The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

  Boys have not changed much over the past two decades. But the reaction to them has. The instinct to negate them has triumphed. Even the literature on the boys’ crisis has generated a self-feeding loop; the plea for boys turns inevitably to warning. Fear is the first response, rife even among their defenders, and after the fear comes the blame, two brands of it: right-wing and left-wing. At the beginning of the debate The War Against Boys was explicitly a critique of feminism. Boys were the new girls, limited and despised by a generalized misandry, a politically correct fury that, in its zeal to tear down the patriarchy, simply forgot that men are people. The sociologist Michael Kimmel, a leading theorist of masculinity, has offered the other perspective, first in his 2008 book, Guyland, and again in 2013’s Angry White Men. Kimmel argues that the residue of patriarchy drives young men to despair and self-destruction. The old codes, the macho, the defensive response to a changing world, “the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed” are the primary culprits.

  Neither approach is satisfying when you actually have a kid you’re trying to deal with. “Traditional masculinity,” as I have understood it my entire life, and indeed as I see it for most of human history, involves wanting to succeed at school, and at everything else for that matter. On the other hand, the idea that boys face some kind of serious reverse discrimination is deluded. Fitting boys into an inverted victimology inherited from an outmoded gender war isn’t helpful. If there is a war on boys, who is the army arrayed against them? Was my son’s teacher the enemy? She certainly didn’t think so, and neither do I. She wanted the best for my boy, without a doubt. She just wanted less mess. She wanted quiet. The problem was that she had no idea how to deal with the boyishness except to contain it, to wish it away.

  Not that I had any better ideas, at least not at first. After the conversation with his teacher I had a good look at my son and the boys around him. There are problem boys in this world. There are boys with attention-deficit disorders and anxiety disorders, boys who genuinely need medication. There are boys with autism and boys who are plain devils. My boy is not one of them. My boy is a typical boy. He’s the boy Tom Waits was thinking of when he wrote about the little boys who never comb their hair. I was this same boy.

  My son never combs his hair. He runs in, smelling of mud and rain, and throws his jacket and shoes on the floor as he rushes upstairs to find the page in a book of the world’s most dangerous animals that he has been thinking about all day, to see which is deadlier: the anaconda or the black mamba. He doesn’t want to sit. He doesn’t want to do crafts. He wants to walk in the light forests with their dark margins. He wants to talk to his friends about movies. He wants to play video games and wrestle on the beach. In short, he’s a boy—physical, tribal, tender, restless, testing his limits. When I looked at my son’s school, at his life, I saw a basic failure even to recognize that his boyish nature existed. (And yes, the black mamba is deadlier, by far.)

  * * *

  The distinction between the nature of boys and the nature of girls could not be more clear or more vague. It is tied to an ultimately intractable conundrum: How different are men and women? Are we men and women first, or are we people who happen to be men and women? Do we belong to different species, or do we have different decorations? Are boys and girls distinct in their essences or only by accident of birth? These are questions to which the answers may be unknowable.

  Even the Bible doesn’t have an answer, or rather it has two conflicting answers. In Genesis 1:27 God makes Adam and Eve together, simultaneously, in the image of himself: “Male and female created he them.” In 2:18 Eve is explicitly created as an addendum, a “help meet” made from Adam’s rib for his service. So are men and women both created in the image of God, or only men? Obviously an emphasis on either of these two passages produces distinct visions of the nature of humanity, and a whole array of contradictory political and aesthetic consequences follow.

  You don’t have to read Genesis to be confused. Scientific approaches to the nature of gender distinction have replicated the duality, rephrasing the question rather than answering it. In 2013 a data analyst and a professor of psychology, Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis, applied mathematical modeling to the question of the difference between men and women. They undertook a large metastudy, a study of all the other studies on gender differences, and established which were “taxonic,” meaning nonarbitrary biological categories, and which were “dimensional,” showing qualitative differences along a spectrum. Applying these competing models to a huge array of issues, including virtually every kind of psychological indicator and personality trait, sexual attitudes, the capacity for empathy, levels of intimacy with friends and family, even physical strength, led to the same conclusion: “In all instances the dimensional approach prevailed.” Differences between men and women are not essential but exist along a spectrum.

  All is a very big number. It almost amounts to a conclusion. “Gender differences on average are not under dispute,” Carothers and Reis acknowledge. “The idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is. That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex.” The purely biological differences between men and women are negligible, or at least are much smaller than we might have thought. The title of Carothers and Reis’s paper? “Men and Women Are from Earth.”

  Six months after the release of “Men and Women Are from Earth” an extensive study of the brain scans of 949 male and female youths came to the opposite conclusion: “The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood.” The way the brain signals across sides is different for men and women.

