trucks, tea sets and dinosaurs, and I purposely didn't let her watch Disney movies because I didn't want her to get any ideas about being a helpless princess.
It sort of worked - she loved playing with her trucks and cars and dinosaurs. Except she always played truck family, or dinosaur family...I noticed her male playmates seemed to exclusively focus on the "Tyrannosaurus is gonna EAT YOU!" concept. And I have to this day never heard a little girl go "vrooom! VROOM!" immediately upon encountering a toy car.
I went on to have two more daughters, and while one of them was kind of a tomboy who liked climbing trees and playing swords with the boys, she also really liked fairies, dolls, and pretending to be kittycats. The youngest was the most ladylike of the bunch; she was obsessed with tea sets and constructing elaborate fairy houses. And all three of them went through a stage around age 3 or 4 when they insisted in ONLY wearing pink, wouldn't wear pants "they're for boys!", and were obsessed with anything vaguely princess-related.
Yup. Turns out boys and girls are different, on the whole. While some are less gender-conforming than others, there are still some major physical and mental differences. Crazy, huh?
Even in the animal kingdom - my female dog stays by my side and she has a stuffed toy that she carries around and licks and carefully guards from the other pets; while my male dog is prone to wandering off on his own and rips all his toys to shreds.