Delusions of Gender (34 page)

[O]ur son Jeremy, then age four, … decided to wear barrettes [hair slides] to nursery school. Several times that day, another little boy told Jeremy that he, Jeremy, must be a girl because ‘only girls wear barrettes.’ After trying to explain to this child that ‘wearing barrettes doesn’t matter’ and that ‘being a boy means having a penis and testicles,’ Jeremy finally pulled down his pants as a way of making his point more convincingly. The other child was not impressed. He simply said, ‘Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes.’

Unlike their peers, Jeremy and Emily were discouraged from using socially determined trappings such as hairstyle, clothing, accessories or profession as a guide to a person’s biological sex. If the children asked whether someone was male or female, their
parents ‘frequently denied certain knowledge of the person’s sex, emphasizing that without being able to see whether there was a penis or a vagina under the person’s clothes, [they] had no definitive information.’
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Step forward, please, all those parents who go to similar lengths to protect their children from acquiring prevailing cultural assumptions about gender. And do try to avoid being trampled in the rush.

The Bems’ efforts, I think you’ll agree, seriously outclass what we normally, generously, think of as gender-neutral parenting. They were, in Sandra Bem’s own words, ‘an unconventional family’.
⁴
Some readers will be cheering in admiration, while others roll their eyes with a quiet groan. But whatever your opinion of a parent who teases, ‘What do you mean that you can tell Chris is a girl because Chris has long hair? Does Chris’s hair have a vagina?’
⁵
we can all agree that the intensity and scope of the Bems’ efforts offer a helpful hint as to just how gendered children’s environments are. To this day social structure, media and peers offer no shortage of information to children about masculinity and femininity.

The gendered patterns of our lives can be so familiar that we no longer notice them, as this anecdote reported by legal scholar Deborah Rhode slyly makes plain:

One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.
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Yet children, with their fresher observational powers, take note. ‘Russell is a funny Daddy’, commented an astute three-year-old visitor to our home, observing our household’s shared parenting practices. ‘He stays at home like a Mummy.’ Children dropping
in to play after school sometimes turn to our son and ask in surprise, ‘Why is your dad home?’ (And more than one child of our acquaintance has disillusioned a boastful father with the information that, to the contrary,
Russell
is the best Daddy in the world.) Russell, my husband, is indeed ‘funny’ statistically speaking (as well as in other ways that need not concern us here). Whatever you think of the rights, wrongs or reasons for it, it is an empirical fact that children are born into an environment in which it is overwhelmingly women who service the child’s – and family’s – needs. Rare indeed are the children who see their father do more domestic labour than their mother. In fact, as we saw in
Chapter 7
, there seems to be
no
work arrangement between mothers and fathers – including his unemployment or her massive salary – that lets women off the domestic hook. Even the rare families who genuinely value each parent’s career and leisure time equally, and fairly split the domestic load may find themselves dismissed as an aberrant (or ‘funny’) data point, as Australian psychologist Barbara David and colleagues have suggested. They note that in a classic study, children were shown a video of men and women playing a game, with the men performing one kind of ritual and the women another. Girls copied the women’s ritual, and boys the men’s, but only after they had confirmed for themselves that this is what women (or men)
in general
did, and not just one particular woman or man. ‘Thus a parent,’ suggests David, ‘no matter how loving or loved, cannot be a model for appropriate gender behaviour, unless the child’s exposure to the wider world (for example, through friendship groups and the media) suggests that the parent is a
representative
or prototypical male or female’.
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If so, the egalitarian parent can look forward to being undermined on a daily basis. For, as it happens, neither children, nor children’s media, are renowned for their open-minded approach to gender roles.

Young children, for instance, certainly don’t tend to take the expansive, laissez-faire approach when it comes to gender. Last year, when my son was in kindergarten, he asked a classmate if he
could look at her book. ‘No’, the little girl told him. ‘Boys aren’t
allowed
to look at books about fairies.’ The child well-versed in gender stereotypes is not shy about letting it be known that a peer has crossed the line. When developmental psychologists unobtrusively watch what goes on in preschool classrooms, they find that children receive distinctly cooler responses from peers when they play in gender-inappropriate ways. Developmental psychologist Beverly Fagot found that comments as blunt as ‘you’re silly, that’s for girls’ and ‘that’s dumb, boys don’t play with dolls’ were especially reserved for boys.
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But boys and girls alike are treated to little pointers when other children praise, imitate and join in certain types of play, but criticise, disrupt or abandon other activities. Unsurprisingly, this peer feedback seems to influence children’s behaviour, making it more stereotypical.
⁹
Peers’ responses appear to act as reminders to children that their behaviour doesn’t follow gender rules, because they are particularly effective in bringing cross-gender behaviour to an end. In fact, it seems as though even the
prospect
of ‘jeer pressure’ may change young children’s behaviour. Preschool children spend more time playing with gender-appropriate toys when an opposite-sex peer is nearby, in comparison with play in the absence of another child.
¹⁰
Likewise, four- to six-year-old boys express more interest in playing with boyish toys when they are with peers than when they are on their own.
¹¹
The sensitivity of preschool boys to breaking unwritten gender rules was very much in evidence in a group of preschool children in the UK, who were observed by David Woodward. Younger boys who generally would not play with dolls at preschool (one boy is described furtively dressing and undressing a doll under the table, looking over his shoulder all the while to be sure he wasn’t spotted by other boys) would nonetheless happily play with them at home. And once a rather dominant and socially conservative group of boys left the preschool, the gender rules relaxed; more of the remaining boys started to play with dolls, and in the home corner.
¹²

The media, like peers, also offer lessons in the cultural
correlates of gender. Rather than embrace the opportunity to present an imaginary world that offers children a glimpse of possibilities beyond the reality of male and female social roles, children’s media often continue to constrict gender roles, sometimes even with more rigidity than does the real world:

