Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (20 page)

The current assumptions about how boys and girls differ often overlook the very real variability among boys and girls, and, what’s more, the point that Marianne Grabrucker made so strongly to me when I met her still holds good. If we do see differences along the expected lines, it does not follow that these are necessarily produced by biological rather than social factors. It is not the case that a thoroughgoing experiment in non-sexist upbringing was made throughout society in the 1970s and 1980s, and seen to fail. A few parents, a few teachers, made individual efforts to help children to resist the conditioning around them, but while boys and girls were still surrounded by such differing expectations from books, films, friends, toys, advertisements, schools and so on, it is hardly surprising that their efforts often foundered. It is strange that so many people have fallen so uncritically for the idea that the differences we see now must be put down to biology. Since we have not yet created the equal world that Simone de Beauvoir dreamt of, and since girls and boys receive so much encouragement to fall in with traditional expectations, the jury must still be out on whether the differences we see between boys and girls are innate or the result of social factors, or – which seems most likely – a complicated and constantly changing mixture of innate and learned responses. Yet we now constantly hear that the jury has declared, and nature has won the day.

This current fashion for biological determinism purports to rely on new directions in scientific research. Over the last few years there has been a deluge of research studies on the possible biological basis for sex differences, emanating from psychology to linguistics to neuroscience departments of universities, and those studies that seem to back up biological explanations for
stereotypes are picked up with enormous enthusiasm throughout the media. For instance, as mentioned in the introduction to this book, even the very association of girls with pink and boys with blue has been put down to their genetic make-up, when researchers at Newcastle University devised an experiment to test the colour preferences of men and women. The experiment consisted of presenting 208 men and women with differently coloured pairs of rectangles and asking them to pick out their favourites. They found that the general preference was for blue colours, but women liked pinky and reddish colours more than men did. There was nothing in the study to show why this might be the case, but that did not stop the researchers suggesting that this phenomenon was created by genetic differences that arose from a divergence in the way men and women had evolved. ‘We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialisations in the evolutionary division of labour,’ they said
²²
, and this was what the media picked up on, from the
Guardian
to the
Daily Mail
.

Here is part of the
Daily Mail’s
report: ‘While men developed a preference for the clear blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting, women honed their ability to pick out the reds and pink while foraging for ripe fruits and berries. Professor Hurlbert, of Newcastle’s school of psychology, said: “The explanation might date back to humans’ hunter-gatherer days, when women were the primary gatherers and would have benefited from the ability to home in on ripe, red fruits.”’
²³

Dissenting voices were hardly heard in the mainstream media, except in a ‘Bad Science’ report by Ben Goldacre in the
Guardian
, who pointed out that even if a preference for pinkier colours was seen among women, the researchers had not screened out the likely explanation that this is a cultural rather than biological difference. We surround girls with pink, we buy them pink clothes, we give them pink bedrooms, can we be surprised if they are readier to say they like pink? The study
suggested that this could not be a result produced by acculturation, because it included some Chinese subjects, but as they were immigrants who had been living in the West, it is not clear how they constituted a control group. And although the researchers speculated that the difference was ‘hardwired’ into our brains because of our foremothers’ need to pick out fruit in the ancestral plains of our evolutionary past, as Goldacre pointed out, they did not test whether the preference (that women liked more pinkish colours) was backed up by greater discrimination (that women could actually see pinks more clearly).
²⁴
What became clear in the way the experiment was reported is that there is now such a strong desire to explain the pink-is-for-girls phenomenon as biologically based that this desire can override the need for balanced reporting.

In fact, the current convention to associate pink with girls and boys with blue seems to be a recent and culturally specific practice. Until the twentieth century infants’ clothes were generally white, and even once white was discarded for all infants’ clothes, the division of boys and girls into blue and pink took a while to get going. ‘In the beginning,’ Jo Paoletti, a leading expert on children’s clothes, writes, ‘the rule was just the opposite.’ In evidence she cites magazines from 1918 and 1939. The first stated, ‘There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty is prettier for the girl.’ And the second, ‘There seem to be more reasons for choosing blue for girls … red symbolises zeal and courage, while blue is symbolic of faith and constancy.’
²⁵
Consider, too, the fact that when
Time
magazine reported on the birth of a daughter to Princess Astrid of Belgium in 1927, and the country’s disappointment that it was not a son, the reporter mentioned that, ‘The cradle was optimistically decorated in pink, the colour for boys,’
²⁶
,
²⁷

If this new determinism just aimed to explain a preference for blue or for pink among girls and boys, then it would be essentially trivial. But biological explanations are now being used to underpin expectations about many aspects of childhood behaviour, and are also being carried through into adult life. The same beliefs about genetic and hormonal differences now underlie the expectation of persistent differences between men and women both big and small, from their readiness to take parental leave to their ability to park a car, from their desire to stand for election to their memory for arguments.

