The War Against Boys (11 page)

Marshall and her associates presented a slide show, explaining, “A young mind is like Jell-O: you learn to fill it up with all the good stuff before it sets.” What counts as “good stuff” for the Wellesley pedagogues is making children as comfortable as possible participating in activities traditionally
“associated with the other gender.” One favorite slide—to which they repeatedly referred—showed a preschool boy dressed up in high heels and a dress. “It's perfectly natural for a little boy to try on a skirt,” they said.

The group leaders suggested that teachers “use water and bathing” to encourage boys to play with dolls. Acknowledging that preschoolers tend to prefer same-sex play, which reinforces “gender stereotypes,” they advised teachers in the audience to “force boy/girl mixed pairs.” In a follow-up discussion, one of the participating teachers boasted of her success in persuading her kindergarten-aged boys to dress up in skirts. Another proudly reported that she makes a point of informing boys that their action figures are really dolls.

At no time during this eight-hour conference did any of the two hundred participating teachers and administrators challenge the assumption that gender identity is a learned (“socially constructed”) characteristic. Nor did anyone mention the immense body of scientific literature from biologists and developmental psychologists showing that many male/female differences are natural, healthy, and, by implication, best left alone.
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On the contrary, everyone simply assumed that preschool children were malleable enough to adopt either gender identity to suit the ends of equity and social justice. The possibility that they were tampering with the children's individuality or intruding on their privacy was never broached.

Throughout the 1990s, equity activists in the Department of Education promoted a national effort to liberate children from the constraints of gender. The Women's Educational Equity Act Resource Center (a national center for “gender-fair materials” maintained by the Department of Education) distributed pamphlets that confidently asserted the social origins of feminity and masculinity. Here, for example, is a passage from the center's guide, entitled
Gender Equity for Educators, Parents, and Community
:

We know that biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between males and females are minimal during early childhood. Nevertheless,
in our society we tend to socialize children in ways that serve to emphasize gender-based differences.
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In fact, we know no such thing. Play preferences of chimps, rhesus monkeys, and other primates parallel those of children.
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A special issue of
Scientific American
in the spring of 1999 reviewed the evidence that these play preferences are, in large part, hormonally driven. Doreen Kimura, a psychologist at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, wrote, “We know, for instance, from observations of both humans and nonhumans, that males are more aggressive than females, that young males engage in more rough-and-tumble play, and that females are more nurturing. . . . How do these and other sex differences come about?”
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Kimura points to animal studies that show how hormonal manipulation can reverse sex-typed behavior. (When researchers exposed female rhesus monkeys to male hormones prenatally, these females later displayed malelike levels of rough-and-tumble play.) Similar results are found in human beings. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic defect that results when the female fetus is subjected to abnormally large quantities of male hormones—adrenal androgens. Girls with CAH consistently prefer trucks, cars, and construction sets over dolls and play tea sets. “It appears,” says Kimura, “that perhaps the most important factor in the differential of males and females . . . is the level of exposure to various sex hormones early in life.”
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These sorts of findings undermine the simplistic view that gender-specific play is primarily shaped by socialization.

The Department of Education equity educators promoted materials in the schools that ignored the scientific research. They assumed, along with Gloria Allred and the Wellesley Center experts, that typical male and female play preferences were the result of imposed cultural stereotypes.
Creating Sex-Fair Family Day Care
is a model curriculum guide for day-care teachers developed by the department's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. It offers concrete suggestions on how to change children's gender schemas.
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The central thesis of the guide is that the only way to win the battle over gender stereotypes is to stage interventions as early as possible, preferably in
infancy. Masculine stereotypes receive the lion's share of attention. Getting little boys to play with dolls is a principal goal. The 130-page guide includes ten photographs: two show a little boy with a baby girl doll; in one, he is feeding her, in the other, kissing her. The guide urges day-care teachers to reinforce the boys' nurturing side: “It is important for boys and girls to learn nurturing and sensitivity, as well as general parenting skills. Have as many boy dolls as girl dolls (preferably anatomically correct). Boys and girls should be encouraged to play with them.”
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Ever vigilant for gender stereotypes, the guide warns child care workers to “be wary of charming Mommy Bears . . . wearing little aprons and holding a broom in one hand.”
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And it offers a new second verse for “Jack and Jill,” now with Jill leading a safety-conscious, rough-and-tumble-free adventure:

Jill and Jack went up the track

To fetch the pail again.

They climbed with care,

Got safely there

And finished the job they began.
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This government-sponsored day-care guide also urges teachers to carefully monitor children's fantasy play: “Watch your children at play. Are stereotypes present in the fantasies and situations they act out? Intervene to set the record straight. ‘Why don't you be the doctor, Amy, and you the nurse, Billy?' ”
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The purpose of these interventions is described expansively: “Unless we practice nonsexist child-rearing, we cannot fulfill our dreams of equality for all people.”
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Boys do not always cooperate with efforts to rescue them from their masculinity. Sometimes they openly rebel. In their 1994 book
Failing at Fairness
, education scholars Myra and David Sadker describe a fourth-grade class in
Maryland in which the teacher worked with the boys to help them “push the borders of the male stereotype.”
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She asked them to imagine themselves as authors of an advice column in their local newspaper. One day they received the following letter:

Dear Adviser:

My seven-year-old son wants me to buy him a doll. I don't know what to do. Should I go ahead and get it for him? Is it normal, or is my son sick? Please help!

