AIBU to think that the emphasis on "gender neutral" smacks of desperation

[Sakura]

I'm halfway through Delusions of Gender and lots of things have begun to niggle me.

I get the feeling that the need for women to prove their brains are the same as mens is just as absurd as the mad patriarchal obsession with finding differences is male and female brains.

Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology are the most recent "proofs" that the system has conjured up in order to justify oppression and subordination of women

But the idea that we now have to prove male and female brains are the same, and that if girls and boys were just raised in a neutral environment then sexism would just dissappear, doesn't make sense to me. It would rather be like a black man writing a book proving that he is not, in fact, black. And that him not being actually black means that he should't be discriminated against.

But, well... racism was only invented in order to justify slavery. The trade along the Silk Road (Europe to China) proves that for centuries many races and religions lived side by side and traded equally. There was no inherent racism until it became necessary to justify slavery. That, you could say, was the root of the concept of race.

And it's the same with female oppression. The oppression and subordination comes first, the justifications come afterwards. Dispel the brain myths and they'll only think up another reason why women should be disenfranchised in economics and politics.
MEanwhile women have to expend lots of energy proving they are "just as good as men" or "can be just like men"

The truth is, from what i have seen, there is no evidence, one way or another, about how brains work, but even if there were dramatic differences between male and female brains, on what basis would that be a justification for patriarchy? The truth is, there is no justification, and feminists should bear that in mind.

I think women giving up make-up and beauty practices en masse would do a lot for equality, and in the way women are perceived by society (but it'd have to be a mass movement, because it'd be very difficult to do alone- I am not brave enough, that's for sure)

I also think another 'solution for the revolution' would be for women to simply stop working, like the women in FInland did 50 years ago. The country ground to a halt for a day and men were forced to sit up and listen to their demands. NO cleaners, no carers, no bum-wipers, no supermarket check-outs, no Macdonalds cashiers...

Also, one of her chapters is incorrect AFAICS. SHe talks of female children who were of ambiguous sex at birth who are then raised as girls, but continue to show an interest in boys' toys. She doesn't mention the chromozomes. If the children are chromozomally male, then that could be why they are interested in boys' toys, which disproves her own hypothesis.

Either way, I personally don't think any of this matters. men are always going to find reasons to keep women down and 'brain differences' is just the latest in a long line of justifications.

I think the gender neutral thing is a backlash against the biological determinism which has been pedelled as a reason for women to naturally inclined towards the low paid, low status jobs.

I didn't interpret Fine as saying that there would be NO differences between genders if social context were removed, but that it would be very different to how it is now.

Sakura- I just wanted to say that I completely agree with your point about racism being invented to justify slavery. I studied this at uni, and it was frighteningly deliberate.

I have an 8 year old boy and a 22 month old girl and so far there seems very little difference between them at the same age-dd loves the same book about diggers that he did, for example, and their first sentence was the same 'Get down now!'

My sister is fixated on not letting her 18 months old ds have anything girly-last week she brought over a toy bear she had been given for her ds, as it had some pink on it, and a book about princesses.

My son's friend loves to pretend to be afemale character in their games and he told me recently that his mum had made him promise to stop it. (but apparently he crossed his fingers behind his back!)

I justn think it's sad how as a society the pressure is on for children to conform almost from the word go.

ProfessorLayton, I agree with your last post too. MY main point is slightly different, I think.
What I mean is, that even if we raise our children gender neutrally, patriarchy will invent a reason to keep women subordinate.
But I see what your saying about the relevance of the work. It is important to have female neuroscientists out there!!

like it invented a reason to justify slavery

And deal with one hideous fatal disease and another will turn up. People don't die of the bubonic plague or smallpox or syphillis any more, and are far far less likely than they were a hundred years ago to die in childbirth in developed countries; they develop more cancers or have strokes or wither away with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. But that doesn't mean that it was silly to have worked on eradicating plague or smallpox or syphillis, or improve standards for care in childbirth, that we shouldn't have done it because some other disease would turn up and we should just have focused on finding one universal panacaea that would be able to fix anything that was wrong with the human body.

I just think women should be aware that the roots of patriarchy go beyond neuroscience bullshit and gender differences. Radical (as in radical feminist) means root.
Misogyny is the root of patriarchy, not gender difference, so I think some feminists are losing sight of that

also re. medicine:
patriarchal "improving" of standards for childbirth resulted in more maternal deaths than if they'd left well alone.
Doctors used to go from cutting up corpses to giving women episiotomies without washing their hands, then wonder why women caught diseases in childbirth

The U.S spends more money on maternity and childbirth than any other country in the world and has the second highest newborn death rate, and ranks 42nd in the world for the maternal mortality rate after Africa. WOmen would be better off giving birth alone in the woods

I wonder whether at heart this comes down to the radical/liberal feminist divide?