Certain scientists have taken these biological explanations for differences between adult men and women into the mainstream in recent years. For instance, Simon Baron-Cohen is a respected scientist, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, whose influential book
The Essential Difference
has given much strength to these arguments. In this book he argues that while women invest more in social relationships, men are more interested in systems. He uses anecdotes that play into these stereotypes. ‘One of the women may open a conversation with her female friend by saying something like this: “Oh, I
love
your dress. You
must
tell me where you got it. You look
so
pretty in it. It really goes well with your bag.” … the two men’s opening gambit might go something like this: “How was the traffic on the M11? I usually find going up the A1M through Royston and Baldock can save a lot of time. Especially now they have roadworks just beyond Stansted.”’
²⁸
These differences are explained by genes and hormones. ‘All the evidence … leads us down one path on our journey. Namely to suspect that testosterone (especially early in development) is affecting the brain and thus affecting behaviour.’
²⁹
Overall, Simon Baron-Cohen’s thesis is that, ‘The female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems.’
³⁰

And alongside Simon Baron-Cohen are many other scientists who have crossed into the mainstream with their views on how we should pay more attention to biological factors when discussing sex differences. For instance, Steven Pinker, the well-known psychologist, wrote in his bestseller
The Blank Slate
that just as girls play more at parenting and trying on social roles, and boys more at fighting, chasing and manipulating objects, so women put more energy into their emotional lives and men compete more with one another for status using violence or occupational achievement. Biology rather than society, he argues, is probably at the root of many of these differences.
³¹
Other writers have also crossed from academia to the mainstream in writing about these topics, such as Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist, whose book
The Female Brain
explains how a woman ‘tends to know what people are feeling, while a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm’,
³²
and Susan Pinker, a psychologist, whose book
The Sexual Paradox
explored the relationship between women’s higher levels of the hormone oxytocin and their propensity to drop out of the workforce at the higher levels, and between men’s higher testosterone and their apparent ability to succeed in the face of all odds.
³³

All these writers differ, but they all support the same major themes. They argue that behavioural and cognitive differences between girls and boys are observable even at birth, and are not just produced by social factors such as the influence of the peer group or the wider culture. They suggest that these differences will then carry on into adulthood, and are shown particularly in the way that men excel at logical, systematic thinking, particularly mathematical and spatial skills, while women are naturally better at empathising and caring. They explore the idea that such differences are laid down in our genes and hormones because, thousands of years ago, it was evolutionarily advantageous for men and women to occupy different niches in society. And they suggest that we can find proof that these differences
are both innate and unchanging – ‘hardwired’, as these writers often put it – by looking at the ways they are related to differences in hormone levels, and to differences in brain structure and activity among men and women.

The work of such scientists has been enthusiastically taken up by other popular writers. John Gray is a self-help writer whose insight into the difference between men and women is that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. Ever since 1992 he has been telling couples that they cannot expect their spouse to have similar interests and ways of talking, that instead they must accept difference. The ability to tolerate, even love, difference is clearly a prerequisite of any relationship between any two humans, but in John Gray’s universe these differences are assumed to exist only along preconceived lines, in which men grunt and go into their caves and women chatter and wait for romantic gestures. All Gray’s books are essentially variations on a theme, but his 2008 book,
Why Mars and Venus Collide
, was new in one telling way; now Gray does not just put forward his ideas as observations of everyday life, he uses explanations from biology, from genes and hormones, to explain these observations. As evidence for his views he now quotes scientific sources, including Simon Baron-Cohen. Mars and Venus are now driven by the hormones testosterone and oxytocin. ‘A woman’s happiness and energy levels come from the oxytocin-producing acts of nurturing and being nurtured, while a man’s happiness and energy levels comes [sic] primarily from the testosterone-producing act of making a difference.’
³⁴

The media have also taken these themes up enthusiastically, and commentary that supports biological explanations for stereotypes of childhood and adult behaviour can be found throughout print and broadcast and online media. For instance, we can read in the
Economist
that: ‘In the 1970s there was a fad for giving dolls to baby boys and fire-engines to baby girls. The idea was that differences in behaviour between the sexes
were solely the result of upbringing: culture turned women into ironers, knitters and chatterboxes, and men into hammerers, drillers and silent types. Switching toys would put an end to sexual sorting. Today, it is clear why it did not. When boys and girls are born, they are already different.’
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Note how the connection of dolls and girls is linked to the fact that women are natural home-makers, the ‘ironers’ and the ‘knitters’. Or, as Rosie Boycott, the journalist who co-founded the feminist magazine
Spare Rib
in the 1970s, said recently in the
Daily Mail:
‘You can see these differences from very early on – and they cannot be “overridden”. Nature wins over nurture every time. I’ve had many feminist friends who have relentlessly presented their tiny daughters with bright-red fire engines to play with, only to be aghast when they throw them aside in favour of a Barbie doll. The converse is true for boys. Above all, the hormones women receive in the womb mean that, by nature, they do not want to be manic, one-dimensional workhorses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job.’
³⁶
We can see the same themes voiced on television, so that the BBC in the UK and ABC in Australia recently ran similar series called
Secrets of the Sexes
and
Battle of the Sexes
which emphasised the biological basis for behavioural differences between the sexes. As the narrator on the British programme said: ‘According to science, men are interested in things, women are interested in emotions.’ The same ideas are pervading other aspects of the culture around us, from fiction to drama to feature films, and influencing our public, political lives and our private experiences.