The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [2]
On the other hand, from a young age my daughters were far more attuned to social nuances than was my son. While her brother could sit in the same classroom for years with various children and still not know their names, my younger daughter could rattle off not only the names but also the familial and social bonds uniting every child in the elementary school. She and her older sister have always possessed a kind of emotional radar that their more analytical brother lacks. Yet my son, unlike his sisters, remains close to his best friends from elementary and middle school, a challenge to the prevailing wisdom that females have a greater gift for forming long-lasting intimate friendships.
As teenagers, these young men developed an interest in tabletop war games, in which players build and paint fantasy armies and engage in battles based on a complicated set of rules and strategies. I can testify that in my many visits to the Games Workshop, where the armies are purchased and the tournaments played, I have never seen a female player or a female employee—only other mothers like me, anxiously clutching Christmas and birthday lists. Is there a gene for War-Hammer? Doubtful, but there is something—and I don’t think the something is culturally inscribed—that causes males to be drawn to ritualized combat, whether in sport, in games, or on film. Yet, after years of watching violent movies, playing violent video games, and directing the clash of armies on plywood battlefields, my son and his friends eagerly participated in the marches against the war in Iraq and were bitterly and vocally opposed to the conflict.
My daughters were completely uninterested in the peace movement or the war itself; for them the political was not at all personal. They are intensely interested in the lives of acquaintances and celebrities, however, and have prodigious memories for who has dated, married, and dumped whom and whose career is foundering because of what ill-advised choices. Their baffled brother finds their interest in the personal lives of strangers incomprehensible: “You don’t know these people,” he is apt to snap when subjected to yet another conversation about the latest juicy celebrity gossip. In The Essential Difference, the British psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen proposes an explanation for these and other differences in male and female interests and abilities: the average woman has an “empathizing” brain while the average male has a “systematizing” brain. Males are driven to analyze, explore, and construct systems while women tend to identify with other people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions in an attempt to understand and predict behavior. I’ll have more to say about Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis later, but for now it’s enough to point out that it does provide an explanation for the kinds of everyday differences we notice between men and women—and that the hypothesis is viewed as reactionary by those who deny any essential biological difference between male and female brains.
I grew up in a time when increasing numbers of people believed that the differences between males and females were socially constructed, and that if children were raised to understand that there were no essential differences between being born in a male body and being born in a female body, we would all be “free to be”—free of all gender-based boundaries and limitations, free of social stereotypes based on genital distinctions. Boys could cry, and girls could compete; boys could be nurses, homemakers, and teachers (the nurturing professions), and girls could be fighter pilots, police officers, and firefighters (the warrior professions). I am happy to live in a society that has struggled to eradicate limiting beliefs and practices that have kept both men and women from realizing their full potential as human beings. But I have largely abandoned the belief that all the differences we note between men and women are purely a matter of social custom. Some differences run much deeper than custom, the primary one being the deeply