Admittedly I have only read one article by Jonathan Kay. For all I know, he’s won Nobel Prizes in multiple disciplines in his spare time from writing Pulitzer-Prize-winning articles about the national debt, programming open-source software, working as a UN translator and directing and starring in a Broadway musical about his life. However, judging from this article, he is clearly the stupidest man alive.
Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen and miscellaneous ruffians, this post is going to be a long one.
I wish this well-meaning fellow [the genderless baby Storm's father] could have attended my 7-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a pottery and painting studio last week. There, he would have seen 10 little girls, all of them sitting quietly at a table, studiously creating beautiful little masterpieces. The boys, meanwhile, took about 30 seconds to slop some paint onto a ceramic dinosaur or car — and then spent the next hour chasing each other around the facility, occasionally hauling one another to the ground so they could act out professional wrestling moves they’d seen on Youtube.
Not that the boys weren’t “creative.” One of them had been given a cheap video camera from his parents, and spent 10 minutes taking footage of the (unoccupied) toilet in the studio bathroom. This pint-sized Truffaut had a cheering section: The boys assembled around him found the documentary project to be the most hilarious thing in the world, and some became literally incontinent with laughter (ironic, no?) as they took turns passing the camcorder from hand to hand watching and re-watching the footage. Occasionally, the girls would look over at the boys — much as well-dressed diners in a fancy restaurant might gaze out a window to watch hobos fighting over a liquor bottle in an alley — and then sighed and returned to their artistic labours.
As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.
You heard it here, first, ladies and gentlemen! Boys don’t like art! Boys like toilets! Boys’ dislike of art is why we don’t have any famous male artists, like Vermeer and Vincent Van Gogh and Marcel Duchamp and like ninety percent of artists throughout history what the fuck dude are you seriously this much of a moron.
Seriously, Jonathan Kaye, I know you can’t perpetrate degrading stereotypes against women anymore, because those feminists, politically correct mayors of Nofunnington that they are, will be all up in arms. But that doesn’t mean you can perpetrate degrading stereotypes against men, either.
Both men and women are equally capable of running around, enacting professional wrestling moves and thinking toilets are the funniest thing ever. Both women and men are equally capable of sitting quietly and painting stuff. Some people, like me, are capable of neither painting things nor finding the humor in toilets, and so I suppose are forced to wander the earth rending our clothes and mourning our lack of an appropriate gender.
And frankly it is just as insulting to male people to assume that girls create masterpieces and boys go “ahahahahahaha bathrooms” as it is to female people to assume that boys create masterpieces and girls think about their hair.
But that’s a distraction from Kay’s main point. Let us take an exciting adventure into the exotic land of Confounding Variables. What are some possible explanations for “boys and girls act different” than “because biology”?
First, children are really good at picking up at expectations of them. For instance, every girl’s toy aisle is a pinksplosion, and yet pink was not a color associated with girls as little as a hundred years ago. I cannot think of a single good explanation for this beyond “girls are told they’re supposed to like pink so they do.” Sociological research suggests that gender role conditioning occurs from teachers and peers in kindergartens– for instance, boys and girls play dress-up almost equally when they’re three, but almost no boys play dress-up by age five. (Jonathan Kaye suggests that gender couldn’t possibly be socially constructed because he tried to get his girls to play raquetball, which would be a lot more convincing if (a) his girls grew up in a single room isolated from all peers and popular culture except him and (b) he wasn’t clearly a sexist fuckhead.)
Second, girls tend to be friends with girls, and boys tend to be friends with boys. This is enforced by social pressure, both active (“ewww, girls have cooties”, “do you liiiiiiiike him?”) and passive (if you have mostly female friends, and all your friends have mostly female friends, the new people you meet are mostly going to be female). Therefore, the girls are going to want to spend time with their friends, who are other girls, and the boys are going to want to spend time with their friends, who are other boys.
