What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [84]
It is not that boys are simply indifferent to their parents’ lessons about androgyny (from the Greek for “both male and female”). Boys don’t just ignore their parents’ telling them it’s okay to play with dolls; they actively resist. Having a teacher try to persuade a child to give up a “sex-appropriate” toy produces resistance, anxiety, and backlash, particularly among boys. (Remember how devastating the label “sissy” or, worse, “queer” was?) Watching videotapes of other kids playing joyfully with “sex-inappropriate” toys doesn’t work. Intensive home programs of androgynous toys, songs, and books with mother as the teacher produce no changes. Extensive classroom intervention produces no movement toward androgyny—outside the classroom.22
These findings should be particularly disturbing to those of you who staunchly hold that social pressure creates sex roles in the first place. If social pressure creates them, intense social pressure by committed parents and teachers should diminish them. But it doesn’t.
Since social pressure does not play a measurable role in creating sex roles, the determinant might just be fetal hormones, at least in part. There are two lines of evidence: In one study, conducted in the 1970s, seventy-four mothers had taken prescription drugs during their pregnancies to prevent miscarriage. These drugs had the common property of disrupting the masculinizing hormone androgen. The games their offspring liked to play were compared to those preferred by matched controls when the children were ten years old. The boys’ games were less masculine and the girls’ more feminine. Similarly, there is a disease (congenital adrenal hyperplasia [CAH]) that bathes girls with extra androgen as fetuses. As young children, these girls like boys’ toys and rough-and-tumble play, and they are more tomboyish than matched controls. These findings are tantalizing. They suggest that one source of boys’ wanting to play with guns and girls’ wanting to play house reaches into the womb.23
You might be tempted to conclude that sex roles are deep and unchangeable. You would be wrong. As children grow up, stereotypes weaken and are easier to defy. In late childhood, children begin to have stereotypes about crying, dominance, independence, and kindness. But they are much weaker than the early-childhood toy and job stereotypes. In fact, the only really consistent difference between the behavior of boys and girls as they mature is aggression, with boys much more aggressive than girls. As children grow up, even the difference in aggression gets smaller. The greater aggression in boys may come from socialization (boys are more rewarded for aggression and competition than girls are). But it might also have its origin in fetal hormones: Both the sons and daughters of mothers who took the androgenizing antimiscarriage drugs are more contentious and combative than their unexposed sibs.24
Ironically, while pressuring kids to become androgynous does not work immediately, it may have a delayed effect. As children mature into adults, sex-role stereotypes begin to disappear. When children grow up, those raised by androgynous parents tend to become androgynous themselves. Supporting intellectual interests for daughters and warmth and compassion for sons, exposing children to a range of roles, may work, but only in the long run.
This is important, it makes sense, and it is good news. Young children see the world in black-and-white terms: “I’m either a boy or a girl. There’s nothing in between. If I like dolls, I’m a sissy. Everyone hates a queer.” These are deeply held convictions. Young kids seem to play out a sex-role program fueled by a drive to conform that may have its roots in the fetal brain. As a child matures, however, considerations of morality, of justice, of fairness, come into play, and tolerance can start to displace blind conformity. He or she now chooses how to behave. Decisions about androgyny,