Gender feminism - would like to know what people think

[Crumbledwalnuts]

Prompted by a thread about a fairy party. I see nothing wrong with a 3 year old inviting only girls to a fairy party. Others disagree. That's not for here but it prompted some thoughts.

It made me think that perhaps the idea of gender feminism motivates the idea that it's wrong to allow a girls only fairy party. What I'm referring to is the feminist standpoint that males and females are the same by nature and only different by nurture (basically).

I disagree with this very much, despite having a son who cross dressed much more than most boys and a daughter who's very tomboyish. Very. I still think there are basic emotional differences (and so, life preferences) arising from hormones.

I am a feminist and talk to my children about equal rights. I believe feminism is about equal rights not men and women being the same.

What do people think.

I think scientific evidence of innate behavioural difference is tiny and highly disputed and it's so hard to measure the effect of nature vs. nurture because you cannot raise children in controlled conditions and experiment on them.

I have seen such variety in the people that I have met that it makes no sense to say 'all men are like this' 'all women are like this'. You do see trends (that I, personally, would attribute to nurture) but the majority of people do not fit the gender stereotype fully and a significant minority are completely at odds with theirs.

My point being that typical differences, though they may exist (through nature or nurture) do not IN ANY WAY justify the prejudice and discrimination that did, and continues to exist. Targeting services to those who need them i.e. maternity, dv support, different cancers etc. is helpful and useful...saying 'all girls seem to like fairys, boys don't so let's exclude them' isn't.

We are biologically different, our behaviours are formed by our society and our individual personalities but we are still all equal IMO

And feminism doesn't say men and women have to be the same, just that we should have the same choices and opportunities. I don't want to be the same as a man and I don't want to be the same as another woman. I just want to be a person not judged as liking shoes, clothes, make up, caring, cooking etc. and being a bad driver, a good cook, bad a maths, not into video-games etc. just because I have a vagina.

I agree: you can't say "all women are this" or "all men are this". But I think there are differences from nature, and I don't think it makes any difference to the principle of equal rights.
Lala: This is what i think, but I'm aware there is a new brand / style / philosophy of feminism which "decrees" as it were that if we remove all environmental conditioning, girls and boys would turn out the same, that there are no differences.

"scientific evidence of innate behavioural difference is tiny and highly disputed"

not sure it's tiny when you look at the impact of hormones
I mean differing hormone levels in the same person can make an enormous difference to emotional response, so differing levels of different hormones will make a difference between teh sexes

I don't agree that feminism is trying to say that men and women would turn out the same if we were all treated differently. I think the idea is that a) a large proportion of these differences are artificial and b) human beings are so incredibly varied that there will always be people who absolutely cannot be squeezed into any box.

Lots of little boys may well like fairies. Lots won't and would prefer cars. Lots of little girls may well like cars though more will probably like fairies. The central idea behind feminism wanting environmental conditioning removed is so that each and every one of these children can then make up their own mind!

Remove environmental conditioning and more women that men may still choose to stay at home, and more men may remain on executive committees. But you can be damn sure that there will be more men SAH than there are now, and more women in the boardroom/engineering. Because they will get to make their own decisions without being told it's "wrong", and they will be so much the happier for it.

It's really about letting people be who they are, not who they're supposed to be.

But what differences really?
We all want the same things, love, sex, respect, autonomy, satisfying work etc, human things.

Some people are thrill seekers, some are confrontational. Those qualities probably do have a hormonal aspect but as you say hormone levels fluctuate within the individual so much anyway. And we can't seperate the cultural aspects of those behaviours either to quantify how much of an impact they have.
Why concentrate on the unimportant external fripperies like shoes and football as though that's what defines a person.

I hate emphasising the difference thing. We don't, as a society, do it to any other groupings except between the sexes.

Not aware of a 'new brand' of feminism. I just believe whatever seems sensible from everything I read and see around me.

No one knows what would happen if we removed the social conditioning. There was a separated-twin study in the states that was cancelled and the results hidden and there have been a few 'feral' children, but no one rally knows.

The scientific data I've seen shows that our brains are highly 'elastic' and can be made to 'perform' differently, even on scans etc. suggesting that if we treat a boy like a girl he will behave an perform like a girl...but that's just what I remember from the Dr. Fine book

Hormones affect everyone in different ways. I personally notice no fluctuations but some are highly affected and men are the same. I still find no reason testosterone means you don't like fairies, you love football and you deserve to be paid more. Nor any reason oestrogen means every woman makes a great carer, loves shoes and babies and should clean her husband's skid marks up.

And what about post-menopausal or people with hormone imbalance.

And where to LGBT people fit into this if biology is supposed to determine how you behave?

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.

LaLa: Perhaps I've got the wrong name for it. It definitely exists. Can anyone help out? Maybe it's called gender neutral feminism. Re your last question: yes: if there is no difference between males and females then there's no such thing as a transgender person, presumably. But who's going to say that out loud? It can't possibly be the case.

I have a 3 year-old (boy as it happens) - he has only the vaguest idea that there even are 'boys' and 'girls' and that the two are different (he seems to judge mainly on hair I think, but default to 'he' and 'boy').

He certainly would have no idea how to only invite girls to a party - if that happened, I'd be the one making the selections because he isn't mentally capable of making the distinction.

He'd also be perfectly happy to go to a pink fairy party with glitter and wings and wands and tutus despite being totally obsessed with cars (as would most of the children at his playgroup from what I can see). He's far too young for peer pressure to be boyish to have had an effect, and I'm certainly not going to artificially limit him.

I guess my point is, that for 3 year olds at least, it seems to me that it really must be nurture - ie the parents pushing for just girls, because the children themselves are still so young that it can't be them.

Radical feminists believe gender is a social construct and hierarchy used to keep women oppressed. They think that gender should be abolished and differences celebrated not punished as currently happens in a patriarchy.

This doesn't mean they think men and women are the same just that people would be healthier if they weren't pushed into damaging stereotypes. They also recognise biological differences and that is the root of oppression against women.

I don't know any strand of feminism that says men and women are the same (there might be I just don't know of it). Just ones that say we don't know what differences are innate and what are socially constructed.

I don't understand what gender feminism is either. When I google I seem to get sites saying more or less what scallops said, that feminists think gender is a damaging social construct, or I get the gender studies bunch.

Might you be thinking of gender studies? 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'.

I find it really unhelpful, personally, because I think the differences between individuals are much more significant than the differences between the sexes. I don't really believe the hormones/preferences stuff is very important. Even if you think (for example) that most women are more interested in babies than most men, you still need to create a society where men who are interested in babies don't get mocked, and where women who aren't interested don't get belittled, and where caring for babies is not something that is correlated with the social and economic oppression of one sex or other.

FWIW I don't see what's wrong with a three year old inviting only girls to any party, fairy or not, though if said three year old is anything like the three year olds I've met, they'll probably change their minds nine times in one day about who to invite anyway.

I think men and women are different, just not in the ways that we think they are.

And I think the differences are small, have lots of overlap and are hugely exacerbated by social factors. And I think that overlap would be even greater if we had a society which didn't subtly and not-subtly push boys and girls in opposing directions since before they were even born.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.