Why such rancor? It wasn’t as if Pop’s parents were physically reassigning their child’s sex. Nor were they dictating Pop’s choice of toys or clothing. Besides, banning dolls and insisting a girl play solely with trucks is hardly an exercise in equality. Quite the contrary: it disparages the feminine, signals that boys’ traditional toys and activities are superior to girls’. Leaving that misconstrual aside, however, this was not the first time I’d heard the cautionary tale of the over-the-top mother forcing trucks on her despairing daughter in the name of feminism. Always attributed to “a friend of a friend,” it invariably ended with—triumphant drumroll, please!—the girl swaddling and bottle-feeding her truck “babies” (though if conventionally feminine toys were verboten, how did the girls get the bottles anyhow?). It has always smacked to me of urban legend, like the story about poisonous spiders under airplane toilet seats or cell phones sparking fires in gas stations: something that seems as though it ought to be true because it confirms our suspicions about the unnatural consequences that will result from meddling with the natural order of things. Either way, it illustrates how fully biological determinism has come roaring back into fashion.
Doing the math, I realized that the journalists who were most outraged by Pop were the ones who would’ve been the daughters—metaphorically or literally—of 1970s feminists, girls who had been stuffed into endless pairs of shapeless overalls (which in itself would scar a person for life). Their moms had doubtless been well meaning, but their ideals were misguided. And boring. And they backfired: there was no way all those Carries, Terris, Randis, and Jos were going to inflict that neutered femininity on their daughters. When they had children, then—which coincided with marketers’ discovery of the power of microsegmentation by age and sex—they were primed, eager, to embrace the new “postfeminist” girlie-girl. They were beyond the notion of “gender-free” childhood; they no longer needed to squash kids’ inborn preferences in the name of equality, they could vive la différence as Mama N. intended. Good-bye, X; hello, Cinderella.
It is impossible—or at the very least unwise—to explore the culture of girlhood without confronting the question of “nature or nurture” head-on. There have to be innate differences between the sexes, right? How else to explain the Machiavellian manipulations of three-year-old girls or the perpetual motion of preschool boys? How else to understand the male attraction to all things that roll or the female fascination with faces? For most of us, such beliefs are a matter of life experience, grounded in instinct and personal observation rather than a bibliography of double-blind studies. I wanted to know whether there was really something essential and immutable about maleness and femaleness. Are boys and girls destined to be miniature Martians and Venusians? Or are they more like Canadians and Americans: mostly alike except for some weird little quirks, such as how they pronounce the word “about”? And even if the latter turns out to be true and the disparities are minimal, how much—if at all—do we really want to mess with them; how much do we want our children to be products of social engineering? As long as we don’t consider the behaviors and interests of one sex as inferior to the other’s, who cares? Does gender segregation matter, for either the good or the ill? What, I wondered, could science tell me about the stubbornly separate cultures of boys and girls?
To begin to answer those questions, I consulted Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, a fascinating book for which she sifted through more than a thousand studies comparing males’ and females’ brains and behaviors. She was kind enough to offer me a quick remedial lesson in biology. Male fetuses, she explained, are bathed in testosterone in the womb; that signals the reproductive organs to do the guy thing. There is another hormonal spike shortly after birth. Boy babies also tend to be larger (both their brains and bodies) and somewhat fussier than girls and are more vulnerable to illness. For the most part, however, at least in the beginning, the behavior and interests of the two sexes are nearly indistinguishable. Both go gaga over the same toys: until they’re about a year old, they are equally attracted to dolls; and until they’re around three, they show the same interest in actual babies. In other words, regardless of how we dress them or decorate their rooms, when they are tiny, children do not know from pink and blue.
Then the whole concept of labeling kicks in—sometime between the ages of two and three they realize that there is this thing called “boy” and this thing called “girl” and something important differentiates them. But whatever, they wonder, could that be? There is a legendary story about a four-year-old boy named Jeremy, the son of a psychology professor at Cornell, who wore his favorite barrettes to school one day. “You’re a girl,” one of his classmates said accusingly, but the boy stood firm. No, he explained, he was a boy because he had a penis and testicles. The other child continued to taunt him. Finally, exasperated, Jeremy pulled down his pants to prove his point. His tormentor merely shrugged. “Everyone has a penis,” he said. “Only girls wear barrettes.” (Jeremy, incidentally, is probably well into his forties by now and, I imagine, wishes people would stop repeating this anecdote.)
The point is, the whole penis-vagina thing does not hold quite the same cachet among the wee ones as it does among us. Yet if toting the standard equipment is not what makes you male or female, exactly what does?
Well, duh, it’s barrettes.
