I have sons and daughters: three girls, then two boys, and then three more girls. Our house is basically a giant toy storeroom, and you play how you want to play, no questions asked. My boys mostly choose weapons and robots and dinosaurs, but occasionally baby dolls. My daughters play with tea sets and doll carriages and lace-up toys, but also light sabers.
A few years ago, I found myself trading funny kid stories with a group of moms. I told them about my then three-year-old daughter who—unlike her older sisters—had older brothers as role models. She was running along and suddenly took a magnificent header, SPLAT, right on her face on the floor. “And then,” I said, “She just got up, shook it off, and kept running! It’s because she has older brothers.”
Shocked silence. I might as well have said, “It’s because we stopped binding her feet!” I might as well have offered them my business card as leader of the Artificial Gender Manipulation Consortium, now offering classes on How To Reinforce Outmoded Stereotypes. The group broke up and wandered away, the spirit of motherly camaraderie quashed. (For these and other reasons, I stopped hanging around with this particular group of mothers. If I’m going to be a pariah, I want it to be for something cooler than a reputation for patriarchalism.)
Recently my son and I were at Burger King.He leaped off into the bowels of the tube-and-tunnel play structure, and I didn’t see him for a while. As I finished my coffee, I watched three girls, probably around 9 years old, scramble up to the highest platform in the playground. There they settled, and began to make some rules:
“Okay, this part is the jungle,” one girl proclaimed, “and the other part there is the ocean. We can go in here, but only if the other ones are in there, too.”
“And this part is scary, but we like it over there,” said the other girl.
“And we have webbed feet. Webbed feet, and we can breathe underwater.”
“And we have red eyes, and fangs that come out when we’re mad.”
“And this part is the ocean, but we don’t know what’s over there. That’s for the animals, and we don’t go over there.”
Sounds promising, I thought! A nice bunch of imaginative girls. I waited for them to begin the game that required such elaborate rules.
But they just kept chatting. And then I realized: This is the game. They are entirely content setting up an imaginary household, complete with different rooms for different purposes, and different roles for various creatures that dwell there. They may be talking about fangs and webbed feet and jungle creatures, but they’re basically playing house. And sure enough, one of them piped up, “And the baby sharks can play over here.”
My son reappeared, and waved happily to another 8-year-old boy who passed. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I was in the toy aisle at Walmart, and he just threw a sword at me and started fighting. He’s really good!”
I think if he met this kid 40 years from now, they would be thrilled to see each other, and probably start sword fighting where they left off.
Make of it what you will. Maybe these girls and these boys were the victims of social engineering, and their natural, malleable natures have been subtly plied since birth to conform to an artificial stereotype ... and maybe they haven’t. Maybe they’ve yielded to the pressures of society and become what the world has told them they must be ... or maybe they’re just being what God made them to be. Male and female He created them. If they’re interchangeable, why bother making two kinds?
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Absolutely. And where does that ‘wheel’ thing come from with boys, they love anything with wheels. They just do.
“If they’re interchangeable, why bother making two kinds?”
Well, AMEN TO THAT! Why is the obvious no longer obvious?
I’d like to second Jen’s AMEN! LOVE that quote, and this entire post. Thank you for the dose of sense, Simcha.
Oh my. That last line is the BEST EVER. Love it.
“If they’re interchangeable, why bother making two kinds?” Exactly. My boys and girls also play whatever they like, and we don’t encourage or discourage them in any particular direction. I’m just happy when they’re getting along playing the same thing - WHATEVER it is. But yes, the girls gravitate towards “girly” games and the boys gravitate towards “boy-type” games. I’m ok with that.
I wish I had some waffles.
“It’s because we stopped binding her feet!”
LOL…this made my day.
Great point! It is sad that as soon as people are born these days someone, usually their parents, are there to teach them differences between the sexes is a bad awful thing. Though I have to say, the camp that recognizes those differences then defends bad behavior on the basis of gender(i.e. “he’s just destroying your furniture because he’s a boy” or “she’s just screeching at the top her lungs because she is a girl”) is just as bad.
It is so true. My older kids are girls. When it was just them at home, we were out shopping and toy fighter jets caught their eye. So we bought one for each kid, in appropriate sizes, small, medium, and large. They brought them home and began playing, “Mommy jet and her two baby jets.” We also got them things like toy trucks. One was an articulated (like a tractor-trailer) fire truck with all the sirens and lights. Removable ladders. Hoses. You name it. They immediately tied a string around the cab and began leading it around like a puppy. My girls were never much into dolls and that sort of thing, but they did have their own take on playing with typical boys’ toys.
@Sarah M: Yes, I agree - and there are other,worse ways of exaggerating the difference: saying, as some radical traditionalists do, that women shouldn’t have jobs, or that it demeans men to help their wives with the housework. Obviously there are many variations on a theme, and I, for one, am happy to have things like female doctors (gasp! They must have gone to medical school, and work outside the home.
