Half Changed World

Today’s book is Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers.  It’s an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) discussion of what’s wrong with all the claims that men and women are fundamentally different — at work, at home, as partners, as parents.  They take on everyone from Carol Gilligan to John Gray, and argue that the media has totally oversold the claims for gender differences, and that these beliefs about gender differences become self-fulfilling prophecies.  They quote Sarah Blaffer Hrdy — a biologist whose research is often cited in support of such claims — as saying:

"What begins as a scientist’s cautious speculation moves rapidly into a headline in USA Today and from there becomes received wisdom that directs public policy and influences girls’ career choices."

I generally agree with Barnett and Rivers’, so I’ve been trying to figure out why I can’t summon up more enthusiasm about the book.   I think there are two problems.  First, the book is mostly about what’s wrong with other people’s studies and how they’re represented in the mass media rather than presenting any new information.  There’s only so many different ways you can say "very small non-representative sample" and "generalization" and they quickly run through all of them.  The book is thus more useful as a reference to look up the flaws in a specific argument than as a book you’d want to sit down and read all the way through.

Second, I think Barnett and Rivers’ go too far in denying the reality of differences between how men and women behave.  At times I felt like they were allowing their ideological stance to blind them to the evidence in front of their noses. 

This is particularly frustrating because I don’t think their main thesis depends on such a claim.  In fact, in other parts of the book, they do make several arguments that don’t deny that there are such differences:

• The differences between men and women are the results of socialization, rather than biological differences.  (Barnett and Rivers offer counterexamples to the claim all other primates have similar gender roles to humans.)
• The differences between men and women are falsely attributed to gender, when they should be attributed to differences in power.  Powerful women behave in typically "male" ways and subordinate men behave in typically "female" ways.
• While there may be differences on average between men and women, there is more variance within each group than between groups.  In other words, the curves showing the distribution overlap significantly.  Therefore, the average difference doesn’t tell you much about the abilities or interests of any given individual of a certain gender.

I think these arguments are much more persuasive than trying to argue that there are no differences beween men and women. 

I haven’t gotten totally confused by the end of daylight savings time — I know it’s not Tuesday. But I don’t think I’m likely to have time for a book review on Election Day. So, special this week, we have "Tuesday Book Review, now on Sunday!"

The book is She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finley Boylan. It’s a memoir of her life as a maile-to-female transsexual, her attempts to overcome the feeling that she was supposed to be female and of the incredibly loving response of her wife and friends to her transition.

This is not a book I would have picked up just from browsing the bookstore shelves, but a friend recommended it, and I’m so glad she did. It’s very well written — Boylan has written several novels — and a touching love story.

I admit, when Boylan tries to describe why she needed to make the transition, I still feel like I’m blind and she’s trying to describe color to me. She writes about, as a young man, asking women what it felt like to have breasts, and how baffled they were by the question. I share that bafflement. She’s clearly proud of how much she looks feminine, her skills at dressing and wearing makeup, but there are lots of genetic women who don’t look feminine and even as teenagers weren’t especially concerned with their appearance. But any argument I can make, she has already raised, which is disarming.

Boylan writes that she felt she was supposed to be a woman even as a child, but thought that everyone would reject her if she made the transition. So he lives as a man, and marries and has children. And in spite of his loving family, and his successful career, and hobbies he loves, he eventually decides that being a man isn’t something he can live with, and so makes the transition to living as a woman. And the tragedy of it is that having waited so long, his decision affects — and hurts — more people than it would have if he had done it at 25. And the blessing of it is that her wife and children and mother and colleagues and friends respond with love and acceptance. (Her sister cuts off contact.)

There’s one passage from the book that struck me as the heart of the story. It’s after James (later Jenny) has visited a therapist, who tells him that he’s a transsexual and encourages him to live as a woman, noting that it will be easier as he’s young and unmarried. But that’s not what he wants:

"I wanted to learn how to accept who I wasn’t.

"What I felt was, beling a man might be the second best life I can life, but the best life I can live will mean only loss and grief. So what I wanted was to learn how to be happy with this second best life… I still believed that it was a life full of blessings. People can’t have everything they want, I thought. it is your fate to accept a life being someone other than yourself.

"I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have."