  To summarize: the latest evidence, from the best sources, establishes that we are more or less the same but also completely and utterly different. The answers to the question of gender difference are as unsatisfying as they have ever been. Archaic religion and the latest science has to offer are equally baffling. Gender theory is no more helpful than either, reflecting the same impossible duality. Judith Butler famously argued that gender is a “cultural fiction” or, in the pseudo-philosophical language that infected academia in her time, “performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs.” Later Butler attempted to clarify, claiming that “the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.” But the contradiction remains in force, undermining the whole project of gender studies. Gender is both a performance and not. This is knowledge, but it is not the kind of knowledge that helps.

  Total theoretical incoherence is not necessarily a failing; it may be intellectual honesty. Among the differences between men and women there are biological realities; there are performances of gender; there are performances repeated so often that they feel like biological realities. Separating these distinctions is not always possible. Gender, as a concept, is inherently elusive. If somebody tells you there is no biological difference between men and women, he is wrong. If somebody else tells you she knows what the nature of that difference is, she too is wrong.

  * * *

  As we approach equality, the nature of gender does not become clearer. Rather the opposite. How we live gender and how we think about it are divided across a chasm. We may believe that the differences between men and women are elusive, but we cannot act as if they are. That trickiness confronts anyone trying to educate boys and girls.

  In the 1990s Butler’s ideas, or rather a crude version of them, bled down into the substrata of pedagogic assumption. Hers was one of the rare academic theories to translate into widespread change. When it comes to gender, “nature” is not something anybody wants to talk about anymore. The intellectual basis for institutional equality—anyth
ing boys can do, girls can do—runs on an assumption of biological equality and gender as a performance. Simple vanity also had something to do with the triumph of those assumptions. The dominance of nurture elevates teachers’ social status; they become capable of correcting historical injustices, weeding out antiquated prejudices, and altering the world by using its most malleable and powerful change agents: young minds. If the inequities of gender are primarily cultural, then the solution is to impose a different culture. Teachers therefore become trench warriors because boys and girls have to be treated the same in school in order that men and women will be treated the same in society at large. Equality is sameness. Sameness is fairness.

  Children are the repositories of our utopian hopes about gender, as about many things. A couple in Toronto achieved a kind of semifame by rendering their utopianism explicit: they are raising one of their children without gender. Storm’s gender is known only to them and a few select friends. “A tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place?),” the parents posted on Facebook. Storm’s parents seem sweet, living off the grid northeast of Parry Sound, Ontario, worrying about the media circus they inevitably caused, recording what Storm likes and dislikes, sharing their doubts about Storm’s inability to consent to be non-gender-assigned. I try never to judge parents who are loving, as Storm’s parents obviously are. Children are entitled to love in their upbringing, not intelligence. Nonetheless gender refusal—or, to put it another way, the refusal to gender-diagnose—seems to me to be the height of folly. Rather than remove gender from Storm’s life, they have made it the whole subject of his or her existence. Storm was a monster for Halloween, the parents posted. Is that something boys do, or girls?

  Storm’s gender-neutralizing is an extension of standard parental folly. His or her parents imagine that by changing the name, they will change the child. At age two my son became obsessed with heavy machinery, with the distinctions between a front-end loader and a dump truck, between a semi and an eighteen-wheeler. He did so with exactly zero male modeling. I know nothing about cars or trucks or construction; my father had a PhD in semantics, and my father-in-law is a highly uncoordinated newspaper columnist. No man in my son’s life could have told him how a front-end loader works. No man in his life had ever owned a truck. Nonetheless the boy played with front-end loaders and trucks. My daughter, at the age of eighteen months, started playing with dolls, even though there was an equally prevalent absence of female modeling for her. One day she was in a shoe store and simply grabbed a doll off the shelf. Now she needs to put the doll to bed before she will go to sleep.

  These choices were theirs, I believe. At least I know they weren’t mine. I follow in the slipstreams of their behavior, as I believe most parents do.II And I’m not sure that the choices I took to be gendered were anywhere near the most important. At one point my daughter fell in love with her soiled diapers and wouldn’t let us throw them out. There was also a time when she liked to lead her friends out of the schoolyard on wild adventures just beyond whatever fence she was explicitly told not to pass. At three she sometimes likes to jump up and down on my chest, smashing her heels into me, to see if she can knock the wind out of me. She stares into my eyes to see if she’s hurting me. My son used to take off his clothes while we were visiting museums and run away from us, naked, for a laugh. This isn’t gender weirdness. It’s kid weirdness. It’s person weirdness.

  One of the stranger fantasies of our moment—a necessary illusion perhaps—is that we are in control of who our children are, what they become, and what they mean. This is one of those widespread notions that we accept even though it contradicts all evidence and common sense, like the bizarre idea that people are supposed to be happy—a nearly ubiquitous belief that finds no support in the medical or historical records.

  Children are people, a fact that eludes almost all discussion. They possess the fundamental mystery of their particularity—the mystery that lies at the root of human dignity. Occasionally my three-year-old daughter will insist that I shave. She will stand at the top of the stairs and shout, “Daddy shave, Daddy shave, Daddy shave.” And I inevitably do shave. She’s always right anyway; I do need a shave when she screams for it. What does this mean? That she will grow up to be a hairdresser? That she will grow up to be bossy? That I have shaped her relationship to facial hair forever? No doubt I am changing my daughter. But who can say how? I remember my son drinking his first sip of soda water. He considered it. “This water’s sunburned,” he said. (I later purloined this line for a short story.) Where could such a phrase, sunburned water, have come from? The expected surprise and the unbearable exhilaration of growth are the substance of lived temporality. Hold on to your children because you cannot hold on to them: they will never be exactly like this again.

