From a Womanist Musings post on raising a gender non-conforming son:
What he is learning by this whole experience is that breaking the gender binary in any way comes with social discipline. He knows that his home is a safe space, and that he can be who he wants to be, but acceptance has limits outside of his home. In my mind, this answers the nature vs nurture debate. Social discipline is how we force people to conform and perform gender in the manner in which we have normalized. If a six year old boy cannot wear nail polish or play with his mother’s makeup without worrying about being teased and attacked, then the very idea that boys are born with an innate desire to perform certain behaviours is wrong.
@Cait,
Continued derailment and excessive repetition of your same view is grounds for banning.
Yeah, Cait…we get it. Your repeated message has been received and understood. You believe that feminism is awful and the root of all societal evils, and women are to blame for everything that is mentioned as “room for improvement” on this blog. Meanwhile, when someone politely points out your basic anthropology fail, you ignore it and lecture us on a different point, this time about modern times and birth control. Not very constructive or problem-solving input, there…
Basic gender roles are biological No, basic sexual reproduction roles — producing sperm vs producing ovum and incubating a fetus — are biological. Sexual reproduction and gender roles are not the same thing. Sexual reproduction is pretty much uniform across all mammals (not looking too closely at those marsupials etc) but gender roles vary quite a lot. As Soda mentioned above, some cultures have three genders, and different cultures have completely different rules for what it means “to be a man” or “to be a woman” (or to be berdache, or hijra, or fa’afafine, or others…) (While I’m here… @Soda… Read more »
“No, basic sexual reproduction roles — producing sperm vs producing ovum and incubating a fetus — are biological”
Yes and the continuing nurture of the child after the incubation period is also biological. We have only recently developed the technology, (expressed milk and powder milk) to get around that reality.
If one group spends their life breast feeding or pregnant, their roles and lives are going to be different to a group that doesn’t function in the same way. For biological reasons.
Powdered milk is a recent technology. Expressing milk and wet-nurses/shared nursing responsibilities aren’t. Your characterisation of men’s and women’s lives is highly contested in anthropology circies. You’re falling into the trap Noah describes in the very first comment, of thinking that our primitive ancestors lived in a primitive version of the social rules of 1950s America. Some obvious flaws: A males life was different, he could travel further for longer Cait, our distant ancestors were nomads! The entire tribe was regularly on the move. There was no “home” for women to “stay at home with the kids” at. and if… Read more »
‘Cait, our distant ancestors were nomads! The entire tribe was regularly on the move. There was no “home” for women to “stay at home with the kids” at.” Hello everyone. I love this blog already. Our ancestors were foragers. That did not always mean they were nomads. Nowadays all foragers are nomads, but we should not generalize from that. Before the Neolilthic there were plenty of places rich enough to support sedentary populations the way that California and the Pacific Northwest did for millenia and millenia without agriculture, and without nomadism. Just that wrinkle alone complicates simplistic evo-psych explanations of… Read more »
Cheradine
You are making a mistake in thinking that your description of gathering and foraging of olde is somehow different from going to the supermarket and bringing the kids with you today.
Its not.
Women going shopping with the kids to gather supplies for the family = monetized gathering and foraging.
Foraging and gathering was and still is part of staying at home with the kids.
Not at all; several of my friends and I commonly refer to going shopping as “foraging”, as in, “I’m going to forage for some bread and milk, do you need anything?”.
However, you’ve completely ignored everything relevant about what Jim and I have said, and then propagated a stereotype, as though it somehow has any relation to the conversation whatsoever.
In 2011 (and, indeed, for decades now), men can “forage” in supermarkets with the kids, and women can go out and “bring back the bacon”.
Yes
“In 2011 (and, indeed, for decades now), men can “forage” in supermarkets with the kids, and women can go out and “bring back the bacon”.”
This is mainly due to technology. Reliable birth control gives women the opportunity to work on a career. Their lack of opportunity to work outside of child care and foraging and gathering was biologically determined or at least dictated by biology. Technology has also produced a plethora of female friendly jobs where in the past, the number of female friendly jobs was limited.
