by Sam Sommers
EVEN IF YOU AREN’T swayed by the argument that gender norms cause gender differences, there’s little doubt that societal expectations about gender exaggerate the disparities that do exist. Whether it’s math performance, aggression, or spatial skill, reminding people how men and women are “supposed to” act exacerbates gender gaps.
And such gender-based norms are so ubiquitous that they pop up when you least expect them. Like at the drive-thru window. There are plenty of questions I’ve come to expect when ordering fast food: “Do you want to Supersize that?” “What drink to go with your combo?” “You do know that eating this shaves a month off your life expectancy, right?” But “Boys or girls?” isn’t one of them.
Yet that’s what I was asked the last time I forsook nutritional concern for culinary expedience in the midst of a family road trip. I was so caught off guard after ordering two kids’ meals that I literally had to ask the drive-thru attendant to repeat his question, and it had nothing to do with the sound quality of his milkshake-shaped intercom.
When I pressed him as to why he needed to know, he explained that he had to figure out which prize to include in their Happy Meals. I’ll admit that the actual toys my girls received—action figures of some sort—seemed more or less innocuous. But why do drive-thru attendants need to know whether I have boys or girls? Can’t they just ask, “Toy boat or toy pony?” If gender norms run rampant at the drive-thru window, is there anywhere we’re immune from them? The idea that Grimace and the Hamburglar are so interested in my kids’ genitals is a little creepy to me.
Simply put, it’s hard for us to see the world without getting hung up on gender. Again, just think about how people react to newborns, even when quilts aren’t involved. The first thing anyone wants to know after—or even before—a baby is born is the drive-thru window question: boy or girl? Not weight or hair color. Not whether the youngster was blessed with Mom’s eyes or cursed with Dad’s ears. It’s all about gender.
When my second daughter was born, of all the information on the card they stuck to her bassinet in the hospital nursery, the largest, most easily identifiable font belonged to the “I’M A GIRL” declaration at the bottom (see following page). Not her last name, her parents’ room number, or even her physician’s contact information. No, her gender, printed in bold on an appropriately pink card.
“I’M A GIRL,” the card screams. And don’t you forget it!
You might suggest that it’s only natural to fixate on gender. What else is there to find out after hearing that the baby is healthy? Hair color, complexion . . . those are secondary considerations to the big question of “boy or girl?” Finding out that the baby is eighteen inches long is a mere curiosity; finding out its sex gives you insight into the future. It allows you to start mapping out this little person’s path in life.
And that is precisely my point. Upon learning gender, we set into motion the cycle of expectations that will shadow this individual for life. We ask “boy or girl” to determine what color clothes to send as a gift. To figure out which books or toys would be appropriate. To get a sense of the type of person the baby will become—something we have a hard time pondering without knowing gender.
Things don’t change that much after leaving the hospital, either. Even with infants, passersby always ask whether it’s a little boy or girl in the stroller. Idle curiosity? Perhaps. Or maybe we’re just so used to gender shaping interactions that we’re not sure how to proceed without the information. As I’ve learned, hell hath no fury like the septuagenarian who can’t deduce gender from your baby’s outfit.
“Oh, look at him—he’s so alert,” I often heard when out with our first daughter, presumably because she had so little hair and we refused to Scotch tape a bow to her scalp.
“Yes, she is,” I’d reply.
First would come the automatic apology—as if nothing could be more slanderous than attributing the wrong gender to a six-month-old. But then, inevitably, would follow a testier, more accusatory response, one intended to remind me that the mix-up was my fault all along. Something like, “But wait . . . her outfit has blue airplanes on it?!”
Somewhere, Amelia Earhart just rolled over in her . . . well, wherever she is, she’s not amused, that’s for sure.
SO WHAT, EXACTLY, is the takeaway message of this chapter? It’s not that sex differences are imaginary. It’s not that celebrating the unique qualities of men and of women is always problematic. It’s not that you should ignore gender or pretend that everything about little boys and girls is exactly the same.
The real moral is that situations affect even a distinction like male/ female—one that’s endemic to how we see the world and one that seems to have a clear-cut biological basis. The gender differences we learn about early in life aren’t nearly as entrenched as they seem to be. In fact, like so much else in our social universe, they’re highly context-dependent. Much more so than we realize, they’re self-fulfilling, growing out of our own expectations about what men and women are like.
When you think of gender this way, you realize the power you have as a parent, coach, teacher, or manager to shape other people’s sense of what is achievable. You can do this proactively, like the teacher who comes right out and tells his class there are no fixed gender differences in math skill, or who goes out of her way to choose reading books on topics that will appeal to boys as well as girls .21 Or the small-business owner who breaks with precedent, assigning a male employee to organize the office holiday party and a female to research the company’s best options for a technological upgrade.
You can do this reactively, like the father at the store who uses his daughter’s preference for the blue “boys’ bike” as an opportunity to discuss how silly the notion of gender-specific conveyances is in the first place. And you can do this subtly as well, without even saying a word, like the mother who simply refrains from wincing or recoiling when her grade-school-age son cries in public, permitting him to forsake stoicism for a genuinely emotional response to a challenging social encounter.
