The Gender Spectrum
Social pressure to act girly or macho is stronger than you'd think.
by Brett Berk
August 4, 2008
These rules serve little practical purpose, but since young kids immediately register how pervasive they are, they can't help but apply them to everything in their lives, attempting to define themselves and the world around them in terms of their adherence or opposition to these categories — girls do this; boys don't do that; boys like this; girls can't do that. In fact, Sandra Lipsitz Bem, one of the founders of modern gender studies, states that "no other dichotomy in human experience appears to have as many entities linked to it as does the distinction between female and male."
So we've done a pretty good job of making gender the big lens through which young kids view the world, but the choices we offer them for analyzing and synthesizing this information comes down to a needlessly simple either/or choice: BOY or GIRL. This limited set of options doesn't match up with the expansive and multivalent nature of a child's brain. These kinds of dualities — right/wrong, us/them, patriot/terrorist — tend to reduce things to the lowest common denominator, glossing over all the interesting gradations, and diminishing our understanding instead of enhancing it (think George W. Bush on Iraq . . . or anything). Plus — and this is a big addendum — very few people actually fit neatly into either of these categories. Most kids (like most grown-ups) are not boy's boys, or girly girls in any stereotypical kind of way, and end up feeling confused and/or damaged by their efforts to meld their own nuanced experiences with the strictures of these norms. We all know what it feels like to try to squeeze ourselves into a pair of pants that are too small. Imagine how that feels to a child's sensitive nerve endings. Now imagine being forced to wear that restrictive garment for your entire life.
I'm not some radical advocating the elimination of the categories of boy and girl, or campaigning for replacing all gendered pronouns with a senseless prefix like co-. And I'm not against kids being rough-and-tumble or prissy if that's who they are. I just want to help parents give their kids a little more wiggle room in terms of the options they're offered for being human. To probe and poke at the dichotomies we've created. Back when I was a preschool teacher, I used to spend my days decked out in funky cloths, flouncing around the streets of New York singing, and acting as the primary caregiver to groups of young children. None of this was particularly gender-typical behavior for an American male, and the kids often told me so. Kids need a little more wiggle room in the options they're offered for being human. "You can't do that," they'd say, "That's for girls." I'd shrug off their invocations. "Well I'm a boy, and I'm doing it," I'd say. "So I guess it's for boys too." This response puzzled them, but with repeated use, I could see them taking it in. I'll never forget the glee on one girl's face when she finally found a way out of this bind. "Brett's a woman-man," she told her friends one morning, as I wrapped a pink scarf around my head. "He can do whatever he wants."
Kids certainly need structure and rules, as well as opportunities to explore behavioral norms. But it's important to recognize that many of these norms are socially constructed. And since we're the ones who do much of the construction, we need to remember that we have the power to tear things down if what we've created is not serving us. In a sense, to perform an interior redesign of the house of gender, where we're able to increase the size and scope of both the kitchen and the media room to the point where they meet, merge, and create some hybridized points of overlap. The Bugi culture in Indonesia acknowledges five different genders: makkunrai (feminine woman), calabai (feminine man), calalai (masculine woman), oroané (masculine man), and bissu (having male and female energies). I'm not sure if that's exactly the right number of options or not, but at least these distinctions suggest the existence of a spectrum, instead of just two isolated and oppositional points.
The idea of our culture embracing such a model may seem unlikely, ridiculous, or even weird. But it wasn't that long ago that the same could have been said of a girl who wanted to be a doctor, or a woman who actually became one. Things change. Things stay the same. Rules get broken. So slip on those kitten heels, moms and dads. Gender is a giant amusement park, and there's no good reason your kid shouldn't be allowed to go on every ride!
©2008 Brett Berk and Nerve Media
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