//
It just drives me crazy when young people are chided for doing what comes naturally.
I WISH I’d thought of that closing sentence years ago when I was living thru the Age of Aquarius…
Sarah M, I agree! While there are many behaviors that are explained by gender, that does not excuse the obligation of the parent to teach right and proper behavior.
The real issue is freedom. The freedom to find who you are and to be comfortable in your skin. And the freedom to realize that not everyone is going to fit into someone else’s mold of ‘what they should be.’ I did all the girly things - played with dolls until junior high, always was the nurse in the neighborhood war games (no interest at all in shooting), would rather have read Little House than get dirty. Yet, I grew up, chose a profession and got told any number of times that “You just want to be a man.” Do I? I don’t think so. I want to be a woman who can do what she is called to do and be.
Simcha, another great read. I very much enjoy your musings.
“... or maybe they’re just being what God made them to be. Male and female He created them. If they’re interchangeable, why bother making two kinds?”
Perfect. And exactly what I try to relate to my friends and acquaintances.
A friend of mine recently posted “Smash the sex and gender binary” and my response is that gender IS binary, that the natural law of gender. Male and female made He them.
@Curmudgeon: right, God calls people to be many different things. I think what I had in my head was that young pregnant actress who said, when receiving her Oscar, that motherhood was her greatest role—and she was met with the most shameful jeers and castigation by feminists. I mean, here was someone who obviously had a successful career, and was expressing her own opinion that having a baby was her greatest achievement yet—and they all said she was lying, just saying her lines, etc. It never occurred to them that they were doing what they all said they were against: letting a woman make her own life choices. (Whether she was sincere or not is not the point: the point is that radical feminists have become the new oppressors, who cannot stand to let a woman decide how to live.)
This is so true….for most. I do believe it is quite a spectrum though. I have a friend who is married to a super high-powered woman who got her Ph.D. in materials science from an Ivy and designs stuff for the Navy while not working at her academic job. She is not girly AT ALL, (although quite beautiful) and apparently never was. I remember going to a party she and her flatmates held when she was doing her degree, and her bedroom astounded me. She had nothing but her bed, some change on the dresser, a few scraps of paper, some books, pens and a huge Scottish flag in there. It was so male that it made an impression on me. This woman is heterosexual and loves her two daughters, but does not want to stay home with them. I am tempted to think that the spectrum idea explains this better than hard-and-fast gender lines.
Have you seen the research that shows that, while there are stark gender differences in the cerebral cortex at birth, these differences actually decrease markedly with the onset of puberty, and continue to decrease to a point where the brains of men and women (the cerebral cortex part) at about 35 are nearly indistinguishable . Here is a reference, and I apologize for it’s lameness…will try to find the original source.
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/today_in_sex_men_and_womens_br.php
My daughter loves anything with wheels and she came out of the womb knowing how to catch a ball. My son, not so much, but he taught himself to read at 4. I used to believe that nuturing mattered more than nature; now I know enough to know that I can’t make my children do anything but I can hope (and pray) to steer them in good, Godly directions.
Hahaha! Swords in the Walmarts. My life with six sons.
Wait, who says they’re interchangeable?
Even Gloria Steinem, queen mother of feminism, hasn’t asserted something like that. Or at least, not since the 1970s…but even that famous “as a fish needs a bicycle” quote wasn’t about two genders being identical.
Have I missed a major news event?
Anon: ha, maybe no one uses the word “interchangeable,” but they certainly imply it with their screams of outrage every time someone suggests there are differences between the sexes. Which leads to foolishness like lowering the bar for becoming a firefighter, so more women will qualify.
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Look, I didn’t play with dolls either, when I was little. I still don’t like pink. I just want people to quit assuming I’m oppressed just because I have lots of babies now.
I read that one article that one woman wrote about men staying man-children, refusing to get jobs, not getting married, refusing even to commit to a girlfriend. And of course they are. Why not? Feminism managed to devalue everything that could possibly give women an advantage. Inadvertently they managed to give men everything they could possibly want. Financially independent and sexually liberated women they don’t have to support and barely even have to seduce, and they have no biological clocks, so why on earth would they want the hardship of taking care of a family when they can eat pork rinds and play video games all day? Feminists have made everything about marriage and children punitive for men, so now women have to do it all - make the money, buy the house, raise the kids - how is this more liberating than the traditional gender role? Because having it all sounds oppressive.
Awesomness, Simcha! (That is actually a given for you, though.)
I’ve seen too much of the “boys and girls are only different because we tell them to be” stuff - and I was fed a bunch of it in college (education major). But the fact is that most boys, when given Barbies to play with, will shape them into guns and shoot each other with them. And girls will make everything about babies and stuff. Usually, anyway. Even my daughter who is Miss Sports Star tells me that what she wants to do most is be a wife and mother. Of course, my girly-girl-princess-ballerina doesn’t even want to leave home, but she’s only nine.
