Why Canít Boys Be Girls?
Christina Hoff Sommers writes about failed efforts to "sensitivity train" boys into girls:
ìAn ëequity facilitatorí tried to persuade a group of nine-year-old boys in a Baltimore public school to accept the idea of playing with baby dolls. According to one observer, ëTheir reaction was so hostile, the teacher had trouble keeping order.í And then there was Jimmy. At age 11, this San Francisco sixth grader was made to contribute a square to a class quilt ëcelebrating women we admire.í He chose to honor tennis player Monica Seles who, in 1993, was stabbed on the court by a deranged fan of Steffi Graf. Jimmy handed in a muslin square festooned with a tennis racket and a bloody dagger. His square may be unique in the history of quilting, but his teacher did not appreciate its originality and rejected it.A 2001 special issue of Scientific American reviewed the growing evidence that childrenís play preferences are, in large part, hormonally determined. Researchers confirmed what parents experience all the time: Even with counter-conditioning, boys and girls gravitate toward very different toys. ...The entire anthropological record offers not a single example of a society where females have better spatial reasoning skills and males better verbal skills, where females are fixated on objects and men on feelings, or where males are physically docile and females aggressive.î
A quote in her piece from Lionel Tiger, one of my favorite anthropologists, sums it up pretty well: ìBiology is not destiny, but it is good statistical probability.î
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
(My blog's temporarily dead. It will resurrect itself hopefully by tomorrow...)
Anyway, the record is mostly true, but what about gay boys who have GID? Conditioning children to behave in a certain way will anger them, and they're born with most of their behavior skills already. Why not make girls behave like boys? That'd be interesting...
Cecile at August 10, 2003 1:32 PM
What's GID?
There already are girls who behave like boys -- the ones whose beauty routine is limited to giving their mustaches a little twirl or two.
Amy Alkon at August 10, 2003 2:20 PM
My only edit to Hoff's comment about how "the entire anthropological record offers not a single example where females have better spatial reasoning skills and males better verbal skills [...]" would be: ON AVERAGE. There are probably a lot of exceptions to the general pattern. For example, I'm fairly strong in both spatial and verbal reasoning. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I'm a fairly girly male homosexual?
Drugs, not hugs,
Lena
PS: WHAT is GID? A new sexually transmitted disease? Where can I get a copy?
Lena Cuisina at August 10, 2003 5:20 PM
(My blog's back up.) GID = Gender Identity Disorder. Aka premature gayness. The boy I knew dressed like a girl and was in "Special" Pre-K with me. (I couldn't talk until I was four.)
Unless a kid is "special", you can't force them to act the opposite sex.
Cecile at August 11, 2003 12:06 AM
I think kids should just be allowed to be themselves. If a boy wants to play with dolls, let him. If he wants to play with guns, let him. I played GI Joe and Star Wars with my brother, and I turned out to be quite feminine and very heterosexual, and he had no problems playing "house" with me, though he generally wanted to be the dog more than the dad, but he still ended up straight and married to a woman. You can't push kids. You also can't have a "fear" that they're going to end up "gay", because that makes it seem as though there's something wrong with them, and kids have enough trouble in their lives without worrying about what their parents think is "normal". They also don't need to be stigmatized if they end up as something other than what their parents wanted for them, ie, being homosexual rather than straight. If kids don't feel that they can communicate with their parents about the stuff going on inside of them, it really limits their personalities, and you get those people who walk around moaning that their kids don't tell them anything.
Long rant over.
Clarkified at August 11, 2003 7:33 AM
Dear Clarkified --
Does your brother still prefer to be the dog, rather than the dad?
Lena Cuisina
Lena Cuisina at August 11, 2003 8:58 AM
"Does your brother still prefer to be the dog, rather than the dad?"
LOL...uh, actually...he has a dog now who he calls "Your Niece". "Your niece just tore the backyard up today..." "Your niece just knocked my wife over..." "Your niece just learned how to stay..."
He's a pretty reluctant father still, but he's learning on the dog, and they're talking about having kids. I don't know why he always wanted to be the dog when we played, but the story line was always that an intruder was trying to come in, and he, the dog, would have to save me and the kids from certain terror. At least he's stopped kicking his leg when he scratches himself behind his ears.
Clarkified at August 11, 2003 9:29 AM
Funny, Cuisina. Actually, dad and dog have a lot in common; for example, the frequent application of a rolled-up newspaper for not obeying the lady of the house.
Amy Alkon at August 11, 2003 1:50 PM
What is "gender identity disorder"? A way to get insurance companies to reimburse shrinks for doing therapy with trannies.
Someone told me last week that the American Psychiatric Association is now trying to establish a new diagnostic category called something like "relationship disorder," basically because insurance companies do not like to reimburse shrinks for listening to people like me complain about men. Little do they know that I coined a term for this condition YEARS ago, complete with acronym: IBS (Icky Boyfriend Syndrome). Having recovered from end-stage IBS earlier this year, I am now working diligently on another diagnostic category that will allow my best friend to receive full mental health coverage as she's trying to finish her weekly column. It's called Parentheses Proliferation Psychosis, or P3. The most common symptom is the tendency to use parentheses 2-3 times per sentence. There is no known cure for this dreaded condition, but massive administrations of potato chips and flavored mayonaisse from France appear to have some palliative value.
Lena Cuisina at August 11, 2003 11:34 PM
I don't do that (often) do I? (Perhaps if someone had delivered honey dijon potato chips tonight, I could have been well into recovery now.) Alas, I continue to suffer from PPP (as, in turn do we all). (What can be done?)
(Amy Alkon) at August 12, 2003 12:43 AM
I have a variation of P3 myself. (rising out of metal folding chair, facing room) My name is Patrick... and I... I use dashes excessively. (Meekly resumes sitting.)
I'll be typing along about something, and then there's this comment I REALLY need to interject, and there it goes... sandwiched in between those damned dashes. The device is all right in its place, but when the digression becomes so long that readers forget what the topic of the sentence was, it becomes awkward. Worse still, I tend to do the same thing in conversation. I will be talking about something, interject with an aside, and then go off on the tangent for so long, I'll end without returning to the original topic.
On my fitness page - that I'm still working on and haven't posted yet - I think I'm in the running for the world's longest "aside." See for yourself. Taken from my FAQ, when I'm answering a question about the dangers of smoking:
"Since your capillaries are the 'drop-off/pick-up' points for the red blood cells -- where oxygen and nutrients are dropped off, waste products such as lactic acid are removed and fat is carried off to be used as fuel -- constricting the vessels means that all of these functions are done with less efficiency."
I think I'll call my condition TDS or "Terminal Dash Syndrome" -- note the true beauty of this acronym: it sounds like "tedious" -- for the sake of those that like giving clinical terms to relatively harmless idiosyncracies.
Patrick at August 12, 2003 3:23 AM