In sum, what you believe about gender guides not only what your children, charges, and underlings believe, but also how they actually behave. That whole idea Gandhi had about being the change you want to see in the world? It rings particularly true for expectations like those we have for gender.
I’ll admit that here I’m offering only a vague prescription for action: believe that gender doesn’t invariably dictate or limit human potential and those around you will follow suit. So I’ll leave you with three more specific pieces of advice, all particularly relevant to interacting with kids, the most impressionable and malleable of us all:
1) Keep an eye out for gender norms. Because, I’m telling you, they’re everywhere.
It’s not that norms per se are bad—as I said earlier, they’re the grease that keeps the machinery of society moving. It’s easier to handle new situations when we know what’s expected of us and what to expect of those around us. But when it comes to gender, while norms may simplify life, their side effects are far more trouble than they’re worth. Almost without fail, gender norms pigeonhole and they patronize.
Don’t fall for the line that some gender expectations are positive. Even the so-called good ones cause problems. For instance, what does it mean to suggest that women are nurturing? It implies that they’re inferior when it comes to bottom-line thinking, tough decisions, and other aspects of leadership in realms like politics and business. It feeds the mentality that often pits femininity and professional success against each other.
Newly aware that gendered messages are everywhere, keep looking for them on your quilts and in your Happy Meals, in storybooks and on TV, on store shelves and websites that insist on separate categories of “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys.” And even in the romantic musings of the sentimental crooner, who, in the midst of advising fathers to be good to their daughters, also asserts that “boys you can break; you find out how much they can take.” John Mayer’s “Daughters”
is a catchy song, but as with a lot of popular music, the lyrics offer surprising lessons. Like the idea that girls are fragile by comparison, or at least lacking in resilience. Not to mention the insight that Mayer, of all people, apparently subscribes to the Full Metal Jacket school of raising sons.
You can’t shield your kids or anyone else from gender norms. But half the battle is knowing what to look for and preparing yourself for conversations about messages that otherwise go unchallenged. Ask your children what they think the moral of the movie is. Talk to them when you hear them describe any activity, school subject, or profession as the domain of just one gender. Have the challenging conversations that we often shy away from because they’re uncomfortable or controversial. If you don’t, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Corporate America will.
2) Emphasize similarity as well as difference. We get so caught up in the real and obvious physical differences between the sexes that we lose sight of the conclusion that when it comes to how we think and act, men and women are more similar than different. Consider the average classroom. Think about how many of our grade-school days began with “Good morning, boys and girls.” Or how often we heard “Well, the girls are doing a nice job of cleaning up, but the boys still have some work to do.”
Now think about how dumb those comments really were.
As University of Texas psychologist Rebecca Bigler points out, the more teachers emphasize a social category like gender, the more kids come to develop stereotypes about the groups in question.22 Girls are good listeners and boys can’t sit still. Math is for boys and reading is for girls. It doesn’t really matter what the category is: keep dividing the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed teams or comparing left-handed versus right-handed students, and soon enough kids will read between the lines and start to think that these groups, too, share other defining qualities beyond the strictly physical, like personality type or aptitude. Drawing unnecessary distinctions by gender produces the same sort of outcome.
Am I making mountains out of molehills? Isn’t “Good morning, boys and girls” innocuous? Well, at the very least, you must admit it’s a pointless turn of phrase. It conveys no more information than “Good morning, children.” If it’s so harmless and trivial, ask yourself what sort of job action would be faced by the teacher who began class with “Good morning, white kids and black kids.” Or who formed teams for a competition by pitting against each other students living with two parents and those living with one.
Parents talking with their kids about gender and other social distinctions makes sense. So does teachers consciously creating school lesson plans that will appeal to a range of interests and learning styles. But publicly drawing distinctions when they’re not necessary or relevant is counterproductive. Treat your children or class or workforce like a unit and they’ll respond in kind. Think and speak of them as factions and they’ll do the same.
3) Finally, and briefly, don’t find out your baby’s sex. I realize this makes me a contrarian: in the birthing class we took the first time my wife was pregnant, we were the only couple out of fifteen not to know. I’ve heard the arguments for finding out sex: everyone says that they just want to be prepared when it comes to names, clothes, nursery décor, and the like.
But that’s the crux of the matter. What, really, is there to prepare for? What color onesie is your newborn son going to object to? What toy will your three-month-old daughter deem too masculine to jam into her mouth? Once they’re born, you can’t shield kids from gendered expectations, so at least give them a reprieve in the womb. As soon as they arrive, the floodgates will open: dolls and books for girls; building blocks and action figures for boys. For now, just pick two names and wait it out like in the old days.
I admit, when I’ve shared this philosophy with others, their reaction tends to be lukewarm at best. I hate surprises, I’ve been told. We just want to learn as much about our child as we can, the argument goes. But parenting is all about surprises. All you will learn from the discovery of your fetus’s sex is the nature of your own preconceived notions about gender. Our very resistance to not knowing a baby’s sex ahead of time just goes to show how attached we are to seeing the world through the lens of gender.