Third, when I was a little girl, my recreation looked a lot more like “hitting my sister with sticks and pretending it was a sword” and “sulking because I had to be Princess Leia when we played Star Wars when I wanted to be Darth Vader” than quietly painting vases. I mean, I played with dolls and pretended to be a mom too, and we played Historically Accurate Tudor Princesses (lots of head-chopping), but I also pretended to be a time-traveling ninja spy. There is no room for time-traveling ninja spies in this theory, which is a clear flaw in any theory. Which is to say: there are girls who laugh at toilets and boys who paint. Where are they in Kay’s scheme?
Oh no! Jonathan Kay suggests. You see, gender-non-conforming people exist. They’re just all gay and transsexuals.
Depicted: a happily married straight man.
I love it when I can win an argument with My Chemical Romance pictures.
Also, there are a fuckload of lipstick-wearing lesbians in pearls and high heels, trans men that are as femmey as you please, weightlifting gay men and makeupless trans woman in blue jeans (particularly since trans people often have to enact gender roles they don’t actually conform to so the doctors will give them hormones and surgery). I mean, I’m a gender-non-conforming bisexual genderqueer, and the queer community in general is more accepting of gender nonconformity, but that doesn’t mean everyone who falls under the QUILTBAG umbrella is gender-non-conforming, and it certainly doesn’t mean that being QUILTBAG causes gender nonconformity.
I’m not saying that the genders (or for that matter the sexes) have no differences. Male-bodied people and female-bodied people have different brains, and it would be surprising if that extra X or Y chromosome didn’t make any changes to the person’s brain structure; trans people have also reported some personality changes that come with taking hormones. However, we honestly don’t know enough about neurology to be able to state, conclusively, what the differences are or how large they are– especially given the well-documented effects of social conditioning. Throwing up your hands and saying it’s all biological is, frankly, moronic.
About ozyfrantz
Ami: Right. Storm will probably show whether zie is a woman, a man, genderqueer or agendered soon enough.
Debaser: That’s an interesting and correct point… it reminds me of the Robber’s Cave experiment, where randomly dividing boys into two groups led them to (a) display different behaviors and (b) hate each other.
debaser –
“Now, being a stay at home father of three daughters, I’ve learned some things about how (my) children develop…(and yes I tool psychology in college…I’m talking real experience, not bookish experience). My daughters quite naturally knew they were girls and that girls are different than boys. It’s the first sort of distinction that they make..boy / girl. This seemed to come quite naturally. I can’t stress this simple point hard enough. My daughters understood they were girls, that they grow up to be women, and that boys were different (physically different) and would grow up to be men (and I apologize to transgendered people…but I am going to just gloss over that aspect). Where skin color makes almost no difference to children, gender is an important, easily to latch onto distinction. ”
I would actually argue that the prominence of the boy/girl distinction is something that is implicitly taught, not something natural. Because society places a lot on boy/girl distinction. Whether or not you are a boy or a girl influences how you are dressed, what toys marketed to you look like, what bathroom you go into, and often what roles you play in society. So I agree that it’s an important, easy-to-latch-on-to distinction, but I think that children are taught that is an important distinction–whereas, say, hair color (or some other readily noticeable characteristic) is not so important.
Also, as far as anecdotes go (this is really only tangentially related, but whatever), I read a great one (I think it was in some psych book) about these parents who militantly tried to protect their kids from learning about stereotypical gender roles*. One day, their son wanted to wear barrettes to school. They let him. Another little boy said “you’re wearing barrettes! that means you’re a girl!” Confused, their son informed the other little boy that no, he had a penis, which meant he was a boy. The other little boy said “No, everybody has a penis! But only girls wear barrettes!”
It made me chuckle, particularly because I remember my own little brother saying similar things when he was younger–it also took him awhile to start to associate gender or sex with reproductive organs, but for a long time he was convinced that jeans were GIRL clothes (my mother and I wore them, my father did not).
*not really passing judgement one way or the other here about this.
That article about race is a bit silly. A 6 month old baby, when it looks at an unfamiliar race longer than a familiar race, isn’t looking at *race* it’s looking at *something unfamiliar*. Which doesn’t say a damn thing about the baby but probably a thing or two about it’s parents. Here’s a thing to try, take a biracial baby and test it, if it looks at either longer it almost certainly has nothing to do with race, because both are familiar. One is Mommy, one is Daddy (and Aunt Sue, and Uncle Bob, and etc.) Or take white kids adopted by a black family or a black child adopted by a white family and test them. What you can’t do is take Little Johnny home to your entirely white family, in your white neighborhood, with your only white friends, whose (white) children will likely be Little Johnny’s friends, and then wonder why, after every relationship demonstrated to Little Johnny in his home environment is white on white, when you put him in a “diverse environment” he plays only with white kids and finds the brown ones strange and foreign.
Which is 110% uncomparable to gender in which almost every family is going to have both genders demonstrated and familiar.
I read debaser’s point as simply:
A) Children have gender identities, these develop naturally and early.
B) These have little barring on gender expression except on a superficial level.
In my experience completely true and non-objectionable.
Also, there’s been quite a bit of conflation between gender identity and gender roles/expression in this thread. And I’ll just throw out that while most trans people will agree gender role/expression is a contruct, claiming that *gender/gender identity* is a construct is a far more controversial claim. So, it may behoove us to get those distinctions right.
I was fuzzy in my words about “children” because I do not like it when people assign ages to certain mental qualities. Since I don’t like when others do it, I try to avoid doing it myself. I think a few posters are sort of missing my main point because I failed to mention relative ages. So when I talk about sex distinction regarding young children I am talking about toddlers. Children who have yet to even be socialized. They don’t know about penises and vaginas and sexuality but they do know boy vs girl. And yes, it absolutely has to do with clothes, hair style, mannerisms, toys, etc…but what I am saying is that these distinctions regarding sex/gender are learned/manifested earlier on than other distinctions, like about race.
And although I think the article on race had some good examples of bad studies (including the 6 month old baby study) I think the point from that study is that babies certainly do “see” skin color…but not that it matters to them. Most of the other studies involved 5-7 year olds which is already way past the point of toddlerhood. But going back to my original point, babies already prefer women over men before babies care about skin color. I think in most (equal) situations a white baby would ‘prefer’ to be tended to by a strange black woman than a strange white man.
(And I think it has to do with women’s higher pitched voices and, in general, women’s learned skill in handling infants compared to, in general, men’s lack of those learned skills. I learned early that I had to get over the fact that I needed to use ‘sing-song’ style voicing when caring for my children….sometimes called parentese. It sounds goofy and your friends might look at you funny but it works…and if you can get over the initial embarrassment of it you can get over the embarrassment of hugging and playing gently with your baby too. That the caretakers comfort level is very important in how the baby feels about you.)
Thanks for the comments.
I have nothing to say about innate gender differences or childrens’ capacity to notice race / not notice race.
I just wanted to give Noah a virtual high-five for name-checking Marcel Duchamp in order to prove that men are interested in more than toilet humor
Ozy,
“Sam: Judging from his discussions of the ineffectuality of arguing against gender roles, I believe his argument is that (a) gender is primarily, if not entirely, biological and (b) gender is one of hte most important factors in a child’s personality. After all, he did say it didn’t hold water to claim gender differences are socially constructed.
”
He did say that? Must have overlooked that. Well. *Gender* roles are necessarily socially constructed, as *gender* is the “social* sex. It’s an oxymoron to say that gender is biological when it is by definition cultural. Sex is the biological part. To use the word gender at all necessarily implies the importance of cultural effects on behaviour. If there weren’t any, there would be no gender, all there would be would be sex. Now I’m not sure he’s clearly differentiating the terms, but *gender* dfifferences are logically culturally constructed. The question is how/to which extent biologically different behaviour is influenced by culture to become *gendered behaviour”. As culture is pervasive, all biological imperatives are parsed with culture. There’s no entirely culturally *independent” expression of biologically driven behaviour. I want to have sex with women because I’m attracted to women. That’s probably mostly biology, but the way I’m dealing with this is full of cultural influence.
Hm. What a display of fucked up parenting.
Not only is he stigmatizing the boy’s natural expression, he’s promoting the emotional exploitation of girls.
What you want to bet all those girls are going to grow up with an addiction to approval? That isn’t maturity, it’s blind obedience. ‘I’m a girl, therefore the way I get through life is by looking pretty and acting nice.’