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.

I think there's some complex stuff that's gone on with this.

When a lot of gender stuff was first starting to take hold, and I became aware that i was not on the same page as most other women in my general social group,

I was initially very surprised to see that it was these mums who were dead set on non-sexist parenting, non-sexist toy choices, and all the rest, who were also the most enthusiastic about gender woo.

I have no doubt there are also the Jazz Jennings type of situations where the parents are very different, but that was absolutely not the case among the university educated women I knew. These women would never in a million years have bought a Barbie doll, I knew one who refused to let her daughter have a really cool toy castle someone had given them because it was pink. They were all over letting boys wear dresses or Dora shoes or whatever they wanted. They were also very concerned with making sure their sons grew up without toxic masculinity and their girls were reading books about girls who were powerful and tough.

I thought it was so weird at first, but I've come to see that it's all part of a whole different way of thinking that exists in a different material reality (or thinks it does) and has a different logic.

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'.

There are 2 factors here, that need disaggregation.

Firstly, gender neutral parenting - which was meant to be liberating.

Secondly gendered toys (and clothes) - which were not.

The 70s and 80s had quite a lot of the former, and much less of the latter than more recent generations. And the children of those generations turned out very differently.

I would agree that boys need to know they are boys.

But I don't think that involves policing the games they play and who with. Children don't have any concept of gender identity and transition until they are introduced by adults. So we just need to stop introducing that idea to small children.

Solved.

I would agree that boys need to know they are boys. But I don't think that involves policing the games they play and who with. Children don't have any concept of gender identity and transition until they are introduced by adults. So we just need to stop introducing that idea to small children. Solved.

100% agree. My games were never "policed" - I lived in the country and we went where we liked outdoors and played with who we liked. I was just suggesting that any idea a little boy comes up with that he might "really" be a girl should not be indulged, by parents or schools -- and that I find the idea ridiculous when boys' and girls' games did indeed make it absolutely clear that girls could and did have babies when the grew up. It's no good allowing a boy to think he might be a girl if he will never have that choice, which is the biological basis of sex differences, and the basis of the challenge to all people in finding the way they want to live out the real gender they have been endowed with.

Sorry, @ValuePartnership, I misread your first post completely

I think all children need to be gently discouraged from saying they are the opposite sex. I think I read it as discouraging boys from playing girls' games in case they got the message that they could be girls too. Totally read it wrong!

Yes. Agreed. In fact I did this with a boy within my first couple of years of teaching. I was teaching in the reception class one
day and had a boy who always wore the princess dress as soon as he came in in the morning. He told me he wanted to have babies when he grew up and I told him that, no, he can't because he's a boy. Simple, really.

I would probably get into trouble for that now, but this wasn't on the radar then.

He's all grown up now. I wonder how he's turned out.

Maybe the worst of the problems have come with conspicuous consumption.

In the “olden days” the focus was less on brightly coloured plastic toys which are highly marketed and branded and more on making up your own games with friends. Perhaps the fewer toys and more basic toys in the past had many benefits, children socialised more deeply, interacted more frequently and for longer stretches of time with the natural world, were more creative and imaginative, developed more practical skills and crafts. All of this enabled them to have a more secure sense of self. To know themselves and to have the grounding experience of being known by others.

Clothes came into this too, children’s clothes were distinct from adults, you didn’t get the sexualised crop tops and porn star style clothing which you get now for girls. Clothes costed a greater proportion of people’s disposable income and so were home made, we all had our home knitted school jumpers for example and as much as possible was handed down. Basics like t-shirts and joggers were unisex.

Now children play less with friends I think and spend more time alone with character/brand specific toys or screens. Perhaps this leaves them a bit untethered, not quite sure of who they are, not anchored in a community.

Add to that a parenting style which is quite hands on, and influenced by politics and ideology about what children should and shouldn’t be playing with and doesn’t actually allow children to be free to discover their own preferences and maybe that leads to the very confused children of the noughties?

I fell into this myself with one of my daughters who loved stereotypically girls toys. I felt that I should discourage her from those things to bring her up more gender neutral. That was my first realisation that gender neutral meant basically boys. I soon gave my head a wobble accepted the child in front of me and supported her natural inclinations. I had somehow come to believe that dolls, dressing up and princesses were anti feminist and bad. I had to have a serious rethink of my assumptions and ideas.

