2 Masculinity/Femininity

Taking Sex Differences Seriously Steven E. Rhoads Encounter Books SAN FRANCISCO Copyright © 2004 by Steven E. Rhoads All rights reserved, Encounter Books, 665 Third Street, Suite330, San Francisco, California 94107-1951. First edition published in 2004 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit corporation. Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rhoads, Steven E. Taking sex differences seriously / Steven E. Rhoads. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-893554-93-7 1. Sex roles. 2. Sex differences. 3. Child rearing. I. Title. HQ1075.R48 2004 395.3—dc22 2004040495 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CATHY ©1994, 2002, 2003 Cathy Guisewite. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved. DOONESBURY ©1993, 2000, 2003 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved. NON SEQUITUR ©1999 Wiley Miller. Dist. by UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. ©2002, Mike Twombly, Dist. by THE WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP. FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE ©2000 Lynn Johnston Pro- ductions, Inc. Dist. by UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. All rights reserved. ©1997 Anne Gibbons, Courtesy MHS Licensing. All rights reserved. for Diana, the queen of our forest and the love of my life CONTENTS Introduction 1 PART ONE ■ Nature Matters ONE ■ Androgynous Parenting at the Frontier 8 TWO ■ Masculinity/Femininity 14 PART TWO ■ Men Don’t Get Headaches THREE ■ Sex 46 FOUR ■ Fatherless Families 79 FIVE ■ The Sexual Revolution 96 PART THREE ■ Men Want Their Way SIX ■ Aggression, Dominance and Competition 134 SEVEN ■ Sports, Aggression and Title IX 159 PART FOUR ■ Women Want Their Way, Too EIGHT ■ Nurturing the Young 190 NINE ■ Day Care 223 Conclusion 244 Acknowledgments 264 Notes 267 Bibliography 305 Index 363 vii INTRODUCTION n 1966, a botched circumcision left one of two male identical twins without a penis. A leading sex psychologist, Dr. John IMoney of Johns Hopkins University, persuaded the parents to raise the toddler as a female. When the child was twenty-two months old, surgeons castrated him and constructed what appeared from the outside to be female genitalia. Called Brenda and treated like a girl, the child was later prescribed female steroids to “facilitate and mimic female pubertal growth and feminization.”1 When Brenda was twelve, Dr. Money reported that she and her parents had adjusted well.2 The media loved the story of the “opposite-sex identical twins.” In a long report, Time magazine called the case “strong support” for the view that “conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered.” The 1979 Textbook of Sexual Medicine noted the girl’s “remarkably feminine” development, which was taken as demonstrating the flexibility and “plasticity of human gender identity and the relative importance of social learning and conditioning in this process.”3 In academia, numerous introductory psychology and sociol- ogy texts used the case to argue that sex roles are basically learned.4 Theorists who believed that gender roles are socially constructed were ecstatic. In 1994, Judith Lorber described how the girl’s parents “bent over backwards to feminize the girl and succeeded. Frilly dresses, hair ribbons, and jewelry created a pride in looks, neatness and ‘daintiness.’” The social construction of gender, she concluded, “overrode any possibly inborn traits.”5 1 2 Taking Sex Differences Seriously In retrospect, one wonders whether it is fair to say that what happened to Brenda was simply “social construction.” With the injec- tion of female hormones and without the male hormones coming from testicles, Brenda was getting a bit more encouragement toward femininity than families and society usually administer. Nonethe- less, when the facts became more accurately known, it was clear that neither the chemicals nor the socialization efforts had succeeded in making Brenda a girl. Some hardworking researchers and jour- nalists were able to show that Dr. Money had completely misrepre- sented the results of his experiment. In the early 1990s, they located the grown-up Brenda and found that she was now named David, working in a slaughterhouse, married to a woman, and the adop- tive father of three children.6 At age fourteen, Brenda had decided to start living as a male, and at fifteen, she had been told the truth about her biological past. She then announced that she had always felt like a male and wanted to become one again. She was given a mastectomy, male hormones and a constructed penis. The story that emerged revealed that David had always acted like a male even when everyone in his world had told him he was a female and should