At least that’s what kids think: it is your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color. Slippery stuff, that. You can see how perilously easy it would be to err: if you wore pink or your mom cut your hair too short, you might inadvertently switch sex. It could happen: until around age five kids don’t fully realize that their own identities (not to mention their anatomies) are fixed. Before that, as far as they’re concerned, you could grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. And they don’t understand that other people’s sex stays the same despite superficial changes—that a man who puts on a dress is still a man—until as late as age seven. “In general, the concept of permanence is hard for children to grasp,” Eliot said. “The prefrontal cortex of the brain is what looks to the future, and that’s the slowest part to develop. Another example would be death: young children have a very hard time understanding that a pet or a person they love who has died is gone forever. They may listen to what you say and seem to get it, but secretly they believe it can change.”
It makes sense, then, that to ensure you will stay the sex you were born you’d adhere rigidly to the rules as you see them and hope for the best. That’s why four-year-olds, who are in what is called “the inflexible stage,” become the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police. Suddenly the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses became more clear to me: developmentally speaking, they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls, when they will latch onto the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity.
Initially, as a parent, I found this came as a bit of a relief. The pod princess that had taken over my daughter’s body did not represent a personal failure on my part; it was entirely unrelated to anything I did or did not do, wear, or say. I couldn’t even blame it on her preschool classmates. Her extremism, it turns out, was natural, something kids will and, apparently, should go through. At the same time, that left me in a quandary: Did that mean my battle to minimize the pink and the pretty had been misguided? Worse than that, was it actually harmful? I flashed on a trip to the grocery store—the O.K. Corral of our Disney Princess showdowns. Daisy had pointed to a Cinderella sippy cup. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she had shouted.
“Mmm-hmm,” I’d said noncommittally.
“Why don’t you like her, Mama?” she had asked. “Don’t you like her blue dress?”
I’d had to admit I did.
She had thought about that. “Then don’t you like her face?”
“Her face is all right,” I’d said, though I was not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child
in thrall to those Teutonic features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”
Over the next forty-five minutes, we would run through that conversation, verbatim, approximately thirty-seven million times, as Daisy pointed out Cinderella Band-Aids, Cinderella paper cups, Cinderella cereal boxes, Cinderella pens, Cinderella crayons, and Cinderella notebooks—all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a three-year-old trapped in a shopping cart—as well as a bouquet of Cinderella Mylar balloons bobbing over the checkout line (any day now, I had muttered to myself, they’ll come out with Cinderella tampons). The repetition had been excessive, even for a preschooler. At the time I’d wondered what it was about my answer that confounded her. Now, in retrospect, I fretted: what if, instead of helping her realize “Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control, and power to the people!” my daughter had been thinking “Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?” By forbidding her immersion in Princess products, had I unintentionally communicated that being female (to the extent that Daisy was able to understand it) was a bad thing? Wasn’t there something else she could cling to, some other way she could assert her femininity, besides dousing herself in Sleeping Beauty perfume? In one kindergarten class I read about, for instance, boys hopped to the front of the room to get their milk at snack time; during art, girls skipped to the shelf where paper was kept. Hopping made you a boy, skipping a girl. Anyone who got it “wrong” was subject to ridicule. That may sound absurd, but really, is it any more random than declaring that only girls can wear skirts?
But the Big Kahuna of sex differences, according to Eliot, is toy choice. Boys push cars, girls push strollers. You even see it in primates. In a 2002 study, researchers gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a police car and a ball), two stereotypically feminine toys (a doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed animal) to forty-four male and forty-four female vervet monkeys. The vervets had never seen the items before and were (obviously) unaware of their connotations. The results? Though males and females were similarly drawn to the neutral items, the males gravitated toward the boy toys, while the females went for the doll and—grrr!—the cooking pot. A fluke? Maybe, but six years later, that finding was replicated by a second group of researchers studying rhesus monkeys. Meanwhile, among us humans, girls who are born with a genetic disorder that causes them to produce high levels of male hormones are more physically active than other girls and favor traditional “boy” toys.
Listening to Eliot, I began to think that the toy makers might be right in gender coding their wares. This was not just business, it was not just marketers’ manipulation. I mean, if boys will be boys and girls will be girls—even among monkeys, for heaven’s sake—there is no point in further discussion, is there? Pop will reveal Popself any day now by becoming obsessed with either Bob the Builder or Barbie (or their Swedish equivalents). And X is fated to remain in the realm of fiction.
That may be where most parents intuitively land, if less ambivalently than I, but it is not the whole story. Toy choice turns out to be one of the largest differences between the sexes over the entire life span, bigger than anything except the preference (among most of us) for the other sex as romantic partners. But its timing and intensity shore up every assumption and stereotype we adults hold: little boys naturally like backhoes, ergo men won’t ask for directions. That blinds us to the larger truth of how deeply those inborn biases are reinforced by a child’s environment.
