If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.
Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything. Seeing this more clearly through my experience, I began to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because they think that’s all they have, their one pathetic advantage over all she seems to hold above them. I make no excuses for this. There are none. But as a man I felt vaguely attuned to this mind-set or its possibility. I did not inhabit it, but I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed.
There were other surprising discoveries. With all the anger I felt flowing in my direction — anger directed at the abstraction called men — I was not expecting to find, nestled within the confines of female heterosexuality, a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men’s bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought. Not even just for the metrosexual, though he has his audience, but for brawny, hairy, smelly, stalwart, manly men; bald men, men with bellies, men who can fix things and, yes, men who like sports and pound away in the bedroom. Men whom women loved for being men with all the qualities that testosterone and the patriarchy had given them, and whom I have come to appreciate for those very same qualities, however infuriating I still find them at times.
Dating women was the hardest thing I had to do as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenceless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armour. But then, I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armour is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.
That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. It was hard being a guy.
Rather than choosing to become a woman again, it is probably truer to say that I reverted to form. I stopped faking it. I came back to myself, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman.
Norah Vincent, “Double agent” (an edited extract from Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised As A Man), Guardian, 2006-03-18.
March 24, 2014
QotD: On Women’s Power
February 26, 2014
Facebook‘s 58th gender and the (in)flexibility of language
Chrissie Daz discusses the rise of the “third gender” (should that be 58th?) and earlier attempts to make language conform to an idealized view of how life should be, as opposed to how it is:
The legal recognition [in passports and other legal documents] of intersex people and others who cannot properly be said to be either male or female is probably a good idea, but this should not impact upon the vast majority of people who have no problem living in a binary-gendered world or using binary-gendered language.
History is replete with failed attempts to re-invent or modify language, from Esperanto to the feminist PC language of the Eighties. But this campaign to institute a third sex in language and law may well prove to be the most unstable project yet. The ever-changing and ever-expanding taxonomy of words and identities aimed at respecting difference among transsexuals, always seems to cause undue offence among transsexuals themselves. To use the word transsexual, for instance, as a noun (rather than as an adjective) is said, by some, to diminish a person’s identity down to a single trait. The very term transsexual has been replaced, first by transgendered (to assert that fact that it is about gender not sexuality) and now by Trans*. The capital ‘T’ is obligatory and the asterisk is meant to represent inclusivity. Apparently, to simply call someone ‘Trans’ implicitly denigrates the experiences of cross-dressers and gender-queer folk who are not intent upon making a full transition from one gender to the other.
Amid all the offence being taken over these linguistic acrobatics, the one thing trans campaigners, and now Facebook, fail to realise is that language does not respond well to being artificially manipulated. As Wittgenstein once remarked, language is like a toolbox, you use the best tool available for the job in hand. With general use, over time, words and their meanings change to reflect changing forms of social consciousness. It is not the other way around. Any attempt to force language to respond to the presumed delicate sensitivities of marginal groups not only underlines and reifies these presumed vulnerabilities, it also undermines the responsiveness of language to real experience.
February 14, 2014
February 2, 2014
December 19, 2013
Changing perspectives of gender
Christopher Taylor on how women’s views of boys and men change as they grow:
Something interesting happens to most women when they get married and have a boy: they change their perspective on men. I think its not unreasonable of girls to get a certain grrl power men-are-dumb point of view in modern culture, we’re constantly bombarded with this message. It would take a pretty strong and unusual girl to resist the education that music, film, television, books, and education all imprint on her.
In college, young women are told all men are rapists at heart, and their denials is simply proof of the rape culture that menaces women constantly. Advertisements continually portray men as hapless idiotic children. With few exceptions, television shows almost always show the male characters as barely-literate frat boys and cave men. Music and movies promote the image of the all-powerful kung fu genius girl who looks hot constantly and always has the right put down to make men look bad.
But when a woman marries, she finds out guys aren’t all like that. Her husband has [his] faults, but strengths as well — or why would she love and marry him to begin with? She finds out that he’s no more immature and childish than her, just in different ways. She learns that men have strengths and abilities that women lack, just as they lack things women have.
And when she has a son, she sees things from a different perspective. That shirt that was so cool and empowering that said “Boys suck throw rocks at them” when she was 12 seems horrible and abusive when her son is the target. She finds out that her school treats boys as if they are some awful imposition that need to be drugged into submission and silenced in class. She learns that all the girl-power stuff she grew up with was at the expense of the boys.
But with a culture that so strongly tries to repress and shunt aside boys and treats men like knuckle dragging brutes, its even tougher for a boy to grow up as a man. I feel for the boys of today in school where they learn they should shut up and stop being masculine, that its awful and wrong to be a man and beautiful and good to be a woman. Growing up in the face of that can’t be easy.