  * * *

  The desire to erase gender distinction is a simple, logical extension of the desire for gender equality on all terms. But the approach to equality, which is at bottom an attempt to treat men and women as fully human, settles eventually into an unsatisfying lack of clarity. In a patriarchal society in which children are raised in patriarchal schools by patriarchal parents, one could simply assume that the difference between boys and girls is the inevitable result of the educational system. But gender distinctions between children still emerge even when those patriarchal ideas are ruthlessly rooted out.

  The day care my son attended in Toronto was scrupulously politically correct. How politically correct? One day government inspectors came by to see that all the regulations were being fulfilled, and they found two infringements: that there weren’t enough dolls of color available to the children and that there weren’t enough positive images of people with disabilities. The day care could have been shut down for either. So the next morning, before any children showed up, a huge picture of an African-American kid in a wheelchair playing tennis was hung over the front door. Even in an institution so scrupulous about the political acceptability of the representations it permitted, the first day I dropped my son off I noticed all the little girls sitting at a table dressing dolls while the little boys were running around the table, kicking each other, having folded the dolls into the shape of guns.III

  Difference has a tendency to assert itself, despite what we might wish. There is solid evidence that gender separation in schools helps both boys and girls. A 2013 study conducted in Korea, which admits children to coed or single-sex schools randomly (removing self-selection bias), came to the conclusion that “attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools, rather than attending coeducational schools, is significantly associated with higher average scores on Korean and English test scores.” Educators have known for generations that boys and girls need different things to be successful in the classroom. The differences in need can be broad—boys need more structure—but they can also be surprisingly elemental; for instance, boys do better in cooler rooms, and girls do better in warmer rooms. The boys’ crisis is another example of the old lesson Nature asserts itself. Always. The conscious effort of so many individuals and institutions to impose equality between boys and girls has revealed the reality of gender difference by contrast.

  Thrown out the door for criminal behavior, gender distinction returns like the prodigal son, to be feasted, its reputation somewhat restored. The prodigal return of difference cuts to the most sensitive spot in our lives: the kids. The son of two moms who turns into the hockey jock. The daughter of the feminist professor of the sociology of gender who won’t leave the house unless dressed completely in pink. We’ve all seen it. And the research confirms the anecdotes. Studies from as early as the 1970s found that boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. For many years it was assumed that the difference between boys and girls was simply the product of deep-seated cultural mechanisms. In 2002, however, two evolutionary psychologists, Gerianne Alexander and Melissa Hines, noticed a significant exception to the gender division in playtime. A
genetic disorder occasionally led to higher levels of androgen in the womb than normal, and mothers who were prescribed hormone treatments during pregnancy showed the same increases. The daughters of these mothers overwhelmingly preferred to play with boys and with their toys. Did socialization therefore not have as profound an effect on toy selection as previously believed? What if the differences in play couldn’t be explained by the assumptions placed on children? What if the explanation was simpler, deeper?

  Alexander and Hines decided to look beyond the merely human. At the UCLA/Sepulveda Veterans Administration Nonhuman Primate Laboratory they offered eighty-eight vervet monkeys living in seven different social groups a set of six toys: a ball, a police car, a doll, a cooking pot, a picture book, and a stuffed dog. The ball and the police car were categorized as “masculine,” the pot and doll were “feminine,” and the book and stuffed dog were neutral. They found that both male and female monkeys approached all the toys, but male monkeys played more with the boy toys and girl monkeys played more with the girl toys. A similar test in 2008 using rhesus monkeys further supported Alexander and Hines’s theory that the gender distinction in human modes of play evolved on the primate level. Since the 1970s, as gender roles in the culture at large have expanded, children’s toys have become more gendered and more traditional. Every boy a truck driver and every girl a princess. The Disney Store has a boys’ page and a girls’ page on its website.

  This distinction in styles of play and toy preferences may seem only a curiosity, but its consequences are profound, because style of play leads to the development of gender identities, both cognitively and socially. Boys play with boys and girls play with girls, and the split is evidence not of a symptom but of a cause of difference. Play is the beginning of work. Play is more serious than work, because play is the underlying meaning of all that work can be. A child in the rapture of deep play should never be interrupted. Playing children re-create, with each game, that terrible seismic moment, whose consequences remain to be worked out, when mammals began to shape the world. Every little girl who organizes a tea party is rebuilding, from scratch, the whole of civil society. Every boy who builds a backyard fort remakes all of Rome. Adults laugh at the self-styled seriousness of infant efforts, the tender concentration of little fingers investigating the line between immanence and transcendence. They should remember that all human efforts are laughable.