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.
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.’
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.… Read more »
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 😉
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.
To clarify something… they are not raising Storm with NO gender. They are merely not telling OTHER ppl what Storm’s gender is, so ppl will not buy pink clothes or dolls for Storm b/c they think zie is a girl or buy trucks and planes b/c they think zie is a boy. :3
The misconception started w/ the Daily Mail picking up the Star story and continued on from there to the View, etc : They aren’t raising Storm genderless nor are they forcing Storm to be genderless.
darn it I can’t edit but I wanted to say something about the linked article on race…(and something besides the flaws of many of the studies cited)…
When the articles says, “Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.” it is succinctly stating about race what I was trying to state about sex.
“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. ” We don’t know for sure about A, but even if we say it is, we force people who, through no fault of their own, don’t fit the median way of being that gender. As for B, well, that is us who make a fucking big deal of that. No wonder kids think it’s the most… Read more »
The_L: Good news: http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/products/default.aspx
It’s a bit more than $100 though.
I myself can’t wait until my kids gets old enough to be trusted to not eat any of the parts.
Ozymandias:
While I won’t worry about calling Asian people “yellows” (whites tend to be “pinkish” , blacks can be light brown (nearly white skin) to nearly coal complexion, so if I’m going by skin color…!) , I will say that I agree with your last two paragraphs, which are far more nuanced than I expected in this kind of a conversation. I suppose then, I should say that since we’ve made our points and reached some understanding I am done with the derail 🙂
Clarence: First, of course, it’s really offensive to call Asian people “yellows.” It depends on what you mean by “racism is a one-way boat.” I do believe that the primary form of racism in our society is against people who are non-white; that is the form of racism our instutitions and cultural narratives tend to tacitly support. However, just because someone is non-white doesn’t given them a free pass against being racist; a black person may be racist against (for instance) Asians, and I have known quite a few people bullied by prejudiced people for being white. I do believe… Read more »
If we’re going into the race derail, I agree to an extent that pride for things you can’t control is silly, but I also agree that being proud of being the powerful group (whatever it is) is actively harmful. Not to say you should feel ashamed for being white, but it’s like feeling proud for being rich; you didn’t earn that money, and you shouldn’t think that just because you have that money you’re better than other people, at least partly because if you did you’d be much more harmful than a poor person who thinks poor people are especially… Read more »
I do not want to side track the thread with a race discussion but I should clarify how I used it. I only wanted to show that differences in sex is more distinct than, for example, differences in skin color. So when ozymandis says, “that the groups are based on skin color as opposed to equally arbitrary considerations like eye color is a result of America being a racist society.” it shows me that we agree on the issue of race. This is the way I am using race. This is how I intended my example using race to be… Read more »
..should be “…denigration of other races”
Ozymandias: My critique is that racism is not eliminated by only allowing racism to go one way. I think that with you racism is very much a one way boat. I totally deny that entire paradigm (In short, I am not a fan of Tim Wise) and while a child of mine would be taught equalism and history no child of mine would be made to feel guilt due to her or his race or mixture of races. And I wouldn’t find racial pride abhorrent in blacks, whites, or yellows provided said racial pride was not accompanied by racial denigration.… Read more »
Ozy: Thats a good point, but the implication seemed to be that “only white people can be racist” (though I admit I might be reading the article wrong, my brain’s not where it should be today)
Clarence: But that’s exactly the attitude that the study finds counter-productive. It’s impossible to be completely color-blind in a racist society– if you don’t talk about race with your kids, they are very likely to pick up the cultural messges that white people are better than black people. Similarly, even if consciously you try to ignore race, your unconscious biases may come into play (which almost all people have– have you read about Implicit Associatiion Tests? The evidence is suggestive, at least). Color-blindness is a simplistic way to view race; awareness of how race– institutionalized racism, unconscious racism, explicit racism–… Read more »
Paul: Given that what their race is is likely to be a confounding variable in how children perceive race, I don’t see why necessarily limiting it to one race is a bad thing, although followup studies about how, for instance, black or Asian children perceive race would be very interesting.
Ozy: “That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If “black pride” is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It’s horrifying to imagine kids being “proud to be white.” Yet many scholars argue that’s exactly what children’s brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not… Read more »
I don’t know what clarence saw, but the fact that it seems that only white families were used in this study (I think? the article mentions “white parents”) is a bit of a flag for me
Edit: Should’ve added “because I lost such a great outlet for creativity” in the first paragraph as the reasoning behind my weeping, not playing house.
debaser71,
At least in linguistics and the psychology of language, this is no longer the consensus view, not even among evolutionary-minded people. Many current approaches reject modularity assumptions and try to explain the relevant phenomena using general cognitive principles such as statistical learning, analogy, and theory of mind.
I remember, as a young boy, sometimes my sister and I combined our toys together (her with barbies and other related dolls) and me with Godzilla, Gi-Joes, etc and we’d play house. Goodness, those were fun times. I really enjoyed the pleasure derived from constructing a story out of those situations. My sister loved it too. At least, for a bit. Then she no longer wanted to do those things as she found them stupid and boring. Needless to say, I weeped a little because there’s nothing more fun than constructing a story out of something with another person filled… Read more »