May 22, 2013
Camille Paglia reviews recent academic works … on BDSM
It’s cleverly entitled “Scholars in Bondage”:
Three books from university presses dramatize the degree to which once taboo sexual subjects have gained academic legitimacy. Margot Weiss’s Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) and Staci Newmahr’s Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (Indiana University Press, 2011) record first-person ethnographic explorations of BDSM communities in two large American cities. (The relatively new abbreviation BDSM incorporates bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism.) Danielle J. Lindemann’s Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) documents the world of professional dominatrixes in New York and San Francisco.
[. . .]
Furthermore, Weiss is lured by the reflex Marxism of current academe into reducing everything to economics: “With its endless paraphernalia, BDSM is a prime example of late-capitalist sexuality”; BDSM is “a paradigmatic consumer sexuality.” Or this mind-boggling assertion: “Late capitalism itself produces the transgressiveness of sex — its fantasized location as outside of or compensatory for alienated labor.” Sex was never transgressive before capitalism? Tell that to the Hebrew captives in Babylon or to Roman moralists during the early Empire!
The constricted frame of reference of the gender-studies milieu from which Weiss emerged is shown by her repeated slighting references to “U.S. social hierarchies.” But without a comparative study of and allusion to non-American hierarchies, past and present, such remarks are facile and otiose. The collapse of scholarly standards in ideology-driven academe is sadly revealed by Weiss’s failure, in her list of the 18 books of anthropology that most strongly contributed to her project, to cite any work published before 1984 — as if the prior century of distinguished anthropology, with its bold documentation of transcultural sexual practices, did not exist. Gender-theory groupthink leads to bizarre formulations such as this, from Weiss’s introduction: “SM performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations.” The preposterousness of that would have been obvious had Weiss ever dipped into the voluminous works of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and important writers of the past three centuries and a pivotal influence on Nietzsche. But incredibly, none of the three authors under review seem to have read a page of Sade. It is scandalous that the slick, game-playing Foucault (whose attempt to rival Nietzsche was an abysmal failure) has completely supplanted Sade, a mammoth cultural presence in the 1960s via Grove Press paperbacks that reprinted Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal essay, “Must We Burn Sade?”
[. . .]
What is to be done about the low scholarly standards in the analysis of sex? A map of reform is desperately needed. Current discourse in gender theory is amateurishly shot through with the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority, as if we have been flung back to medieval theology. For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunkies in the Vatican Curia.
First of all, every gender studies curriculum must build biology into its program; without knowledge of biology, gender studies slides into propaganda. Second, the study of ancient tribal and agrarian cultures is crucial to end the present narrow focus on modern capitalist society. Third, the cynical disdain for religion that permeates high-level academe must end. (I am speaking as an atheist.) It is precisely the blindness to spiritual quest patterns that has most disabled the three books under review.
The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labor in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment. But these “mind-forg’d manacles” (in William Blake’s phrase) can be broken in an instant. All it takes is the will to be free.
May 18, 2013
The “most balanced gender studies textbook available”
Cathy Young has some concerns with a popular gender studies textbook:
A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up “transformed into the opposite sex,” the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys’ reaction was straightforward: “‘Kill myself’ was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl.” The original poster — whose comment was, “Wow” —identified the source as her “Sex & Gender college textbook,” The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.
The post quickly caught on with Tumblr’s radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or “liked” by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, “Yeah, tell me again how misogyny ‘isn’t real‘ and men and boys and actually ‘like,’ ‘love‘ and ‘respect the female sex‘? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs… As Germaine Greer said, ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.'”
Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.
I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel’s reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade. The publication date was the first tipoff that the study’s description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the “recent” data had to be about thirty years old. Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?
When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes — e.g., husband-hunting as a girl’s main training for adulthood — than 1980s reality). But that’s not nearly as dramatic as “I’d rather kill myself than be a girl.”
Update, 19 May: Welcome to all the visitors from Reddit. I think this is the first time one of my posts got linked from Reddit (and several thousand of you have dropped by in the last 24 hours). To mark the occasion, I’ve added a Reddit link to the Sharing options on all posts.
May 7, 2013
Escaped Colombian convict gets sex change to avoid recapture
You have to admire the dedication of Colombian prison inmate Giovanni Rebolledo who apparently went through a partial sex-change in an attempt to stay off the police radar:
After escaping from prison where he had been sentenced to serve 60 years, Giovanni Rebolledo reportedly decided to get breast implants to help him avoid capture.