As a liberal feminist I tend to see the last few hundred years as a series of small victories. A bit at a time we have established that women can manage to cope with the vote, can work in factories and fight in armies if they want, can combine careers with marriage and parenthood, should at least in theory be paid the same amount for equivalent work. I see the demolition of the "it has to be this way because their little brains are just different " argument as another one of those small victories (if our little brains had been different then the line of attack would have had to be different and focused on the "it has to be this way because" part of the argument, but I do think it's easier to be able to point out that our brains are not, actually, radically different, and that many of the small differences detectable in adulthood are a result of the cultural stereotypes force-fed to our plastic brains in childhood). It isn't going to be the last victory; there will be another to be fought, and another, and another. I'm not even sure (although I hope) that there will be a last victory but I do believe that things will keep getting better by degrees and that society will be significantly better for my daughters than it is for my generation.

I am guessing that from a radical POV each small victory isn't of itself worthy of comment as the goal is to jump straight to the end state (the end state that I, in contrast, am not entirely sure we will ever reach). So from that point of view talking about male and female brains is more of a distraction than anything else?

Ha! See we came down to the radical/liberal thing around the same time.

That's why I jumped from a hundred years ago to now. Initial "improvements" in medical care and moving from (female) midwives to (male) doctors massively increased death rates. But in the UK now death rates are unarguably far far lower than they were a hundred or two hundred years ago.

The biological determinist argument is a ridiculous over exaggeration, and thus a political tool, probably to reinforce patriarchy and male power.

However, I think it is important for feminism to deal with the differences between male and females.

We cannot on the one hand say that men have more testosterone than women, but then all female:male behavioural difference is socially constructed.

It is ludicrous to deny all the 'biological' or neuropsychological studies which have found differences in male and female brains as irrelevant. Every study time and time again finds there are differences in male and female brains. These differences may be over exaggerated by patriarchy, but they do exist and it is in women's interests to get the story straight - so patriarchy cannot exaggerate and manipulate.

I don't understand what the problem women have in acknowledging these differences. They are minor differences, but a small difference can perhaps make a big impact. A very crude example of this is the fact that we share 95% of our DNA with chimps. But we are very very different to chimps.

Acknowledging our differences is not a defeat to patriarchy IMO. On the contrary, unless we are honest about our biological differences, we will never make true progress with feminism because we will never be able to refute the exaggerations and manipulations. And these differences should always be presented in a feminist context, not as a protector of patriarchy, which is perhaps why when these differences are presented, women are very likely to deny and protect their position.

Rambling now, but dealing with differences in a feminist context is my preferred route. Not denying differences exist. It is clear differences exist so they need to be dealt with in a feminist context.

Where do you get your figures on neonatal death rates from, by the way? UNICEF gives the top ten as Liberia (66 deaths per 1000 live births), Cote d'Ivoire (64), Iraq (63), Afghanistan (60), Sierra Leone (56), Angola (54), Mali (54), Pakistan (53), Central African Republic (52) and Lesotho (52). The US is down in 164 or so with 4 deaths per 1000 live births (although this is higher than the average for industrialised countries as a whole (3 deaths per 1000 live births)).

There are differences, on average. But by and large, in almost all cases where there are observable statistically significant differences, on average, those differences are tiny. Really really tiny.

Take "identifying emotions on faces", for example, which is actually a trait that has shown quite a large difference (compared with other male-female traits). The difference value for that is 0.40 which means that a third of men will perform better at this task than the average woman. I think that in these cases, simplifying "the average woman is very slightly better at identifying emotions than the average man, but at the same time will be out-performed by a third of men" into "women are better at identifying emotions than men", or even "women are generally better at identifying emotions than men" is misleading. A difference that small is IMO hardly worth mentioning (it's too tiny to use as the basis for any kind of policy, surely?), let alone making sweeping generalisations about and I reiterate that this is one of the larger observable sex-linked differences.

There are a very few traits where there's a very large difference between adult men and women, to be sure displays of physically aggressive behaviour is one but given the plastic nature of the brain it's very difficult to unpick whether that's innate or the product of socialisation.

Aggression is a great one to pick up. This is universally displayed male trait. Whatever culture they are in, males will be more violent than women. That is a huge thing, especially when combined with the fact that men are significantly larger and with more muscle mass than women.

I don't understand what you mean by a 'difference value' - could you explain what that .4 refers to?

With regards to radical/liberal feminism, I sometimes feel that liberal feminism works for a woman fairly well up until the point that she has a child (or indeed gets pregnant).

I found being a liberated woman with equal rights and freedom relatively easy up until the point I had children. (Leaving aside sexual assault.)

