outside the (toy) box

First, let me put this out there -

Sex - biological /anatomical differences between males and females

Gender - a social category, whose basis is sex, that refers to the socially learned meanings, beliefs, behaviors and expectations that are associated with males and females.

So sex is what’s between your legs and gender is the pain in your ass.

Har har har.

More seriously, I am one of many social scientists who argue that while men and women are extremely different, that most of these differences are socially learned. Gender doesn’t just flow from biology - it is something that we work very hard to create and nowhere is this more visible than in childrens’ lives. This is something that I read extensively about in graduate school and have taught in the classroom many times, but having children and actually watching them encounter the expectations and assumptions that are made about them on a daily basis has left me speechless.

What’s amazing is that it starts immediately –

We mark children differently based on their sex. Not just pink and blue and wearing dresses, but hairstyle, the cut of the clothing, the sayings on their t-shirts, even the decorative items are gendered. In a peculiar example, we’ve gendered the whole animal kingdom — boys get dogs, frogs, alligators, and snakes and girls get butterflies, cats, ladybugs, and bunnies. Aren’t we weird? There are male and female cats, afterall. Somehow ducks and sheep escaped labelling. All I know is that even the basics - jeans, socks, t-shirts, and sneakers have remarkably been rendered gender specific. Very little clothing that my dd wore can be worn by my ds without an eyebrow-raise, and most of it would cause an uprising.

We interpret childrens’ behaviors in gender-specific ways. Think of a kicking baby in a hospital - what do people say to and about male babies? “He’s going to be a soccer player/football player” female babies? “a ballernia.” A crying baby — he is mad, she is sad. The same behaviors - different interpretations.

We also treat male and female children differently. Research shows that we engage in more rough and tumble play with boys than with girls, that we are more affectionate with girls than with boys, and that we are quicker to rush in and help a girl when she struggles with something than we are when a boy does so. The research on parent/child interactions, interestingly has pointed out that in young children - toddler age - that there are not observed differences in the children’s behaviors, only the parental behavior (to be more accurate, maternal behavior is what was examined in the most recent study).

We surround boys and girls with different objects - most toy stores are even divided into boys and girls sections, in spite of many common interests that kids share (sports, music, art, games, dramatic play, the outdoors, science and experimentation.) Girls get play kitchens and make up sets while boys get toy cars and trucks. Dolls for girls, guns for boys. Even those things that are marketed for both girls and boys are gendered. Have you ever shopped for a bike for a child? Case in point.

• Sometimes the gendered messages embedded in toys are more subtle - my dd has a fisher price train set, with many elements (a house, a farm, etc.) and about a dozen little people. We played with it for over a year before I noticed that every single one of the male “people” had an implied occupation (hard hat, calculator, etc.) and none of the female people did. Grr. She also has a school bus that plays “wheels on the bus” and when you push the boy it says, “the boys on the bus say, let’s go play!” the girl? “the girls on the bus say, giggle, giggle, giggle” barf.  And then there is the learning classroom toy that is a great tool for teaching, but what does it teach by having male characters in the classroom outnumber females 3 to 1? I’ll stop here. I could spend all day.

And the stories we tell children (through tv, books, films, etc.) about boys and girls are very different. Children’s books today have improved — 1/3 have females as central characters (though 2/3 do not). Yet, while presence has increased, representations have changed very little. Female characters appear not so much stereotyped as colorless - bland, background characters (e.g., the male, main character’s underdeveloped mother). It remains very difficult to find books that are centered around girls, unless they are “fairy tales” depicting the central character as beautiful, but incomplete, pining for love. The happy ending in this story is almost always marriage or the promise of marriage. Stories oriented around male characters, in contrast, end with accomplishments - unraveled mysteries, friendships forged, evil held at bay, obstacles overcome, contests won.

There are a wonderful minority of books that go against type, and they are worth the effort to find. Why?

These stories — in books, as well as in television, film, and other forms of media — matter. Children learn from stories who to emulate, what to pretend, what the possibilities are, who matters, who doesn’t. They shape their aspirations and establish ideals.

For boys there are certainly problematic characters, but their weight is tempered by the sea of choices. For every violent bully, there is a Harry Potter, a Buzz Lightyear, an Elliot (from ET, you silly, don’t you remember your youth?). While boys see adventurers, girls are taught over and over again that the best attribute they can possess is physical attractiveness (defined in some freaky ways — can you imagine if we had eyes as large and wide set as The Little Mermaid?) and that their most important objective should be to marry.  I’m not opposed to marriage, I love being married, but I do think it’s important to think about the differences in the stories we tell our children. Boys are taught that they have to work to make their dreams come true through self-growth, bravery, using their wits, fighting to win. Yet, the stories we tell girls teach them that their dreams can only be fulfilled by being so beautiful that a man falls in love with them. This has some obvious problematic elements, right? First, it’s a very narrow range of choices. Happy endings are always the same. Second, it is a dream that requires someone else for fulfillment. This is a goal they can not reach on their own.

It isn’t all this way — there are some wonderful alternatives out there - Dora, Dorothy (even if Judy Garland does play her as a weepy wimp), debatably Kim Possible, but they are few and far between. As a parent, I have spent lots of time trying to find some alternatives, sometimes with very little success. I hope that this blog will serve as an arena where I can share some of my favorites and learn about yours. PLEASE share your favorites!

In the end, the gender roles we create are amazingly powerful - gender ultimately colors almost everything about us - the way we sit (girls take up less space), the amount of vocal color we use when we speak, our self-confidence, our facial expressions, our friendships, our career aspirations, the things we value, our relationships with our friends, our perceptions of our bodies, our hobbies, our musical tastes… on and on and on.

So what? First, the box — there is a very limited range of acceptable behaviors, especially for boys (we are much more tolerant of girls being boyish or having stereotypically male charcateristics than we are of boys being girly of having stereotypically female charcateristics) and I think that’s a shame. I want my kids, all kids, to just be able to be who they are without these unnecessary limits. Second, depicting these gender differences as natural has traditionally been used to justify inequality on the basis of sex.  And that’s just junk.

So, this is a box that I would like to see opened just a bit. I don’t care if my daughter ends up a covergirl and my son ends up a pro wrestler, I just want them to have the range of options that I think they deserve. Society sends stable, recurrent messages about what real boys and girls should be like, and I hope (in my home) to try to offer them a broader view.