Isn't some of this just a nurture / nature debate? I tried to encourage my pfb to do all sorts of stuff but it didn't work - she liked girl toys. Similarly, I tried all sorts of stuff for my psb but he stuck to boy toys.
Brains aren't always that plastic.

I can’t remember who said this but it’s been noted that as adulthood has become less divided on gender lines (with more women going to uni, women having fewer babies, women being more likely to have careers and not just jobs, paternity leave becoming a thing etc) childhood has become more divided on gender lines.

How we went from raising children with a big mix of hand me down toys and clothes but with their sex acknowledged to raising children with extremely gendered accoutrements but keeping their sex a secret I really cannot explain.

I agree that it wasn’t quite as gender neutral in the 80s as nostalgia pretends it was but alternative teen youth culture stuff has been pretty non-gendered (at least aesthetically) since the Teddy Boys and Girls.

I think that girls and boys should be allowed to play with any toy they wish to and that they should be told they are boys and girls and that playing with what some view as boys' toys does not mean that a girl is a boy and vice versa, but that all children can play with all toys.

The stage of pink princesses for girls and space heroes etc. for boys in small children is a very short time, and some believe that it exists because young children don't actually yet know what it means to be a boy and a girl so they seek clues to that and superficial clues first look appealing.

Once they understand the biological definition both sexes become much less differentiated in that sense, i.e., wear jeans and t-shirts and even play together more.

One child expert said that children can be detectives about trying to understand the meaning of various groups adults put them into, and when they are very young they don't really understand biological sex, so resort to something such as one little boy thinking that having a hair clip or hair band meant that a child was a girls. Many pick colours as only suitable for girls (pink) or for boys (blue) as a way to define sex, but very young children have not been found to have these colour preferences which in the West start around three or four years of age or so, and which are also not the same colours in all cultures.

What caused so many toys to be redefined as strictly suitable for only boys or for only girls when things were much more relaxed in the past is a real puzzle to me. It also happens with clothing now where little girls' clothes have cute animals (rabbits, kittens, bambis, unicorns) and little boys' clothes have predator animals.

Some say that this began in the 1990s? Not sure, but it's surely having some relationship to the increasingly rigid thinking about 'gender' among the younger generations.

What caused so many toys to be redefined as strictly suitable for only boys or for only girls when things were much more relaxed in the past

Capitalism.

In the past there were fairly common ideas that some toys were for girls (dolls, unless they were toy soldiers, and toy kitchens) and some.for boys (cars and trains). But the majority (teddies, yoyos, hoops, spinning tops, lego) were for everyone. They came in a variety of bright colours and were.passed from.sibling to sibling, and friend to friend (as were clothes, prams etc).

If something is made in yellow, and is suitable for all, you sell 1 per family. If it's made in pink and blue, or 'Technix' and 'Friends', or kittens and dinosaurs - and sold in strictly segregated Boy and Girl sections of the shop - you sell 2 to families that have both a boy and a girl.

@BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn

I’m not so sure that you can lay all the guilt at the feet of capitalism. I worked in advertising and marketing in the 80’s, one of my clients was a major toy manufacturer. In those more leisured times, we did a lot of ‘market research’ , in other words, talking in an unstructured way with parents, and observing children with prototype products.

It did seem that there were some very basic differences in what (most) boys wanted from a toy to what (most) girls wanted, and these differences seemed to be about their ultimate biology . To take your example of the spinning top, the girls could well end up putting it to bed and singing to it, the boys enjoyed whipping the poor thing ( and quite possibly using the whip on each other …). Whether said top was pink or blue really wasn’t the crucial factor here.

What was interesting was that girls toys often allowed for far more imaginative play than boys. Cindy could go mountaineering, though she was wearing a ball gown to do it. GI Joe ( there didn’t seem to be a British version) shot people, and quite often he himself was used as a weapon, I have seen a small boy point Joe at someone and say bang bang. Of course even small children are socialised, but I don’t think that was the whole answer.

I used to attend the huge trade toy fair in Nuremberg every year, and these differences were common across all the nationalities who were exhibiting .