When you don’t find out the sex of your unborn child, you buy nine more months of freedom from preconceived notions, old wives’ tales, and urban legends. And with every puzzled question you hear from well-meaning friends and relatives—But how will you know what color to paint the nursery? Then what type of gift should I buy? Is it still OK to give you the soccer ball pajamas I picked out?—you’ll be reassured that you made the right decision. When you don’t allow yourself (or those around you) to be guided by expectation, you realize just how much you lean on that crutch in the course of ordinary thought and daily interaction.
6.
LOVE
IT’S AMAZING WHAT PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF, FOR BETTER and for worse. In our relatively brief time on this planet, we’ve exhibited an astounding capacity for the terrific but also the terrible. The constructive but also the destructive. The Taj Majal but also The Tyra Banks Show.
In other words, human potential falls along a broad continuum. We’re born with a flexible fate, our range of possibilities nearly unlimited. Even as we age, move forward, and choose forks in the road, we retain the potential in our lives for both good and evil, heroism and cowardice, leadership and blind obedience. As you know by now, it’s the power of situations that emerges as a critical yet underappreciated determinant of which directions our lives take.
Thus far, this book has examined the many ways in which context shapes social thought and behavior. The final two chapters will explore the extremes of this continuum of human capacity, focusing on a dichotomy familiar to us all: love and hate. More specifically, this chapter examines the factors that shape our attraction to others and our intimate relationships; the next chapter probes a darker aspect of humanity, namely the prejudices and biases that pervade our interactions with one another.
Both chapters cover familiar terrain in unfamiliar ways. And both offer surprising conclusions that are, in turns, reassuring as well as disconcerting.
FACE/BUTT/WIT
What attracts you to somebody?
It’s a tough question, even if your significant other isn’t hovering over your shoulder as you try to answer it. In fact, it’s the very type of question for which introspection is poorly suited. For a moment, though, pretend this is a Dr. Phil book and try your best to answer: Whether you’re male or female, gay or straight, what are the three most important factors in determining whom you’re attracted to?
I posed the same question to a class of undergraduates. Granted, it can be risky to try to generalize from the anonymous responses of college students—after all, most of the world’s population doesn’t eat cereal for dinner, wear pajamas in public, and consider 10:30 a.m. an early wake-up call. But my guess is that in general terms, there’s plenty that’s similar between their responses and yours, even if specifics and terminology vary.
My students’ answers focused on physical characteristics and personality traits. Here’s a fairly typical set of responses:
Another student—apparently a budding country-and-western lyricist—went with a comparable yet more apostrophe-friendly reply:
Some students were even more specific regarding the precise physical attributes they seek:
I can only assume that response number 3 refers to a certain muscle tone or shapeliness and not simply the mere presence of legs.
All in all, 50 percent of their responses stuck to physical characteristics—including several not suitable for reproduction here if I hope to avoid an NC-17 rating. I suppose that when asking college students anonymous questions about what attracts them to others, one should expect wiseass answers (no pun intended) like “left buttock.”
Another 47 percent of their responses focused on personality or disposition. Among these, “sense of humor” was the most popular, followed closely by “
intelligent” and “warm” or “friendly.” And in a low-standards variation on the same theme, one person simply requested “not a total jerk,” generously leaving the door open for prospective mates with only partial membership in said group.
In short, ask people what leads them to fall for someone, and their answers seem ripped right from the personal ads or one of those matchmaking websites that promises scientific compatibility analysis. They tell you about their ideal partner: personality traits, physical appearance, perhaps a certain, indefinable quality of character or depth of soul. In other words, they talk about attraction in WYSIWYG terms—in some cases, monosyllabically pithy WYSIWYG terms:
Face/butt/wit. This not-so-holy trinity epitomizes 97 percent of my students’ responses about attraction. Just 3 percent of their answers had anything to do with context, such as whether they had recently ended a previous relationship or how much their friends like a prospective mate. I’d bet that your responses were similarly focused on personality and physicality.
But you should know better by now. Attraction, like so much of daily experience, is all about the situation. Face/butt/wit gets you only so far when it comes to matters of the heart, as Lord Byron famously wrote. Or was that Shakespeare?
LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH
We think of love in mystical terms. We romanticize about soul mates, ponder the mysteries of animal magnetism, and deem attraction too magical for rational analysis. We prefer our love packaged Hollywood-style, with predestined couples that persevere through near misses before finally finding each other in the end. You know, like those movies I bury at the bottom of our Netflix queue when my wife isn’t looking.
Our thoughts rarely turn to the more mundane factors that dictate when, where, and with whom we fall in love. Our blissful naïveté on this count makes an easy mark for satire. Consider this tongue-in-cheek headline from The Onion: “18-Year-Old Miraculously Finds Soulmate in Hometown.” The indictment of our head-in-the-clouds take on attraction continues:“They say God puts one special person on this planet who is your one true love,” said Munter, who has left Marinette County twice in his life, both times for marching band competitions in nearby Menominee. “It’s incredible, but I somehow found mine right here in the town where I’ve always lived.”