I don’t understand how a life as rich and full of blessings as Boylan describes her life pre-transtion could be unbearable, even if it is "second best," but I’m totally convinced by her writing that she found it so, that she would not have put herself and her loved ones through the difficulty of her transition unless she found it impossible to continue otherwise. I do wonder about what would have happened to Boylan if he had been born 100 years earlier. If he lived at a time when transsexuality wasn’t generally recognized and sex change operations were an impossibility, would he have drunk himself to death while insisting that he was happy? Or would he have been happy, living his life as a man?

In that infamous article on the "Opt-Out Revolution," Lisa Belkin argues that –on average — women are less ambitious than men, less interested in the conventional measures of success — money, power, titles — and suggests that it may be due to biological differences between men and women.

This conclusion is firmly rejected by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. She makes a classic liberal feminist argument: ambition is not seen as a "feminine" quality, especially in the mainstream white middle-class definition of femininity; many women censor their own ambitions and choose not to compete with men as a result; and society penalizes women who are overtly ambitious and competitive. This argument should be familiar to anyone who has read Susan Faludi’s Backlash or taken an introduction to Women’s Studies class.

What’s new and interesting in this book is Fels’ emphasis on recognition as a fundamental human need. She has a very specific definition in mind here:

"Recognition means being valued by others for qualities that we experience and value in ourselves; it involves appreciation by another person that feels accurate and meaningful to the recipient. Because recognition affirms a person’s individual experience or accomplishment, it is different from other forms of attention."

Fels’ description of how women simultaneously hunger for this sort of recognition and deny that they desire it (and are uncomfortable when they receive it) rang very true to me. For example, she cites repeated examples of women running for elected office — perhaps the ultimate action of seeking public recognition — who frame their activitism as just another form of caregiving. However, she sometimes pushes this argument to the edge of absurdity. Reading this book, one might think that the biggest danger of divorce to homemakers is the loss of the recognition provided by their ex-husbands rather than the financial threat or that the biggest advantage of the "old boys network" is the recognition it provides rather than the doors to power it opens.

Fels is about as negative about full-time parenting as anything I’ve read since The Feminine Mystique. She writes that a body of literature "document[s] the large component of child care that consists of demanding, low-control, repetitive tasks. This aspect of child care undoubtedly accounts for the fact that virtually everyone who can afford some kind of child care has it. It is the reason that full-time parenting, frequently praised as the most important and meaningful job in the world, is not one that men are lining up to do." Further, she argues that few people receive recognition for their parenting skills, because children are notoriously self-centered (Fels says "comically oblivious") and no one else is paying attention to what you’re doing.

Fels argues that — except for the very stressful years of the late 20s and early 30s when both careers and young children are highly demanding — working mothers are happier and more satisfied with their lives, their marriages, and their sense of self than at-home mothers. Her basic recommendations are for more government support for child care, more paternal care, and for women who are unhappy at work to seek out better jobs rather than to give up on paid employment entirely. She is concerned that women who "opt-out" will be buying temporary relief at the cost of long-term depression.

One of my fellow DotMoms recently wrote about being the mother to two daughters. Well, I’m the mother to two sons.

When I was in college, I read a book called X: A Fabulous Children’s Story, which is about a child raised so that no one at all knows if X is a boy or a girl, so X does all the boy games and all the girl games and lives happily ever after. This is the classic position of equality feminism, which denies that there are any innate differences between boys and girls.

Obviously, my husband the SAHD and I aren’t terribly big into gender roles, so we’re often a bit embarassed by how much our older son is into typical boy things — trucks and cars and trains and airplanes and construction equipment. (The younger one is too little to express such preferences.) We’re still not convinced that there are little trucks somewhere on the Y chromosome, though, as we haven’t raised our children in a vacuum — they’re exposed to books and television and other kids on the playground. (One of my friends likes to tell the story of how her son’s preference for pink went away after exactly one day of school.)

If you watch closely on a playground, you can see gender roles being created. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems that mothers are more likely to chase after little girls saying "be careful," while letting their boys explore more freely. David Reed suggests that mothers are more likely to hover than father — and if men are more likely to spend times with their sons than with their daughters, this reinforces the pattern.

At our encouragement, my mother bought my son a doll, which he occasionally undresses and redresses, but mostly ignores. But he often plays with the trucks as if they were dolls, taking them to the "tractor dentist" who cleans their shovels, and having them go to visit their friends.

I’ll be watching to see what happens as he gets older, and what his younger brother’s interests turn out to be.