The nine-year-old “advisers” were unsympathetic to the boy. The teacher then read aloud from a popular feminist book,
William's Doll
. It is a story about a boy who wants a doll “to hug it and cradle it in his arms.”
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His father refused and tried instead to interest him in a basketball or in an electric train. But William persisted in wanting the doll. When the grandmother arrived, she gently scolded the father for thwarting William's wish. She took William to the store and bought him “a baby doll with curly eyelashes, and a long white dress with a bonnet.” William “loved it right away.”

The story did little to change the fourth graders' minds. According to the Sadkers, “Their reaction was so hostile that the teacher had trouble keeping order.”
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A few reluctantly agreed that the boy could have a doll—but only if it were a G.I. Joe. The Sadkers were surprised that boys so young could be so inflexibly traditional. “As we observed her lesson, we were struck by how much effort it took to stretch outmoded attitudes.”

William's Doll
has been made into a play. Boston University professor Glenn Loury tells about sitting through a production at his son's elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1998. Loury, the father of two boys—one starring in the play—was not impressed: “First of all, what is wrong with wanting your boy not to play with a doll but to play ball? There is nothing that needs to be fixed there.”
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Loury was speaking for many fathers and mothers. However, his voice and sensibility seemed to count for naught with the resocializers.

Shaping the gender identities of schoolchildren was a heady enterprise.
And it was inspired and informed by the scholars in some of our leading universities. Preeminent among them was Carol Gilligan. Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard School of Education saw themselves leading a profound revolution that would change the way society constructs young males and females. Once children were freed of oppressive gender roles, Gilligan predicted a change in their play preferences. She and her associate Elizabeth Debold firmly believed that so-called male behaviors—roughhousing and aggressive competition—are not natural but are artifacts of culture. Superheroes and macho toys, they said, “cause boys to be angry and aggressive.” Debold reported on their studies of three- and four-year-old boys who “are comfortable playing house or dress-up with girls, and in assuming nurturing roles in play.” Unfortunately, as they saw it, boys' interest in playing dress-up with the girls is rarely encouraged or sustained. “By kindergarten, peer socialization and media images kick in.”
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The gender reformers at Wellesley, the Department of Education, and Harvard helped shape attitudes and policy in schools throughout the country. They were convinced that breaking down male stereotypes, starting in preschool, was good for society. Whether it was good for the boys never came up. In classrooms across the country little boys got the message that there was something wrong with them—something the teacher was trying to change.

It is doubtful that these efforts at resocialization were ever successful. But they surely succeeded in making lots of little boys confused and unhappy. Questions abound. What sort of credentials do the critics of masculinity bring to their project of reconstructing the nation's schoolboys? How well do they understand and like boys? Who has authorized their mission? To better understand the logic and motives of the resocializers, it is helpful to consider the arguments of a contemporary gender theorist.

Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology at Hunter College, is one of the most frequently cited authorities on gender schemas and how to change them.
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She is also a leading light in the National Science Foundation's gender
equity campaign ADVANCE.
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With the help of a $3.9 million National Science Foundation grant, she and her colleagues established the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, where they have developed tutorials on gender role transformation.
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Her 1998 book,
Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women
explains the urgency of that mission:

In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action . . . [and being] assertive, instrumental, and task-oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different; it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.
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Our society, says Valian, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop “a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement.”
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Such gender role socialization, she says, exacts a high toll on women and confers an unfair advantage on men.

To achieve a gender-fair society, Valian advocates a concerted attack on conventional schemas. Changing how parents interact with children is at the top of her list. For example, says Valian, there is a widespread assumption that women are better with babies than men. Where did that come from? The commonsense answer is that women's special affinity for babies is a powerful, universal, time-immemorial biological instinct. But Valian dismisses such explanations and cites a large body of research showing how parents and other adults aid and abet children's preferences and propensities.

Valian describes a study in which fathers are placed in rooms with their one-year-old sons or daughters. “On the shelf, within the babies' sight but out of reach were two dolls, two trucks, a toy vacuum cleaner and a shovel.” What does the father do? Over and over again, fathers were observed giving their sons a truck twice as often as they gave them a doll.
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(They gave daughters dolls and trucks at similar rates.) She mentions another study in which parents appear to reward children for choosing sex-appropriate toys. Valian concludes, “It appears that [parents] want their children . . . to conform to
gender norms.” And, according to Valian, those norms inhibit a child's potential to flourish later in life.

As things stand, children learn to enjoy only half of what is potentially open to them, the half adults give them access to. Girls learn to take pleasure in being nurturant, boys learn to take pleasure in physical skills. Girls' increasing interest in sports shows how quickly some of them acquire a taste for physical activity. We have yet to provide boys with a parallel opportunity for nurturance.
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In the closing sentences of
Why So Slow?
, Valian says, “Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks. . . . From the standpoint of equality, nothing is more important.”
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