Gender roles & culture - some musings

[INamechangedForThisMadness]

I've just finished Hannah Barnes' book Time To Think (you have to read it, btw. A total safeguarding fiasco) and have gone back to Gina Rippon's The Gendered Brain, which I've been trying to finish for a good few years now.

So just pondering sex, gender and the cultural influences and stereotypes.

In The Gendered Brain, Rippon talks about how in the 70s-80s toy choices were much more neutral than they had been in the 50s-60s because of second wave feminism.

Later, in the 90s-2000s toys became more gendered, or at least more gender coded (pink/blue). I remember the 'Let toys be toys for girls and boys' campaign being around in the early 2010s (I wasn't looking at toys 2000-2010).

But I remember there being a push for 'gender neutral parenting' in the 2000s. But in this wider context of gendered toys.

Rippon throughout the book points out how kids pick up on sex differences at very young ages, and at how they then learn gender roles from literally everything around them.

In a culture where they're encouraged (to an extent, there is/was a lot of sexism around boys doing girl things) to play with a range of gendered toys, by liberal, progressive (of the time) parents, I just thought it was interesting to then reflect that we now have a cohort of 15-25 year olds who look back and perceive that they played with cross-gendered toys/wore cross-gendered clothes, and that this is now perceived as evidence of a trans identity.

What was meant to be liberating, kind of now feels like it was a trap. And instead of everyone going 'yeah, scalextric and meccano were great toys for everyone' we go, 'oh, I liked boy toys so I'm a boy'.

Just half-formed thoughts.

The bit I don’t get though, is how anyone thinks anything as superficial as their choice of clothes/toys/activities means they are actually the opposite sex, and the biology that determines every cell in their body is somehow irrelevant

Not to say it’s not worth musing 😉

Sure, but I'm leaving that to one side for now. Thinking more about that human inclination to look back and cherry pick validating 'evidence' to reinforce current ideas.

For example, I'll tell you I've always been a tomboy, but I know there is plenty of evidence that I also did perfectly standard "girl" things in my childhood & adolescence (& adulthood).

I just

I just thought it was an interesting couple of thoughts to come out if two different books

The 00s were absolutely awful for gender segregated pink/blue toys. It was extreme. EVERYTHING was baby blue or baby pink. It was like all the other colours were forgotten. There would be the ‘girls toys’ section of the shop and the ‘boys toys’ section it was totally unnecessary. Feminists at the time fought for them to be called ‘construction toys’, ‘dolls’, etc.

My belief is that it was in the extreme gender segregation of the 00s that today’s young genderists want to rebel against.

Wait wait wait..!

(I'm listening to the audiobook and these are real-time thoughts)

Rippon has just reminded us that we do get real brain changes due to environment. So what if our giving 'gender neutral' or even 'opposite gender' toys to our kids in the 90s/2000s actually did/does lead to brain changes (which may or may not link into other preferences) that is then perceived as a trans identity. Because of an increasingly sexist/gendered society that's come back in the later 2010s & 2020s?

The whole point of this book is that brains are plastic so any change in culture/experience is reflected in the development of that brain. So girls socialised as girls, who do girl things are going to have "girl brains". (Horrible phrasing, I know, sorry)

I remember Cordelia Fine’s book coming out and it was blessed relief, with stats to contradict all the claims and assumptions going on that gender was innate and really fixed at the time.

I recall at the time there was a Swedish school which announced they wouldn’t use sexed pronouns, to avoid stereotyping. I remember thinking it wasn’t a bad idea at the time.

Yes, and if we (parents) were trying to resist and were pushing 'neutral' toys, is that now, in an even more gendered world, feeding into that feeling of being "non binary" or "trans"?

Is this the logical result of different waves of 'progressive' attitudes?

I haven't read that, I'll look it up.

But Rippon goes over all those "data" and shreds it. I have particularly enjoyed her rants about the monkeys!

I like Rippon's book, Fine's book, and there are several more which are quite good. Eliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Jordan-Young's Brainstorm, and at least two more the names of which I can't now remember.