I think babies are socialised into gender roles from birth, and the adults doing it don't even realise they're doing it.

Yes

Babies and toddlers face adult approval - smiles etc- when they perform in the way that is expected for their ( apparent ) sex

Before birth - gender reveal and decorate the nursery , buy clothes according to the sex

Once born mother show a much bigger fear response with girls than boys - danger versus opportunity

Kind girls , rough and tumble boys , pretty girl , strong boy,

And it continues in schools bossy girl , leader boy

We all do it - it's what we have been taught since childhood , it's very hard to break

So yes any marketing tests will show the already programmed society choices - and reinforcing them is helpful to maximise sales

But see @Allthegoodnamesarechosen's post where sex differences were noted across nationalities. National differences would likely include cultural differences. But some of the examples you have given are very culturally/class specific e.g. I never did a gender reveal or decorated nursery with either of my kids because it isn't culturally relevant and you need to have a certain amount of free dosh/space and time to do this. In my culture, rough and tumble play for boys is tolerated but not held up as the ideal - the ideal male figure is a religious scholar, not a physically strong man. There's a big fear response for both boys and girls, I would say the sex difference here is narrow. We have our own gender roles which undoubtedly do feed into how we treat our kids, but these don't necessarily match the role divide you've mentioned.

So if there is evidence of boys and girls playing differently even across different nationalities and different cultural expectations around gender roles, I would not dismiss the possibility of an innate sex difference out of hand. It's back to the whole Nature v Nurture debate.

Oh it's not all capitalism, I agree. But capitalist exploitation of underlying sexism accounts for the explosion of separate pink and blue versions of everything over the past couple of decades.

As for biology - as Kucing and Midge say, there is social reinforcement of gender roles and expectations from the moment a child is born. There have been lots of experiments like putting the exact same 1-year-old baby in a room with various adults and a selection of toys. Half the adults get a blue-clad baby 'Tom', and the other half an 'Emily' dressed in pink. 'Tom' gets wrestled with and encouraged to sit on the toy car; 'Emily' gets dolls waved in her face and is told she's pretty.

By the time a marketing panel asks a 5- or 10-year old what toys they like, it's not biology determining the answers.

Sex differences are seen across nationalities

Not always the same difference of course - bummer for you that / the aptitude for science and building things for example is in some cultures seen in girls not boys

But many of the observed differences will have been with us since Lucy left Africa when the need to protect the child bearing people , the need to ensure they took up child bearing to boost the very small human population was strong

Add into that the war / fighting that took place once populations did expand - when the issue of physical strength became a priority across all cultures that wished to protect themselves leading to almost ( but only almost ) worldwide an patriarchal society

The same drivers lead to similar outcomes - sexist societies where people are expected to behave in a certain way because of their sex

It is seen that is you cross dressed children adults describe their behaviour differently.

And by enforcing such roles you limit children
By enforcing such rules you other children who have aptitudes that are not aligned with the norm
We are no longer simple animals

No, my thoughts are about the interaction of these concepts.

I think some of us were parenting as gender neutrally as possible (having ourselves grown up in a relatively gender neutral culture, shielded by the limited TV/no internet of the time, and by mothers influenced by second wave feminism) but within a vastly more gendered culture (massive TV choices, greater gendered advertising and later the rise of the internet). And how that gendering has continued and has been exacerbated by social media etc

Your middle paragraph there is right out of Rippon's book.

She refers to children as 'gender detectives', looking for cues to categorise people and experiences, and sex and gender being one type of categorisation. They absorb all these tiny social/cultural clues, even when we think we're trying to be 'gender neutral' with them.

I agree.

I can't remember the details, but I know there are interesting studies where adults were asked to play in a room full of toys and games with very young children, young enough that you couldn't tell at a look what sex they were, some dressed as stereotypical boys and some as girls, and the adults were told names corresponding to the way they were dressed e.g. Tom for a child dressed in 'boy' clothes and Lucy for a child in 'girl' clothes.
The adults when questioned afterwards were sure they'd treated the children the same regardless of sex, but in fact observation showed they'd encouraged the ones dressed as boys towards trucks and things, and the ones dressed as girls towards things like dolls, and had spoken and behaved differently according to their perceived sex.