Delusions of Gender (33 page)

Yet so thoroughly have these preferences become ingrained that psychologists and journalists now speculate on the genetic and evolutionary origins of gendered colour preferences that are little more than fifty years old.
²
For example, a few years ago an article in an Australian newspaper discussed the origins of the pink princess phenomenon. After trotting out the ubiquitous anecdote about the mother who tried and failed to steer her young daughter away from the pink universe, the journalist writes that the mother’s failure ‘suggests her daughter was perhaps genetically wired that way’ and asks, ‘is there a pink princess gene that suddenly blossoms when little girls turn two?’ Just in case we mistake for a joke the idea that evolution might have weeded out toddlers uninterested in tiaras and pink tulle, the journalist then turns to prominent child psychologist Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg for further insight into the biological basis of princess mania: ‘The reason why girls like pink is that their brains are structured completely differently to boys’, he sagely informs us. ‘Part of the brain that processes emotion and part of the brain that processes language is one and the same in girls but is completely different in boys.’ (Now where have we heard
that
before?) ‘This explains so much – you can give a girl a truck and she’ll cuddle it. You can give a boy a Barbie doll and he’ll rip its head off.’

But what is also overlooked is
why
, according to Paoletti, children’s fashions began to change. Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be
in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions
could be taught
and
must
be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear.’
⁴

In other words, colour-coding for boys and girls once quite openly served the purpose of helping young children learn gender distinctions. Today, the original objective behind the convention has been forgotten. Yet it continues to accomplish exactly that, together with other habits we have that also draw children’s attention to gender, as a number of developmental psychologists have insightfully argued.
⁵

Imagine, for a moment, that we could tell at birth (or even before) whether a child was left-handed or right-handed. By convention, the parents of left-handed babies dress them in pink clothes, wrap them in pink blankets and decorate their rooms with pink hues. The left-handed baby’s bottle, bibs and dummies – and later, cups, plates and utensils, lunch box and backpack – are often pink or purple with motifs such as butterflies, flowers and fairies. Parents tend to let the hair of left-handers grow long, and while it is still short in babyhood a barrette or bow (often pink) serves as a stand-in. Right-handed babies, by contrast, are never dressed in pink; nor do they ever have pink accessories or toys. Although blue is a popular colour for right-handed babies, as they get older any colour, excluding pink or purple, is acceptable. Clothing and other items for right-handed babies and children commonly portray vehicles, sporting equipment and space rockets; never butterflies, flowers or fairies. The hair of right-handers is usually kept short and is never prettified with accessories.

Nor do parents just segregate left- and right-handers symbolically, with colour and motif, in our imaginary world. They also distinguish between them verbally. ‘Come on, left-handers!’ cries out the mother of two left-handed children in the park. ‘Time to go home.’ Or they might say, ‘Well, go and ask that right-hander if
you
can have a turn on the swing now.’ At playgroup, children overhear comments like, ‘Left-handers love drawing, don’t they?’, and ‘Are you hoping for a right-hander this time?’ to a pregnant mother. At preschool, the teacher greets them with a cheery, ‘Good morning, left-handers and right-handers.’ In the supermarket, a father says proudly in response to a polite enquiry, ‘I’ve got three children altogether: one left-hander and two right-handers.’

And finally, although left-handers and right-handers happily live together in homes and communities, children can’t help but notice that elsewhere they are often physically segregated. The people who care for them – primary caregivers, child care workers and kindergarten teachers, for example – are almost all left-handed, while building sites and garbage trucks are peopled by right-handers. Public toilets, sports teams, many adult friendships and even some schools, are segregated by handedness.

You get the idea.

It’s not hard to imagine that, in such a society, even very young children would soon learn that there are two categories of people – right-handers and left-handers – and would quickly become proficient in using markers like clothing and hairstyle to distinguish between the two kinds of children and adults. But also, it seems more than likely that children would also come to think that there must be something fundamentally important about whether one is a right-hander or a left-hander, since so much fuss and emphasis is put on the distinction. Children will, one would imagine, want to know what it
means
to be someone of a particular handedness and to learn what sets apart a child of one handedness from those with a preference for the other hand.