Anywhoooo…. Brilliant as usual, Simcha. Thanks!
Oh listen, what a load of twaddle. It’s society, all society. Gender role expectations affect our children from the moment they are born. Experiments have shown that people treat babies differently depending on the gender they told the babies are, regardless of their actual gender. Girls as young as three have their eyes downcast more often than boys. Attractiveness is correlated with self esteem in girls much more than boys by 4th grade. When I had children (I have three girls), I decided that I would get them a range of toys, and they could play how they wanted. I engaged cars and rough-and-tumble play as much as barbies and dolls. We tried to avoid gender expectations as much as possible. I bought a range of clothing, camo pants included.
Yeah, pity they didn’t engage with me. My girls like babies and dolls and pink. The only camo they would wear was the pale one, with the pink and silver flowers embroidered on it. I put in my biggest effort to let my girls be who they ARE, without pressure from me, and this IS who they ARE.
Love the last bit!!
Ann, I’m confused, which one is it? It’s society, all society, or it IS who they ARE? It seems to me that if your theory held up, that once you exposed your girls to the range of toys, clothing, and play, that their preferences would reflect that? Instead, they prefer dolls and babies and pink. How does that prove that it is society?
Sorry, I needed a sarcasm font:) I hear the nurture argument (society) all the time (psychology student), but when I chose a range of toys and clothes, including those that were gender neutral, they still went towards games that involve nurturing, babies, dolls, families, setting up house. I wasn’t expecting that, but I’m quite ok with it, because I too gravitate towards that, despite studying, and despite the many options that are (thankfully) open to me. It’s just what I like, and it’s that way for them too. Male and female, He created them :)
Thank you for a great article. I’m forwarding it onto my daughter who just wrote a Sociology paper on the subject. Too bad this is a couple of weeks too late for her!
When she first told me the subject matter,I was pleased to find out that she could see the obvious bias her professor had toward the subject. Says my daughter “I witnessed so much “boy” growing up with 4 brothers, I can’t see how genders are only influenced by their environment.” Wise kid ;)!
Some things are God-given, some are social.
My grandma was embodiment of strong biblical woman, and she taught us, for example, not to whine when we fall, but to “get up, shake it off, and keep running”, just as your daughter did. For her, it was nothing feminine in crying, whining, passive submission or something like that. Yet, she was very cute with her grey chignon, small purse, always in pastel or floral dresses.
There can be mixed messages as well. My maternal grandmother showered me with dolls I never played with, and pink things I hated. Yet her response to the bullying I dealt with was to tell me to not be such a baby. ( I remember her seeing me get pushed around by a classmate, and she was livid- with me. “Why didn’t you slug her ? Why do I have a granddaughter who’s such a d-d wimp ? Next time, show ‘em what’s what with a fist !” )
I second all of the great comments on a terrifically honest article. A radio personality priest stated it even more succinctly. He refers to feminism as the attempted masulinization of women. I am a sister of 7 women and mother of 5 girls and teacher in an all-girls high school - and I agree with him. Feminists not only can’t see the forest for the trees, they don’t even know what kind of tree they are!
I bought a baby doll for my one-and-a-half year old son before his sibling was born and a toy kitchen around that same time. It wasn’t easy finding a doll that wasn’t dressed in all pink (we ended up with light purple) and a kitchen in “neutral” colors. I once witnessed a friend of mine scold her son for even playing near the doll house at the daycare. How can we expect our sons to grow up to be great big brothers or even Dads, for that matter, when we freak out if they touch a doll? :-) My son did’t play with the doll all that much but it was there if he wanted to play with it.
I find this to be very true. My mom always likes to tell the story of the day my (then) 2 year old brother turned a can of corn into a toy car, making vroom sounds as he pushed it around the kitchen. There were no toy cars in the house yet, only the gender-blind educational toys they had purchased when I was born. In later years she hid toy guns in an effort to stop brotherly violence; they had swordfights with sticks instead. I liked playing with their cars and toy soldiers though.
I took women’s studies classes in college and worked at the women’s resource center on campus. Needless to say, I bought into the whole feminist/politically correct mentality. When my son was born, I tried to keep violent toys out of the house. But I found out that he would turn practically anything at hand into a toy weapon. I gave up my crusade in exasperation when I saw my two-year-old little boy take a ping-pong ball and turn it into a gun. A PING-PONG ball! Can you think of anything LESS gun-like??? Anyway, I realized that it must be nature and not nurture, despite what all my college professors wanted me to believe, and I began my journey in questioning the other nonsense they taught me as well. (It’s funny, but their mantra was always “Question Authority”—they even had it on bumper stickers on their cars—but they never wanted us to question THEM!)
Ann - I read the last line of your comment regarding your professors and have emailed it to my daughter at college—it is EXACTLY what her Sociology professor keeps saying, but doesn’t seem to abide by!!
In my haste to respond ... my comment was, of course, referring to Amy’s, not Ann ... entire thread, great though
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