I don’t think any of us are unaware of the way that reliable contraceptives have increased the opportunities for women within our modern society. That has everything to do with the way our society, with its particular structures and cultural rules, is set up, organised around the family unit instead of the tribal unit, and with certain beliefs, prejudices, and so on. It doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the discussion, though. It doesn’t have anything to do with boys wearing nail polish and being bullied for it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact… Read more »
In 2011 (and, indeed, for decades now), men can “forage” in supermarkets with the kids, and women can go out and “bring back the bacon”. I’m not sure what this discussion has to do with inate sexual differences, but I can guess. Let’s start with contrasting these supposedly different activites, foraging and hunting. Physical differences – gender dimorphism when it comes to muscle attachment as it pertains to throwing – check, there is a difference. How material is it – depends on the weapons and the situation. Cognitive differences – Men often have better spatial awareness, and this can affect… Read more »
@Jim: Boys get diagnosed more with ADD, but that’s only because they are actually ADHD and disrupt class. One minor point of disagreement here. I think ADD/ADHD is actually vastly overdiagnosed. What we’ve got is a culture which cuts education funding, leading to the elimination of sports and recess and other physical activities, and misguidedly tries to make the classroom more “female friendly” to encourage STEM participation, by coming down harder on rowdy behavior. And this is combined by Big Pharma’s funding of ADD/ADHD drugs and pressure on doctors to diagnose it. The result is a large number of boys… Read more »
Basic gender roles are biological but technology allows us deviate from them. Until very recently biological determinism dictated that the over whelming majority of those born female are going to become pregnant as soon as their bodies are ready to and that once that baby is born, they will fall pregnant soon after wards. A males life was different, he could travel further for longer and if he did not protect and provide for the women and children, they would have died or at least lived an horrific existence. Pink and blue are just symbols, no different from the feminist… Read more »
It certainly doesn’t solve the nature/nurture debate… but that is so much less of a debate than its made out to be. It’s not a binary debate, and it’s not even a case of “some things are innate and some are learned” but rather than every behaviour that emerges is a result of an interaction between a subjects’ individual history (ie “learned”) and his biology (which is essentially a subjects’ genetic history, which is also defined by interaction with the enviroment, albeit over a different timescale entirely) Think of it this way – a human is born with a set… Read more »
And people spend HUGE amounts of energy policing and enforcing them.
Only real men can wear pink 😉 That’s a sad little story, and I suppose everyone experienced this to a degree. I wore long hair as a toddler, until my mom cut it off because of a worrying/nagging grandmother who was worried about my masculine credentials at age 2 (the irony being that her controlling style and emotional grip over my mother made it quite difficult to experiment with regular (dangerous!) boy stuff later on…). I applaud the mom for giving that space, and I hope she’ll be as supportive when her son will wonder about how to be man… Read more »
She makes point 1, yes. I happen to agree with her there, for the most part. But I don’t think either she, or we, are trying to make point 2? At least, if I’ve understood what you’re saying. I think that all of us are saying ostracisation behaviour is (sadly) something that human beings come with built-in (to varying degrees from person to person) and that needs to be taught out of kids rather than into them. But the question is, what are the “transgressions” that the kids ostracise other kids for, and how do they choose those? I think… Read more »
This a reply to the whole debate between you, Cheradenine, and Clarence, really, but I wasn’t sure where to post so I’ll just reply here. I read in Delusions of Gender (although I don’t have a link of reference to the specific research handy, but I could try to find it if anyone’s interested), that the current evidence suggests that children do have an innate instinct to figure out which gender they belong to and how this gender is supposed to behave, but the specific behaviours are a result of what they observe in the society around them. From a… Read more »
Cheradenine: A. First, I think some things ARE innate, but no it doesn’t get down to “blue” and “pink”. I’d say the evidence is much stronger as an example for biological differences in what toys AND how they play with those toys between the average boy and girl. B. But more to the point what i am arguing HERE is that the “kyriarchy” is being setup by children based on the persecution of those who are different. And THIS PERSECUTION appears to be an innate human trait. The Womanist Musings piece is thus -it appears to me- making two arguments:… Read more »
Clarence, you say “I don’t agree”, but I think you’re actually in agreement? 🙂 I mean, I agree that children have a very strong instinct to follow what everyone else around them is doing, and ostracise anyone who doesn’t — and that the ostracisation is simply for “being different” or “breaking the rules”. But Noah’s point is strong too: the kids are enforcing what they observe to be the cultural rules, which, as you yourself say, they are taught by their culture — it’s not (as some claim) that they’re expressing some inbuilt biological urge, that somehow having a Y… Read more »
Alas:
I don’t agree. Children seemed wired to notice “difference”. It’s true that if the culture was otherwise and all boys wore nail polish – well then, some boy who didn’t would be the scapegoat. Children may be taught what is “normal” by their culture but they aren’t taught to notice what is abnormal. That is merely human nature. And yes, I suspect this poor lad will start learning about the kyriarchy really quickly unless he becomes very good at defending himself. 🙁
This. So much this.
It addresses a key point of the entire gender-role bullshit sandwich that I think often gets overlooked: If these behaviors and roles are supposedly so innate and natural and bred into us by cavemen whose societies resembled 1950s sitcoms, then why do we need to expend so much energy policing and enforcing them?