We tag gender in exactly these ways, all of the time. Anyone who spends time around children will know how rare it is to come
across a baby or child whose sex is not labelled by clothing, hairstyle or accessories. Anyone with ears can hear how adults constantly label gender with words:
he, she, man, woman, boy, girl
and so on. And we do this even when we don’t have to. Mothers reading picture books, for instance, choose to refer to storybook characters by gender labels (like
woman
) twice as often as they choose nongendered alternatives (like
teacher
or
person
).
⁶
Just as if adults were always referring to people as left-handers or right-handers (or Anglos and Latinos, or Jews and Catholics), this also helps to draw attention to gender as an important way of dividing up the social world into categories.

This tagging of gender – especially different conventions for male and female dress, hairstyle, accessories and use of makeup – may well help children to learn how to divvy up the people around them by sex. We’ve seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa.
⁷
This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There’s some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup and so on are intended before their second birthday.
⁸
And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong.
⁹

It’s at this critical point in their toddler years that children lose their status as objective observers. It is hard to merely dispassionately note what is for boys and what is for girls once you realise that you are a boy (or a girl) yourself. Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labelled ‘Me’ versus ‘Not Me’), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender.
¹⁰
Developmental psychologists Carol Martin
and Diane Ruble suggest that children become ‘gender detectives’, in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe.
¹¹
Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers’ amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference:

[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced ‘only boys like cold water, right Dad?’ Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and ‘chewing’ on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment.
¹²

In fact, young children are so eager to carve up the world into what is female and what is male that Martin and Ruble have reported finding it difficult to create stimuli for their studies that children see as gender neutral, ‘because children appear to seize on any element that may implicate a gender norm so that they may categorize it as male or female.’
¹³
For instance, when creating characters from outer space for children, it proved difficult to find colours and shapes that didn’t signify gender. Even something as subtle as the shape of the head could indicate gender in the eyes of the children: aliens with triangular heads, for example, were seen as male.
¹⁴
(Later, we’ll see why.) And experimental studies bear out children’s propensity to jump to
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
–style conclusions on rather flimsy evidence. Asked to rate the appeal of a gender-neutral toy (which girls and boys on average like the same amount), boys assume that only other boys will like what they themselves like; ditto for girls.
¹⁵

It’s hardly surprising that children take on the unofficial occupation of gender detective. They are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasised through conventions of dress,
appearance, language, colour, segregation and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance. At the same time, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the information we provide to children, through our social structure and media, about what gender means – what goes with being male or female – still follows fairly old-fashioned guidelines.

F
orty years ago, psychologists Sandra and Daryl Bem decided to raise their young children Jeremy and Emily in a gender-neutral way. Their goal was to restrict as much as they could their young children’s knowledge of the ‘cultural correlates’ of gender, at least until they were old enough to be critical of stereotypes and sexism.

What, exactly, did this involve?

Theirs was a two-pronged strategy. First, the Bems did all that they could to reduce the normally ubiquitous gender associations in their children’s environment: the information that lets children know what toys, behaviours, skills, personality traits, occupations, hobbies, responsibilities, clothing, hairstyles, accessories, colours, shapes, emotions and so on go with being male and female. This entailed, at its foundation, a meticulously managed commitment to equally shared parenting and household responsibilities. Trucks and dolls, needless to say, were offered with equal enthusiasm to both children; but also pink and blue clothing, and male and female playmates. Care was taken to make sure that the children saw men and women doing cross-gender jobs. By way of censorship, and the judicious use of editing, WhiteOut and marker pens, the Bems also ensured that the children’s bookshelves offered an egalitarian picture-book world:

[M]y husband and I got into the habit of doctoring books whenever possible so as to remove all sex-linked correlations.
We did this, among other ways, by changing the sex of the main character; by drawing longer hair and the outline of breasts onto illustrations of previously male truck drivers, physicians, pilots, and the like; and by deleting or altering sections of the text that described females or males in a sex-stereotyped manner. When reading children’s pictures books aloud, we also chose pronouns that avoided the ubiquitous implication that all characters without dresses or pink bows must necessarily be male: ‘And what is this little piggy doing? Why, he or she seems to be building a bridge.’
¹

The second part of the Bems’ strategy was to, in place of the usual information about what it means to be male or female, promote the idea that the difference between males and females lies in their anatomy and reproductive functions. Your typical preschooler enjoys a detailed knowledge of gender roles, but remains a bit hazy regarding the hard, biological fact that males differ from females when it comes to the allocation of such items as penises, testicles and vaginas.
²

Not so, for the Bem children: