What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [83]
There is a substantially more effective way to curtail sex offenders: castration. It is used in Europe for very serious offenses—brutal rape and child molesting. Castration is done surgically—cutting off the testicles—or with drugs that neutralize the hormone produced by the testicles. In four studies of more than two thousand offenders followed for many years, the reoffense rate drops from around 70 percent to around 3 percent. Drug castration, which is reversible, works as well as surgical castration.20 In America, castration is called “cruel and unusual punishment” and is not done. When I consider all the wasted years in prison, the high likelihood of repeating the offense, and the special hell that other prisoners reserve for child molesters, castration seems less cruel to me than the “usual” punishment.
Layer IV: Sex Role: Social Behavior, Personality, and Ability
Are men different from women? Are boys different from girls? Can sex differences be narrowed?
These are loaded questions, fraught with political overtones. To the feminist, they evoke impatience. They are just scientific code for attempts to claim that women are inferior and to justify continued male oppression. To the sexist, also, they evoke impatience—for the opposite reason: They are part of the long history of left-leaning scientists’ manipulating evidence to bolster their pet social theories—touting whatever congenial evidence they can muster, for example, against capital punishment, for abortion on demand, against IQ testing, or for school busing, while ignoring uncongenial evidence. In this incarnation they are attempts to justify narrowing the huge differences between men and women that do exist and should exist, because these differences are at the very foundation of the social order.
Whatever these questions are politically, substantively they are questions about sex role. There are a large number of sex differences: anatomy, health, brain makeup, and life span, to name a few. But only three kinds of differences are directly relevant to sex role: the social differences, the personality differences, and the ability differences. The existence or nonexistence of some of these alleged differences is too shrouded by conflicting evidence for me to foist off on you my own opinion. Other differences, however, are clear—based on hundreds of studies and thousands of subjects. So I will present those that are clear and about which most workers, male and female, in these fields agree—however uncongenial to someone’s politics the differences might be. There is, in fact, surprising consensus about sex differences.
One point of agreement is that there are huge sex-role differences between very young boys and girls:
By age two, boys want to play with trucks and girls want to play with dolls.
By age three, children know the sex stereotypes for dress, toys, jobs, games, tools, and interests.
By age three, children want to play with peers of their own sex.
By age four, most girls want to be teachers, nurses, secretaries, and mothers; most boys want to have “masculine” jobs.21
In most cultures, young children categorize the world according to sex and organize their lives around the categories. No one has to teach them sex-role stereotypes: They invent them spontaneously. This is hardly a surprise, and the pat explanation is that they learn sex roles from their parents. After all, parents behave differently with daughters than with sons. For example, parents decorate the rooms of girls in pink and put dolls in their cribs. Boys get blue cribs and toy guns.
What is surprising is that kids reared androgynously retain their stereotypes as strongly as kids not so reared. Young kids’ preferences bear no relationship to their parents’ attitudes or to their parents’ education, class, employment, or