Gender feminism - would like to know what people think

But I would think of that as something separate mummybare. Definitely areas where women's rights should differ from men's rights, for example about making a decision about whether or not to abort a pregnancy, because this is about bodily autonomy.

I don't see what that has to do in general with stereotypes etc, though.

Yes, that's what makes it hard to separate out what's innate from what's socially conditioned; our brains have evolved to respond strongly and rapidly to social conditioning and no one grows up entirely cut off from social context.

I find this very interesting. I did a lot of gender studies at uni and have read Lise Elliot (I can also recommend), so I get that there is very little difference in children. And in adults.

Where I struggle is with the politics of motherhood. The experience of pregnancy, birth and becoming DD's primary carer has been a total game changer for me.

While I've always been a feminist, having a child has made me realise that it's not as easy as 'we're all the same'. We're not. After all, it is always the women who do the childbearing and the breastfeeding. Not all of them, by any means, but when people do those things, they are always women. And the effect of those things on a woman's body, hormone levels and brain is not insignificant.

Thanks Lurcio, I'll look it up.

I don't think we're disagreeing; I meant that the human brain is hardwired to be incredibly plastic in response to the environment around it. 'Hardwired' is probably a bad choice of word, I should have just said 'Humans have evolved to absorb from birth the norms and value of the society they live in'.

Mooncup - "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" by Lise Elliot is very good on this. (Don't be put off by the title - she's a neurologist, and the book actually sets about debunking many of the myths. I've been told Cordelia Fine is better though - on my to-read list).

One thing though - it's not so much hard-wiring as the converse: incredible plasticity in the infant brain which means that environment - including gender stereotyping, unfortunately - can massively affect brain development.

Mooncup - "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" by Lise Elliot is very good on this. (Don't be put off by the title - she's a neurologist, and the book actually sets about debunking many of the myths. I've been told Cordelia Fine is better though - on my to-read list).

One thing though - it's not so much hard-wiring as the converse: incredible plasticity in the infant brain which means that environment - including gender stereotyping, unfortunately - can massively affect brain development.

"Prepubescent children don't really have different levels of hormones, though. There is a difference in prenatal exposure, but comparing girls with a male fraternal twin (who would have been exposed to higher testosterone levels in utero ) with girls with a female fraternal twin (who wouldn't) showed absolutely no statistically significant difference in interests or behaviour, which suggests that it can't have that big an impact."

I didn't know this, really interesting!

There are studies showing that girls and boys are treated differently from birth, even by parents who don't know they're doing it. And the influence of consumer society and gender-divisive culture is everywhere.

Humans are hard-wired from birth to absorb the norms and values of the society they live in and behave accordingly. A newborn Scottish baby will behave in the same way as a newborn Papuan New Guinean baby... but by the time they're three the differences will be enormous. Given that boys and girls are treated differently from birth in UK society it's not hard to understand why they behave differently.

Yes, I'd damn well want to stop my daughter thinking modelling was a good career, because of the risk of eating disorders. For exactly the same reasons I've explicitly spoken to my 5 yr old DS about the army (the TV ads make it look so glamorous). I've explained that while soldiers are very brave, and sometimes wars have to be fought as a last resort, at the moment we have too many people in charge of the country who think it's a good idea to send soldiers off to be shot at and killed in illegal wars simply for their own political aggrandisement. If I can explain this in age-appropriate terms to a 5 year old boy, I don't see why a mother of a 5 year old girl can't do a similar thing re. modelling. And I certainly wouldn't put either on a par with engineering!

(Important: this is not meant to denigrate serving soldiers for whom I have the greatest respect. But, by god, it is meant to denigrate some of our recent political leaders, who are guilty of war crimes in my opinion).

Sorry that post wasn't that clear. Basically I can't see what is wrong with pointing out what could be damaging about a career, in terms that a 5/6 yr old would understand.

No we don't want children to grow up obese, nor do we want them to having eating disorders brought on by wanting to fit impossibly high standards based on their looks alone.

Really Dadwashere? You can't possibly imagine a highly likely scenario where a woman's self-esteem might be stripped with a career in modelling? Self-esteem is fluid.

Not to mention eating disorders that are prevalent too. The mother had a valid point. She may not jhave wanted to get onto the objectification argument with a 5 yr old.

