Stephanie Coontz
That’s a really tough question. But as women and as people who are critics of hierarchical gender and class arrangements, we have to find ways to acknowledge the messages men have received about how to be men and the self-sacrificing or just plain helpful things they often do trying to live up to those messages, and at the same time explain that they don’t have to do all the painful stuff to themselves or to others that they’ve been told is part of masculinity.
Going back to the polls on gender you cited, we have to be more conscious of the fact that in most societies, gender has traditionally been the first thing people see about any individual in any setting. Almost all of us are flooded from birth with expectations about how we should behave toward others and how they will behave toward us based on the gender we most closely resemble. In experiments, when people are shown a video of a baby and asked to describe its behavior, they often can’t or won’t describe it unless told the sex. Told it’s a boy, they describe tears as anger; told it’s a girl, they describe the same crying baby as scared.
By ten months old, infants associate stereotypically female faces with gender-typed objects. Seventy percent of toddlers are employing gender labels before they’re two years old. One of the first things toddlers learn is how you tell a woman from a man, which one they’re going to be, and what tools and clothes their sex is supposed to use. Parenting hardly matters here: My son, who has a feminist for a mom and who had a female doctor, once insisted to me that women couldn’t be doctors. It’s so powerful. The more they learn about what their gender is supposedly good at or bad at or likes or dislikes, the more they tend to adjust their behavior to accord with it — or in other cases, to defy or reject it because they…
Auteur: Stephanie Coontz