Despite his rather impressive new rack, Police were able to identify and capture Rebolledo during a routine stop and search in the Viejo Prado district of the northern coastal city of Barranquilla.
Following his extreme make-over, the suspect reportedly was involved to some degree in prostitution in the area.
Depending on where the Colombian justice system decides Rebolledo has to serve the remaining years of the original sentence, “Rosalinda” may be a very popular inmate after this.
October 13, 2012
Sometimes there’s a logical reason to discriminate in pricing
Tim Harford on the recent EU ruling that insurers will no longer be allowed to consider gender in setting insurance rates:
He: And not before time. It’s outrageous that I have to pay more for my car insurance than you do. I’m a perfectly safe driver.
She: Of course you are, dear. But you also drive a lot more than I do, which is not unusual for men. Since you drive more miles you are exposing yourself to the risk of more accidents.
He: Am I? Oh.
She: This is one of the reasons that men have more accidents than women. Another, of course, is that some young men are aggressive, overconfident idiots. But in any case you should probably put the money you save into your pension pot because you’re going to need it when you get stuck with the low annuity rates we women have had to put up with.
He: But my life expectancy is shorter. I deserve much higher annuity rates. That’s outrageous.
She: So you’re outraged that discrimination against you hasn’t ended earlier, and equally outraged that discrimination in your favour isn’t going to continue for ever?[. . .]
She: We might not get too comfortable. Insurers will start looking at other correlates of risk. The obvious one is how far people drive: men tend to drive more than women. Then there are issues such as the choice of a sports car rather than a people carrier. Such distinctions may carry more weight in determining your premium than they do now. As for annuities, if they can’t pay any attention to your sex they might start paying more attention to your cholesterol.
He: I can see that this might get very intrusive.
She: It might. Or it might get very clumsy. Mortgage lenders used to be accused of using geography as a way of discriminating against minorities in the US, since ethnicity and postcode can be closely correlated. There are modern analogies: since women are on average smaller than men, perhaps in the future premiums will be proportionate to height. Stranger things have happened.
September 7, 2012
Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem
This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.
It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.
[. . .]
I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.
Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.
Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)
April 12, 2012
Sweden pushes past “gender equality” to “gender neutrality”
Nathalie Rothschild in Slate:
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa.
I’ve always thought it a bad idea to allow governments to decide what names parents are allowed to give to their children. Obviously I’m an old fogey and should be ignored on critical issues like this.
Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils’ genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as “buddies.” So, a teacher would say “good morning, buddies” or “good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack” rather than, “good morning, boys and girls.” They believe this fulfills the national curriculum’s guideline that preschools should “counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles” and give girls and boys “the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles.”
The next step, of course, is to require the Prime Minister to address the Sveriges riksdag as “Buddies”. That’d set a proper tone of intimacy and co-operative inclusiveness, right?
To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing “gender pedagogues” in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
And you thought helicopter parents were bad? Imagine living your entire pre-school-to-high-school career under the watchful gaze of “gender pedagogues” whose task is to ensure that you never display any behaviour or utter any phrases which are gender-specific.
February 4, 2012
When Canada’s Department of Transport became transphobic
Tabatha Southey has an interesting article in the Globe & Mail. I was unaware that the Canadian Forces now support transitioning transgendered soldiers (and have done for more than a decade), but that another branch of the government headed in quite the opposite direction last year:
While I think we should take the transgender community’s word for it — that transitioning works to transform often excruciatingly unhappy gender-dysphoric people into contented people — there are lots of studies that back them up as well.
It’s hardly something that anyone would do for kicks. Transitioning isn’t for sissies, which is why it’s heart-warming that our military made a practical and humane decision to accommodate transgender soldiers. And it’s also why it’s unfortunate that since July, 2011, a Department of Transport rule has been on the books that could prevent those same transitioning soldiers from flying home for Christmas.
The existence of this rule was brought to light this week by blogger Jennifer McCreath. It states that if “a passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents,” that person is not allowed to fly.
I’m prepared to believe those who say transgender and inter-sex people aren’t the demographic the rule aims to catch, but that leaves me wondering who it is the authorities are trying to nab.
October 21, 2011
Neuroscientists and neurononsense
Stuart Derbyshire and Nina Powell review Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender:
Given that objective measures show gender differences are in decline, it is surprising that there has been such an increase in books and reports describing hard-wired differences in male and female brains and that so many people are using them to explain why men and women live different lives. The most famous British example is Simon Baron-Cohen who has extrapolated from his research on autism (a predominantly male disorder) the more general conclusion that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy while the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender brilliantly demolishes these overly simplistic and, essentially, wrong conclusions about male and female brains. She does this in two different ways. First, she points out that supposedly fixed differences between men and women are quite plastic. For example, merely asking men to consider the social value and benefits of empathising will lead them to be more empathic. And when men are paid to detect and correctly identify emotional states they perform as well as women. Similarly, when women are told that women perform better on a spatial rotation task their performance matches those of men. It appears that male and female differences in task performance can be fairly easily overcome by changing the motivation to do well or by changing the way the task is framed. That doesn’t sound like something hard-wired or fixed in the brain.