Nooka, with scary levels of people overweight, a weight management industry generating billions a year, cosmetics generating many billions more, plastic surgery becoming more common place and numbers of anti-depressant prescriptions going up up up- its general society you need to prep a kid for, not getting them to reject a career choice in modelling voiced at age 6. Raise a kid to have a brain and self esteem and they will use both, but in the way they intend in the profession they decide to enter (if they are even able to enter it). It applies equally to a girl wanting to be a model or an engineer.

But I might think that just because I've only (knowingly) met two transexuals and they both seemed to be very busy being very 'feminine' in a way I found quite alien.

That seems quite a reasonable thought to have to me. I would hate for my dd to become a model and a part of that is because I think that she would be highly likely to end up eating disordered and unhappy (and defined by her physical self, not use her brain, not change the world and a bundle of other things that I think are important too).

As a fairly untypical woman I really really dislike all the gender stereotyping that goes on all the bloody time, and although my children have at times exhibited some fairly extreme boy/girl type behaviours I would not start saying that they were innate, because of course they have been influenced by the wider world (isn't she pretty/good, isn't he energetic, what a boy!) and also because I know plenty of other children who are very different.

I think that a better world would treat everyone as the individuals they are and celebrate difference more than conformity. I do suspect that might reduce the incidence of gender dysmorphia, because I think that if people weren't shoved into boxes so much then your physical sex probably wouldn't matter so much.

Its quite a deep trap. A five/six year old daughter goes up to her presumably feminist leaning mother and announces 'when I grow up I want to be a model' (presumably she had been watching Americas Next Top Model or similar). The reply from her mum was to tell her daughter she did not really want to be that because those women were unhappy and hungry. There was so much wrong in that my head wanted to explode.

I haven't seen the thread, but found the idea that only girls are interested in fairies at three to be utterly bizarre. There's not any real difference between a fairy and an elf or dwarf. They're all fantastical or mythical creatures. If boys don't like them, why is the Hobbit considered a boy thing?

So while there may be some small psychological differences between boys and girls, an interest in fantastical creatures in woodland garb is not one of them!

I would sum up the general gender situation as follows - there are very few innate differences between men and women, but we shouldn't fall into the trap of deeming stereotypical feminine activities to be worth less than stereotypical masculine things. A female footballer is not somehow better than a femal dancer, of any age.

I think I agree grimble.

Also, I don't think the gender-neutral feminism argument is that women and men are exactly the same in all areas, but that (as I believe) there are far more differences between individuals of one gender than there are between genders. Most of the stereotypical differences between men and women or popular-culture differences (Men are from Mars etc) are heavily linked to culture and socialisation.

A brilliant book to read is "Delusions of Gender" by Cordelia Fine. A really interesting bit I found in that was where it describes a study done in a primary school where they randomly identified a "red" group and a "blue" group and then constantly addressed them in terms of "good morning, reds and blues" and lined them up separately, things like that. They found that the children developed competition and hostility between the two groups and were more likely to conform to the whole group behaviour even though they were totally randomly selected to begin with. It makes you think about how gender is emphasised even from very early on and young children are constantly told "You are a boy/girl" and they perceive this as belonging to a group and then constantly look for things that identify them as being in this group. I found it really interesting anyway. I do find that 4yo DS is always saying things like "Mans do X" or "Mummies are good at this, Daddies are good at that" or "This is how boys do it" or asking what "mans" or ladies do or daddies or mummies or girls or boys. And of course, it's all well and good to tell him "Boys and girls can do this" but when the social norm is very much that boys don't or girls do then it's difficult, because he's getting to an age now where other children will pick up on it and talk about it.

There are people who talk about gender as a more concrete concept, and some of them would identify as third-wave feminists - people who'd say that a tomboyish girl was 'genderqueer'.

That terms irritates the hell out of me if indeed it meant that a tomboyish girl was genderqueer.

I was tomboyish, still am in that I like sports and activities generally associated with the male gender and dislike domesticity and activities generally associated with the female gender.

However, I have never doubted that my identity is female and I am 100% heterosexual.

The very use of the term genderqueer seems to imply that there are things e.g. preferences, activities etc. that "belong" to one gender or the other when my whole feminist ethos tells me that preferences, activities etc. should be gender free. We should be freeing ourselves from the idea of gender suitability, not binding ourselves to it.