Then it all changed and suddenly my life was being ruled by the biological differences between men and women. DH's life carried on relatively unscathed. Suddenly I was slap bang up against the patriarchy and there wasn't much I could do about it. I could either be a SAHM or a 'working mum' - DH isn't a 'working dad', he is just a dad.

For me the problem women face is not that their brains may or may not be different to men's but that their bodies are. Traditionally there wasn't much point educating girls in maths and how to make planes because they were not going to do those things as grown ups - they were going to have children and become housekeepers. This has now become a cultural norm even though girls do have access to education nowadays. The whole 'women's ickle brains' thing is just a social construction to hide and justify the fact that whilst women had their backs turned giving birth and breastfeeding, men grabbed all the power and installed a system of privilege that suits them.

I also think we are in a horrible period of backlash at the moment - all this obsession with girly sparkly stuff wasn't nearly as prevalent when I was a child as it is now. I blame it on a combination of consumerism and patriarchy.

I will have to go away and look up exactly how you calculate a difference value because it's been too long since I did practical statistics

I totally agree beachcomber, and I see this as a result of us as feminists ignoring the bleeding obvious - the biological differences (I include the brain in that though and am not ashamed to do so)

We have to somehow get to a point where we are dealing with he differences, not ignoring and denying them.

Has anyone ever noticed in futuristic sci-fi films with women in positions of power/doing technical stuff that there are rarely any children about?

Ha! Yes it is interesting we reached that point at the same time.

CNN report on U.S newborn death rate

AMnesty INternational report on Maternal Mortality rates

LadyBlahBlah I pretty much agree with everything you've written in your post

Women without children are the only group who make significant impact through the glass ceiling. That is great for them. And women. But not helpful overall, and especially in dealing with our biological differences.

Exactly. By trying to prove that we can make it in a 'man's world' we are accepting the status quo as the right and proper default setting that would be fine for women if they could just pull their fingers out and stop oohing over babies and aahing over pink dresses.

So who is going to have the babies and bring up the next generation then? Ah, that will be women whilst they bust their guts being sexually harassed in the workplace and cleaning the bogs at home (and in the workplace too generally).

Bring on the revolution!

Agree about the backlash, Beachcomber. We are so in the middle of one at the moment. They talked about that at the LOndon Feminist conference. One of the opening speakers said that 1985 to the present day
has been a Backlash, what with the "pink and sparkly brain" idea, pole dancing and prostitution is empowering, cosmetic surgery, the media obsession with romance and WAGS...

ProfessorLayton, have you read Backlash, by SUsan Faludi? SHe's a liberal feminist but radical feminists love her work as well.

"I found being a liberated woman with equal rights and freedom relatively easy up until the point I had children. (Leaving aside sexual assault.)"

That is true. IME life is easier as a woman than as a mother. But surely the most important thing to do in that case is make the child burden a 'gender neutral' area. Not a 'woman's role'

My favourite book ever is 'Woman on the edge of time' - in the future society women and men are 100% equal, they have the same rights and responsibilities in a totally egalitarian society. But the 'downside' was that child-bearing was done by machine and breast-feeding could be done by any of the 3 'co-parent's' regardless of whether they were male of female. Is that a sacrifice worth making?

I see the backlash thing as a message along the lines of;

"look ladies, ok so you can do maths but the fact is, you're the ones who have the babies and the boobies. Why don't you just accept it and find a way to make yourselves feel better about it - have a pole to dance on and a pink thing as a consolation prize. Really, it's a win win - you get to be empowerfulised and I get to ogle your tits - what's not to like?"

Gotta get the girls to like their pink sparkly consolation prize early on otherwise they might turn into one of those nasty feminists who thinks men's obsession with boobies is pathetic (and suggests they definitely shouldn't be running the show as they are too easily distracted).

Ormirian I agree up to a point. But again, you have to have faith that mens' propensity for abandoning the mother is "learned". I'm not sure it is. there are a helluvalot of single mothers out there. Many not by choice.

HAve to bring up aggression again. A scary amount of men do away with their wife and children. It is scarily common.

The worry I have, is that handing over rights back to men is going to cause problems(when women have only just managed to get any rights over their children in the last half of the twentieth century- until then men unequivocally owned children) .

Men are going to have to hand over some political and economic power first IMO, and that is something they are certainly not doing. THe IMF, OECD, all the business conferences, political international conferences and trade conferences are predominantly run by and for men, and the only women there are there for decorative purposes, in the main.

ANd yet...feminists are talking about giving men an equal say over children?? They might be shooting themselves in the foot to hand everything over to men, without any clear sign that they're going to get anything in return.

I agree with Beachcomber, the only way out of this pickle is through a revolution