So are we exploring the idea that the parents and grandparents of the mid 20th century were right that boys and girls should be treated differently. Play gently with the girls, boys generally need more outside time/physical play? Are we considering that there might have been some wisdom in the old ways which generation x perhaps misunderstood or just missed?

I think the second wave feminist children were my generation. I'm in my late 40s, so grew up in the 80s mainly.

I remember a lot of brown and dungarees. I wore a lot of my brother's hand me downs. Lego was massive and that awful pink and purple Lego wasn't a thing.

At the same time, though, I also had a lot of hand me downs from my cousin, who was a fashion victim Madonna fan, so lots of ra-ra skirts. It wasn't all neutral

My DM suspended her career and stayed a home for about a decade. Most of my friends' mothers were also at home.

There were still very male pursuits and power structures in play. My Dad worked at the BBC and, although he had a lot of female colleagues, it was still very much a man's world.

So, despite the veneer of a gender-neutral, feminist upbringing, there were a whole heap of social cues that reinforced gender roles.

I think it was towards the end of the 90s when gendered everything became a thing. It was certainly that way when I had my DS in 2005.

I used to think there wasn't a difference between men and women other than socialisation. I read Cordelia Fine too.

However, I've come to the conclusion now that there are probably natural tendencies to particular traits that are nature-lead. I think it is to do with hormones mainly, but also evolution. If men and women's bodies are so different, then it stands to reason that brain chemistry has evolved to be different too.

That is not to say that there is a correct way to be a man or a woman, or that nurture and environment can't affect behaviour. I'm certain that they do. I'm just less certain now that there aren't biologically determined differences in a very general sense.

I would expect, for example, male violence to have reduced over time, but it is a constant across all cultures.

I'd say definitely not.

I think we have to work with the way things are. We need to value boys' and girls' traits equally. We need to value emotional intelligence and gentleness as much as assertiveness and competitiveness in both boys and girls.

We are in a society that seems to value traditionally male traits over female ones. Hence caring professions are low paid, whereas more competitive sectors are highly paid (thinking about banking, corporate law...for example)

It's a huge shift and I'm not sure it's possible to make it happen, but that would be my ideal world.

Thanks for the tips

No, not at all, I've made a connection (possibly erroneously) that what we did with good intentions (and, I think, correctly) has been misinterpreted by those children as they grew up into an even more stereotyped world.

I think the concept of gender has morphed into The Hulk here, instead of being swept away as we had hoped it would.

@lifeissweet do read Rippon's book.

Her premise is that in young babies there is no evidence of gendered brain or behaviour. And that what we see as gendered differences later are either not actually difference because the studies are very flawed, or because of the plasticity of the brain responding to its gendered environment.

Though she does not touch on male violence at all here. (Although having also read Laura Bates' Men Who Hate Women there's definitely a learned aspect to that too).

@lifeissweet you're right about the value placed upon gendered professions. Really valid points there.

Thank you. I definitely will

As recall my upbringing as an only child in the early 1960s girls "played" all the time at being mothers (in a wide range of contexts), but boys did not play at being fathers - if we did get roped in by the girls to take that role it was totally boring and we dropped out. Boys together liked playing individual and group contests and competitions, with a lot of running and hiding. Trivial as this might sound, I would say boys need to be discouraged from any early expression of girl identity, because that will certainly appear to involve giving birth and looking after babies, and no matter what clothes they wear, this will never happen and it's wrong to suggest otherwise by omission.

Really?!

My brother preferred playing with the girls. He preferred the imaginative play the girls tended to prefer rather than the rough and tumble and football of the boys.

He grew up to be gay. I don't think this is an unusual tale.

Why discourage playing with the girls? He didn't ever believe he was going to give birth, because he knew he was a boy. I find that suggestion a bit odd.

Theresa May brought in a law that advertisers on TV couldn’t stereotype their adverts for children’s toys at a specific sex. So no blue trains for boys and no pink babies for girls.

https://www.youtube.com/. There’s a boy in this Barbie advert

I hated football and any of the organised games, and when the boys got rough I was nowhere to be seen. As an only child I tended to opt out of the lot and read. But it could not have been clearer to me then that a girl expected to become a mother. How could a boy "really" be a girl if, indeed, you he knew he could never become a mother? I am gay, btw.