On a radio talk show interviewing the author of "Man's Brain," a woman listening to the show wrote this entry:
I can't believe I'm hearing this. The "chasm" you talk about between boys and girls is almost completely socially constructed from the day of birth. The emerging understandings of epigenetics and the malleability of active genes within a person's lifetime is showing that there are very few basic behavioral traits that are innate, and those really have little or nothing to do with whether you are born with a penis or vagina.
As a mom of a fourth-grader I see the way the already socially-programmed adults in a child's life push that conformity agenda on children.
You say you know what your gender is before you know your name, but the reality of the large number of people with a "transgender" experience shows that your gender is separate from your reproductive sex anatomy. Again, the "boys vs girls" or "men vs women" behavioral "chasm" is almost completely socially constructed and programmed into people's behavior patterns through a complex system of reward and punishment to conform to societal expectations based on your reproductive anatomy.
My reply:
Some cultures overstate gender differences--Arab society comes to mind, as well as the "thug culture" promoted on MTV…while mainstream American culture normatizes the innate traits of one gender as the ideal for all.
Thus, statements like yours are seemingly egalitarian but they actually enshrine the female mind and demonize the male one. Boys are taught that they're defective girls.
Be honest. Aren't the cultural values you expect our society to teach all children the ones traditionally associated with females? Gentle, collaborative, cooperative, sensitive...
Thus in Europe or Brazil, men and women wear equally revealing swimsuits, while in America, mens' suits hide male sexuality while women's suits are closer to the Euro norm. And--this change is recent. In the 1950s through the 1960s American mens' and womens' swimsuits were similarly revealing. This dramatic change happened later, and correlates with the rise of feminism. It's also true of youth clothing in general now, BTW.
Moreover, the claim that epigenetics proves that it's all socialization is just the latest instantiation of the nurture over nature crowd. While the relative malleability of the human mind enables aberrant cultures to skew developing character, and while one way to skew character is to exaggerate sexual dimorphism--another way is to deny it, as you did.
So while we're malleable, boy are nevertheless bigger and stronger than girls. For example, in pro tennis both men and women train themselves to near-perfection. And while the top women players could mop up the floor with 98% of the world's male players, if there were just one unisex competition today's top women champions would rank no better than 100-200. You're never see them in grand slam tournaments. Yet it's not like the women champions are being discouraged in any way. Far from it. Some of the best-paid athletes on Earth are women athletes.
And didn't you hear the author? Men have 10-15-20 times the level of testosterone that women have, from puberty to death. I remember a show on NPR about a woman who decided she was really a man after having considered herself a radical feminist man-hating lesbian for years. She/he said that she got her first testosterone shot, then walked down the street, and discovered that she'd instantly become the men she'd disparaged for so long--looking at every woman sexually, mentally undressing them, imagining sexual encounters with them. She was horrified and enlightened all at once. Our gender-based hormonal differences have a profound effect on personality.
Human men and women are different because we're descended from ground-dwelling primates. Arboreal primates behave and look relatively similar, because if a troop is attacked up in the trees, the best defense is to jump away in all directions shrieking.
However, all primates that descend to the ground wind up with bigger, more aggressive males, because there you have to mount a defense, and it's ridiculous to expect a pregnant female with a baby on her back to fight a leopard.
I worked in a church nursery for a year once. The children ranged in age from 18 months to 3 years. All the workers agreed that the boys were different from the girls, clearly, obviously, and it was equally clear that none of them were socialized yet.
As for transgender/LGBT differences--those are genetic variations in brain chemistry. Only that church in Topeka that pickets servicemen's funerals holding up signs saying "God hates fags" thinks otherwise these days...and, I suppose, doctrinaire feminists.
You don't have to like the facts of our nature, and you're entitled to be dismayed at these facts. You aren't entitled to reach your opinion through denial of reality, though. That's just what Bush II did, isn't it?
2 comments:
It sounds like feminists have discovered Lysenkoism, the discredited Stalinist-era perversion of genetics -- a subordination of science to politics.
However, it does have a peculiar logical consistency. All their facts flow immediately from their feminist conclusions.
Of course, this does result in an interesting mix of flavors in the hard left Kool-Aid. Since they insist that gender roles are culturally determined (pretty much every culture has distinct masculine/feminine gender roles -- usually a sign of genetic influence) they imply that they are offended and oppressed by most, if not all, cultures. Then they will turn around and pretend that they are “multiculturalists.” Go figure!
That the most fervent multiculturalists are also often doctrinaire feminists is an amusing self-contradiction.
But one trait that distinguishes centrists from ideologues is constant critical self-examination. We continually ask ourselves if our beliefs conflict with each other. We look at new information, such as new studies, and ask if the new info requires us to change anything we believe.
The ideologue always proceeds from his conclusions and tries to shoehorn reality into those conclusions, as you said.
Of course traditionalists can be just as bad. Consider the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a heretical schism from the Mormon church. The FLDS (which has renamed itself but I forget the new moniker) keeps women barefoot and pregnant, with all decisions made by a male hierarchy. It's Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale feminist dystopian novel come true.
Not to mention fundamentalist Muslims, who'd regard the most conservative Amish woman on her way to church as being dress like a whore.
I remember the commonly accepted stereotypes of women back in the '50s, and because of that I understand where militant feminism came from.
Every revolution has its excesses and its Robespierres.
Here's how we'll know when our society has regained it equilibrium as regards women:
when male and female swimsuits are equally revealing, as they were in America for many decades before the 1980s.
I must confess that I have a personal reason for hating American men's swimsuits: I'm a scuba diver, and those tent-like pelvic shrouds simply don't fit under a wetsuit.
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