behave like one. The first time “Brenda” was put in a dress, she pulled it off. When given a jump rope, she tied people up or whipped them with it. At nine, she bought a toy machine gun when she was supposed to buy an umbrella. The toy sewing machine went untouched; she preferred to build forts and play with dump trucks. She rejected cosmetics and imitated her dad shaving. On a trip to New York, she found the Rockettes to be sexy. She wanted to urinate stand- ing up. On the playground, her kindergarten and elementary school teachers were struck by her “pressing, aggressive need to dominate.”7 As the real story of the reconstruction of David was made pub- lic, responsible researchers on the Johns Hopkins medical staff decided they should find out what had become of the many boys born without penises, most of whom had been castrated and sub- sequently raised as girls. Of twenty-five located (ranging in age from five to sixteen), every single one exhibited the rough-and-tumble play more characteristic of boys than girls. Fourteen had declared themselves to be boys, in one case as early as age five. Two children were found who were born without a penis but had not been castrated or sexually reassigned. Both these children, raised as boys, fit in well with their male peers and “were better adjusted psycholog- ically than the reassigned children.”8 Introduction 3 On hearing this Johns Hopkins paper, Dr. Margaret Legato, a Columbia University professor of medicine and an expert on sexual differentiation, asserted: “When the brain has been masculin- ized by exposure to testosterone [in the womb], it is kind of useless to say to this individual, ‘you’re a girl.’ It is this impact of testosterone that gives males the feelings that they are men.”9 Scientists today would call this impact of testosterone on the devel- oping brain a permanent “organizational effect,” which cannot be altered in any substantial way.10 When I was growing up, the sci- ence of the brain was in its infancy, but everyone assumed that boys and girls had different natures. These days, such a belief is quite controversial. The contrary view—that families and culture create notions of masculinity and femininity and establish gender-specific roles—has become commonplace. And if one looks at changes in male and female behavior over the last fifty years, those who believe in the fluidity of gender have evidence to point to. My teenage years were in the 1950s, when men and women, boys and girls lived very different lives. Boys asked girls out on dates and made the sexual advances. After graduation, they scoured the “male help wanted” ads and tried to land the well-paid jobs that would impress girls and ultimately enable them to support a wife and children. Husbands were the breadwinners. On dates, girls were coy and hard to get, at least at the begin- ning. After graduation, women scanned the “female help wanted” ads for jobs that almost always paid less than those the men sought. They would look to marry, and once they had children, they usually quit their jobs or worked part-time for low wages. Wives were the nurturers and homemakers. In the few decades that have elapsed since then, the world has been breathtakingly transformed in important ways. Girls frequently ask boys out on dates and sometimes take the sexual initiative. The “his and hers” want ads have thankfully disappeared, and women now flock to the best-paid professions. One sign of the scale of change is the dramatic increase in relative numbers of women and men earning degrees in law and in medicine. In 1960, only 3 percent of law degrees and 6 percent of M.D. degrees were earned by women. In 2000, the equivalent percentages were 46 and 43, 4 Taking Sex Differences Seriously respectively.11 Another sign is the current tendency of most women to remain employed even when they have very young children. Now, Father’s Day never passes without the national media highlighting Mr. Moms. In 2003, for example, Lisa Belkin of the New York Times described the life of Michael Zorek, whose only job was taking care of his fourteen-month-old son, Jeremy. Zorek felt that he had become “remarkably good” at shopping, at cooking, and at entertaining his energetic toddler. He was angry at the parents’ magazine whose essay contest was open only to mothers. “I’m the one who does the shopping, and I’m the one who does the cooking,” he reasoned. “Why is it only sexist when women are excluded?” Mr. Zorek could be a stay-at-home husband because his wife, Shelly Friedland, brought home a good salary as a corporate lawyer.12 A month before Belkin’s article appeared, Newsweek’s cover story, entitled “She Works, He Doesn’t,” told of more Mr.

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