Eliot’s own research is in something called “neuroplasticity,” the idea that our inborn tendencies and traits, gender-based or otherwise, are shaped by our experience. A child’s brain, she explained, changes on a molecular level when she learns to walk, learns to talk, stores a memory, laughs, cries. Every interaction, every activity, strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others—and the younger the child, the greater the effect. So though kids may be the most rigid about gender during the princess years, their brains are also at their most malleable, the most open to long-term influence on the abilities and roles that go with their sex. In other words, Eliot said, nurture becomes nature. “Think about language. Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds and grammar and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires itself up to only perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, it’s possible to learn another language, but it’s far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly: the ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. That contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired.”
The environment in which children are raised affects their behaviors as well as their aptitudes. Boys from more egalitarian homes, for example, are more nurturing toward babies than other boys are and more flexible about toy choice. Meanwhile, in a study of more than five thousand three-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both other girls and boys with older sisters; boys with older sisters were also less rough in their play than their peers. (The sibling effect worked only one way, incidentally—the younger sibling had no impact whatsoever on the older’s gendered behavior, nor, interestingly, did opposite-sex twins exert such influence on each other.) Similarly—and notably for parents—in 2005, researchers found that mathematically inclined girls whose fathers believed females aren’t “wired” for the subject were less interested in pursuing it. Even the tragic case of David/Brenda—the boy with the botched circumcision who killed himself after being raised as a girl—is no proof that biology trumps culture. David was nearly two when his sex was surgically reassigned as female, old enough, according to Eliot, for his brain to have absorbed a great deal about his gender; he also had an identical twin who remained male, a constant reminder of what might have been. What’s more, a 2005 review of similar cases found that only seventeen of seventy-seven boys whose sex was reassigned chose to revert to male. The other sixty lived out their lives contentedly as women.
Hormones, genes, and chromosomes, then, aren’t quite as powerful as we tend to believe. And that has implications for how we raise and educate our children. “If you believe it’s all immutable, then what is the harm in plunking girls in a pink ghetto or letting boys get by without doing art or singing or all the things they used to like to do before they got associated with girls?” Eliot asked. “But if you believe these disparities in adults are shaped by development and experience . . .” She paused a moment. “Of course, this assumes you see a value in bringing out the full spectrum of emotional and cognitive abilities in any individual.”
On a blisteringly hot morning in Phoenix, Arizona, I stood behind a one-way mirror, the kind cops on TV use when they’re watching an interrogation. But the “suspects” on the other side of the glass were not criminals: they were just a passel of preschoolers getting ready for “outside time.” A little boy with freckles and a sandy Dennis the Menace cowlick came right up to his reflection, pressed his face against it, and stuck out his tongue. The woman I was with laughed. “They’re used to us coming and watching,” she explained, “so they figure someone is probably back here.”
Released onto the playground, the children dashed around the spongy surface, splitting off from one another like amoebas, forming and re-forming their groups. The pattern in their chaos eventually became clear—girls and boys might alight next to each other but soon whirled away, back to their own kind.
And that’s nothing special, right? Girls play with girls; boys play with boys. You would see it at any preschool anywhere. It was nothing special: yet to the woman I had come here to meet, Carol Martin, a professor of child development at Arizona State University and one of the country’s foremost experts on gender development, it meant everything. Martin and her colleague Richard Fabes co-direct the Sanford Harmony Program, a multimillion-dollar privately funded research initiative, aimed (for now) at
preschoolers, kindergarteners, and middle schoolers. Its goal, over time, is to improve how boys and girls think of and treat the other sex in the classroom, on the playground, and beyond: to keep their small behavioral and cognitive differences from turning into unbreachable gaps.
Martin, who has a shock of white hair and preternaturally blue eyes, has spent three decades looking at how kids develop ideas about masculinity and femininity, as well as the long-term implications of those beliefs. In addition to the Sanford program, she has been conducting research on “tomboys.” Among her findings: a third of girls aged seven to eleven that she surveyed identified themselves with the term. Yet in previous studies up to three-quarters of adult women claimed that they had been “tomboys” as kids. That interested me: presumably, most of them were misremembering their past, but why? Why would recalling themselves as less conventionally feminine be so appealing? Maybe because tomboys are resisters; they’re thought of as independent, adventurous, brave—characteristics that women may prize more as adults than they did as girls. Perhaps in hindsight they feel more trapped by the trappings of girlhood than they did at the time, more conflicted about its costs. Or maybe, like me, they’re merely comparing their experience with what they see around them today—the explosion of pink froth—and thinking “Well, I was never like that.”
Cinderella Ate My Daughter Page 6