So genderqueer can fuck off.

But I am sure someone will come along and tell me I have it all wrong

I think a few people do see resisting gender sterotyping as being the same sort of struggle as being gay.

I don't think it is, but what bothers me is that I think the differences are qualitative, and my impression is that some people think if they call themselves 'genderqueer' rather than a woman in a misogynistic world, they will get more respect for the same struggle, because people will understand that being 'queer' is a properly oppressed category, in a way that being ordinarily female isn't.

Mind you, I definitely have a bias here and I'm sure the people I know of aren't totally representative. I just wonder if it's perhaps this sort of thing that the OP was thinking of.

Ah - "Queering gender" - now I get a bit of the idea of it as an analogy rather than a synonym (though would obviously have to read around a bit to see if it made sense). I thought for one moment that they were making some sort of crude conflation of resisting gender stereotypes and sexuality (I suppose they may be doing that).

Just to clarify, I said some people who're into gender studies would identify as third-wave feminists. I know plenty of third-wave feminists who wouldn't think this stuff.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this, as the politest way I can characterise 70% of gender studies stuff is as 'bollocks'. However. Increasingly, I find that people talk about 'queering' gender (ie., transgressing what are considered to be gendered norms) as a phenomenon similar to being queer in terms of sexuality. I find this frankly bizarre, because it strikes me as a bit like schoolchildren enjoying breaking the rules and feeling very subversive for doing so. Whereas what I think is important is considering whether these rules, or these social stereotypes of what gender is, are worth keeping.

The problem with the party in the other thread was that the gender segregation was not at the request of the birthday child, but a decision by the parent based on a stereotype of that girls like and what boys like.

The problem was using the stereotype, not what the invitation list would have looked like had either the DC's friendship groups, or the other children's actual interests.

LRD - "third-wave feminists - people who'd say that a tomboyish girl was 'genderqueer'."

I'm intrigued by this (and have to admit I have read no gender queer theory) - why would one think this? (I was a total tomboy, probably still am, but I've never had any doubts that I was female, and was aware at a very early age that I'm predominantly heterosexual). I suppose my puzzle is that gender/sex discussions, and discussions about sexuality seem to me to occupy slightly different (albeit overlapping) conceptual spaces.

Re. the OP, I'm of the school of thought which says that for almost any putative difference (reading ages, athletic abilities in childhood, maths ability, etc) that you examine, even if you can measure a small difference in the means of the two populations, the standard deviations for each population are huge compared to this small difference. This is the so-called d-value: delta mu / (sigma1 * sigma 2) and is small for most gender differences. For e.g. suppose you identify a mean reading ability for 6 year old girls as being slightly in advance of the mean reading ability of 6 year old boys - this isn't a useful fact in isolation, unless you include the fact that, say, 45% of boys out-perform the mean level in girls (and in addition, if you're doing your stats properly, you should be including information about the confidence level - so, difference in mean performance is significant at, say, the 95% level, i.e. there's a 1 in 20 chance that your difference in performance could be down to sampling error). So applying statistical measures like this to individuals drawn from the population is a totally pointless exercise.

Also, given the plasticity of brain development and the fact that gender stereotyping starts at birth, even where you identify a difference in mean performance (which, as noted, usually has a small d value) it would be almost impossible to attribute this unambiguously to nature or nurture.

Fingers crossed DS is beginning to come out of the peer pressure phase. Having gone from a massive enthusiasm for pink and sparkles aged 3 to "blue is for boys" aged 4, he's now finally saying things like "it's not fair to say girls can't do that/won't be interested in that toy", and has decided he likes green best.

I agree devil. Plus I always feel a bit sad when I hear of girls excluding boys on purpose cos DS has always loved playing with girls.

But today as we drove to his new school he told me that he was going to make an effort to not play with the girls anymore because at his last school he got teased for it by the boys.

And so it begins.... the big hammer of gender conformity coming down on our kids knocking them into their pidgeonholes.

Oh joy..

I would say that if girls are specifying a 'girls only' party at three, there must be some parental influence going on. Neither of mine - one of each - would have had the slightest understanding of 'one gender' only party at that age.