[. . .]
Fine also points to a problem that is, perhaps, more important. The brain is a complicated organ that we barely understand in anything but the most basic detail. Furthermore, brain imaging is a technology that is in its infancy and the data generated by imaging is also highly complicated. A typical brain imaging study will generate a matrix involving hundreds of thousands of numbers replicated across time and people. Analysis of these kinds of data sets is difficult, tedious and complicated, often requiring many years of experience and containing a surprising element of subjectivity and argument about what is the right and wrong thing to do. It is perhaps understandable that brain imaging throws up contradictory results and that brain researchers reach contradictory conclusions. Fine notes that this can lead to theories about brain function being untouched by the collection of brain activation data:
‘As the contradictory data come in, researchers can draw on both the hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use just one hemisphere, as well as the completely contrary hypothesis that men are better at mental rotation because they use both hemispheres. So flexible is the theoretical arrangement that researchers can even present these opposing hypotheses, quite without embarrassment, within the very same article.’
It is a strange science where exactly opposite data support the same interpretation. Fine’s conclusion is scathing. She suggests that neuroscientists are merely projecting cultural assumptions about the sexes on to the vast unknown that is the brain. This process she dismisses as ‘neurosexism’, which is part of a larger discipline called ‘neurononsense’. It is hard to argue.
August 17, 2011
Maclean’s on transgendered teens
Maclean’s covers a controversial topic:
Treatment of GID is highly controversial. Some experts believe that the best way to help children and teens is to convince them to accept their bodies and not undergo the therapies that will cause dramatic physical changes. Cormac, however, lives in Vancouver, where pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Daniel Metzger and the B.C. Transgender Care Group are based. The loosely organized group, of which Metzger is a member, is the sole provider of care for transgender youth in B.C. and offers the most extensive suite of medical services for GID adolescents in Canada. Metzger believes that the best course of treatment for teenagers diagnosed with GID is hormone therapy: either blockers to stop puberty or, if post-pubescent, hormones that physically alter the body in a way that reflects their chosen gender. For some teens like Cormac, who are confident, psychologically stable and have family support, this transformation can be complemented further with cosmetic surgery.
Without treatment, Metzger argues, the path to adulthood for GID teens can be torturous, as evidenced by shockingly high suicide rates: 45 per cent for those aged 18-44, in comparison to the national average of 1.6 per cent, according to the U.S. 2010 National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care. Cormac carefully considers what life would be like today if he were still Amber. He pauses for a few seconds then gravely announces, “I think that would push me to be suicidal.” He is much more calm now, he says, free from his obsession with wanting to be a boy. “Before I transitioned I thought about it a lot, like, every minute. Now, I feel like I have so much extra brain space,” says Cormac, who is an honour roll student.
June 1, 2011
QotD: “Gender-free parenting”
Earlier this month, the Toronto Star published a story called “Footloose and gender-free,” which sympathetically profiled a young couple trying to raise a child in a completely gender-neutral environment — so gender-neutral that the mother and father won’t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says David Stocker, the child’s father.
I wish this well-meaning fellow could have attended my 7-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a pottery and painting studio last week. There, he would have seen 10 little girls, all of them sitting quietly at a table, studiously creating beautiful little masterpieces. The boys, meanwhile, took about 30 seconds to slop some paint onto a ceramic dinosaur or car — and then spent the next hour chasing each other around the facility, occasionally hauling one another to the ground so they could act out professional wrestling moves they’d seen on Youtube.
Not that the boys weren’t “creative.” One of them had been given a cheap video camera from his parents, and spent 10 minutes taking footage of the (unoccupied) toilet in the studio bathroom. This pint-sized Truffaut had a cheering section: The boys assembled around him found the documentary project to be the most hilarious thing in the world, and some became literally incontinent with laughter (ironic, no?) as they took turns passing the camcorder from hand to hand watching and re-watching the footage. Occasionally, the girls would look over at the boys — much as well-dressed diners in a fancy restaurant might gaze out a window to watch hobos fighting over a liquor bottle in an alley — and then sighed and returned to their artistic labours.
As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.
Jonathan Kay, “Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work”, National Post, 2011-06-01