Meet the Jetsons, the family of the future, as imagined by cartoonists in the 1960s. George flies to work in his bubble car while Jane whips up instant meals from a tiny pill using a nuclear energy oven. Even though the Jetsons live in a biomorphic building with a robot for a maid, in terms of gender relations, they might as well be the Flintstones. Dad works and worries about money while mom either stays at home or shops … Although the show’s creators were highly imaginative when it came to the technological gadgets … they could not envision the real change that families underwent.
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In picture books of this time, too, it seemed to be easier for writers and illustrators to conceive of wonderful fantasy worlds and adventures than it was for them to imagine a woman in a paid occupation. A classic study published in 1972 analysed picture books awarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal; in particular, the eighteen winners and runners-up for this award between 1967 and 1971. The authors point out the absurdity of the fact that 40 percent of women (at that time) were in the labour force, and yet ‘
not one
woman in the Caldecott sample had a job or profession.’
¹⁴
Many classic picture books that children still enjoy were written during this period, in which the unwritten rule seems to be that a woman character should be illustrated wearing an apron, or not at all. And even today, contemporary research shows that picture-book women are still cracking their heads against the glass ceiling, venturing only rarely into traditionally male occupations, as well as being less likely to work outside the home than picture-book men.
¹⁵

And why indeed should they, when the ensnaring of a rich and
handsome prince can provide long-term financial security?
Disney Princess
magazine, targeted at the sophisticated two- to four-year-old-girl market, is just one manifestation of the now fantastically successful pink princess phenomenon. The princess genre offers lessons in how to achieve what old-school feminists refer to in tight-lipped fashion as the traditional feminine ideal, that is, how to be pretty, caring and catch a husband. No pursuit, it seems, is too trivial for (some, at least) modern-day princess books and magazines: little princesses are advised to ‘[a]ccessorise to impress’ and, in order that their hair might look as pretty as Belle’s when she danced with the Beast, to ‘try a deep conditioner’.
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Once the preschooler becomes too worldly for innocent fairy-tale fashion, romance and marriage, she can graduate at age five to more grownup versions of the same focus on beauty and romance, thanks to magazines like
Barbie Magazine
, three-quarters of the content of which is devoted to (in order of greatest to least prevalence) crushes, celebrities, fashion and beauty.
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But even in higher-quality children’s literature, more subtle stereotypes remain. Diane Turner-Bowker examined how males and females were described in the forty-one Caldecott winners and runners-up from 1984 to 1994. One gender was most commonly described as, among other adjectives,
beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak
and
scared
in the stories; the other gender as
big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave
and
proud
. (If you’re not sure which sex is being described in these two lists, ask your nearest gender-neutrally reared preschooler; he or she will be sure to know.) Unsurprisingly, the adjectives for males were rated as more powerful, active and masculine than those used for females.
¹⁸
And we all know which type of person we’d rather have with us on an adventure. ‘[G]irls are often left out of the adventure, the thrill, the plot, the
picture
’ even today in the Caldecott award winners, point out
Packaging Girlhood
authors Sharon Lamb and Lyn Brown, who combed through them all in search of a female adventuress. ‘By the time you get to
Mirette on the High Wire
, the only book in the past twenty years that
features a girl in an adventure, you know this isn’t coincidence.’
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(Sadly, even poor Mirette is soon misremembered as being stereotypically feminine rather than the ‘gallant, resourceful little girl’ she really is.)
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Even so, it is easier to find an adventurous girl than a sissy boy. The bucking of gender stereotypes in young children’s books is a task usually performed by female characters, many researchers have found. Just as in the real world women have been quicker to forge forth into the masculine world of work than men have been to sink back into domesticity, in children’s books, too, it is mostly females who do the crossing of gender boundaries. Amanda Diekman and Sarah Murnen, for example, compared twenty popular and enduring books for elementary school children, half of which enjoyed the recommendation of being nonsexist by educational commentators (like
Alice in Wonderland
and
Harriet the Spy
), while the remainder had been classified as sexist (such as
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and
The Wheel on the School
). They found that it was the taking up of masculine traits, roles and leisure activities by female characters that set apart the supposedly nonsexist books from the sexist ones. Yet these nonsexist books were no more likely than the sexist ones to portray males as femininely tender and compassionate, in domestic servitude or contentedly engaged with girlish activities or toys.
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Reviews of elementary school readers (books used to teach reading) in the United States similarly conclude, ‘No sissy boys here’.
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And there are not too many sissy fictional fathers, either. Among Caldecott books from 1995 to 2001 and best-selling children’s books of around the same time, fathers are not only scarce, but also lacking in good cot-side manner, being ‘presented as unaffectionate and as indolent in terms of feeding, carrying babies, and talking with children.’
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Children’s TV programmes still often rely on gender stereotypes, even in children’s educational programming.
²⁴
Dora the Explorer – the intrepid Latina adventuress – is a notable exception. (Check out the Dora merchandise on the Fisher-Price Web site, however, and you will quickly uncover
the familiar themes of princesses, mermaids and fashion.) And of course toy advertisements make it quite clear for whom – boys or girls – particular toys and activities are intended. Lamb and Brown watched hours of Nickelodeon, taking note of the advertisements in between popular programmes. On a typical day, they saw boys playing with Legos, cars and action figures, and girls playing with princesses, fairies, kitchen sets and fashionably dressed and accessorised dolls.
²⁵
And children take note of who is playing with what: when researchers doctored a commercial for a Playmobil Airport Set to show girls, as well as boys, playing with the toy, first- and second-grade children shown this altered commercial were nearly twice as likely to think that the toy was for girls as well as boys, compared with children who saw the commercial in its traditional, boys-only form.
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