Revelations on Sexual Stereotypes

If your four-year-old boy comes toddling up to you and announces: "I'm really a girl, and I want to be treated like one," the first words out of your mouth should be: "What is a 'girl'?  What are girls like, really?  What about girls do you envy so much?"  Then listen carefully;  you'll get an earfull of amazing stereotypes.  It's incredible what lies children pick up just through social atmosphere.

For that matter, when somebody announces that we need to restore 'true' masculinity, or femininity, ask them just what those words mean.  Again, you'll get an astounding pack of stereotypes and lies.  You have to wonder who came up with the idea that human females are naturally attracted by the color pink, or that human males are genetically programmed to chase footballs.  

In fact, the "characteristic behaviors" of human males and females vary wildly according to culture.  There's a group of islands in Polynesia where the women farm and the men fish, and the people claim this is the true nature of men and women, ordained by the gods since the beginning of time;  just 50 miles away there's another group of islands where the men farm and the women fish, and the people claim that this is the true nature of men and women, ordained by the gods, etc.   Never mind how widely sexual "characteristics" vary elsewhere.  

It's hard to tell just which, if any, characteristics of men and women are "natural" because all humans today live in societies, and societies have cultures centuries if not millennia old, and those cultures carry ideas about what men and women are supposed to be like, and children raised in those cultures grow up shaped by those ideas.  Since those ideas include "proper" diet and exercise, they can actually affect the physical development of the children and exaggerate physical differences between the sexes, which also affect behavior.

Looking far back through history and all around the world, I've found only two "characteristic behaviors" of males and females that can even be called universal, let alone "natural".  Those are: women nurse infants, and men direct their urine.  Both of these are obvious natural effects of anatomy.  Nothing else is.  In fact, a woman can write her initials in the snow with her own p!ss, but it requires spreading one's legs painfully wide and wriggling like a cootch-dancer, and the letters aren't very clear.  Don't ask how I know.

It's not even true that males are naturally bigger and stronger than females;  that too is an effect of culture.  Archeologists digging up the graves of ancient Gauls and Spartans were struck by the fact that the skeletons of both males and females were generally the same size and had the same number and size of muscle attachments.  The Gauls left no written records of how they accomplished this, but the Spartans did;  in ancient Sparta the male and female children were raised with the same diet, exercise, training and expectations.  Even when puberty kicked in and the boys got extra doses of testosterone, the girls made up for it by producing more adrenaline, which has the same effect on bone and muscle growth, and there were cultural means of encouraging this.  The Maenads were not just a myth.  Neither, for that matter, were the Amazons.  

There isn't room to detail here just how this knowledge was lost or suppressed for the last 2000 years, but I think we can understand why.  Let me offer an example.

When I was a little kid my mother despaired of making a proper feminine "lady" of me, but oh, did she try.  I can't remember a day when he didn't spend at least an hour fussing at me to walk just so, and talk just so, and coo and croon, and wriggle and giggle, and obsess with clothes and hair, and stay indoors where I wouldn't "muss" my clothes and hair, and avoid vigorous exercise and the horror of sweat.  "Sweat" was a dirty word, nearly as bad as "dirt".

I put up with this bullying no more than I had to, and the moment Mama's back was turned I'd be out of those constricting stiff pink dresses and back into jeans and sneakers and T-shirt, and outdoors and away.  I wanted to go run off into the greenbelt, climb trees, hunt for snakes, and above all I loved horseback riding -- not just pones, but full-size horses.  I can tell you some things about the common love of young girls for horses, and it has nothing to do with Freudian notions about rubbing one's crotch on the saddle.  It's about having the use of that big powerful body -- which can run faster, jump higher, and fight more fiercely than any man.  It's a love which takes money to sustain, since it takes a lot of land to grow the food to fuel that big body, and thus it's become associated with wealth.  That's probably the reason that Mama let me do a lot of horseback riding until I escaped to college.  But anyway...

I knew from an early age that Mama's (and the surrounding culture's) ideas of "femininity" weren't natural -- otherwise, why did she have to spend so much time hammering them into my skull?  Natural desires and behaviors don't have to be Carefully Taught.  Eventually I clarified the idea enough to ask her, straight out, "Why do you keep trying to make me Ladylike?"  The answer she gave me really did explain everything.

"So you can marry a rich man."

Oh, of course!  A rich (and powerful) man is called a Lord, and Lords only marry Ladies.  A Lord has enough money (and power) to maintain his female relatives in comfort if not luxury all their lives.  And marriage is the fallback career for women;  if you can't make good money on your own, find a rich man and seduce him into marriage.  It's also called the Catch-A-Man game.  I have a song about that.

So what it comes down to is that "femininity" in modern culture consists of the characteristics of women who play Catch-A-Man, hunting for rich men.  Never mind what the characteristics of "masculinity" are!  Modern sexual stereotypes add up to relationships of money (and power).  The wiggling and crooning "lady" and the bellowing and brawling "lord", whose images are strong enough to seduce people into surgically changing their apparent sexes are basically about money -- and the power money can buy.  They have nothing to do with nature, genetics, or psychology.

There are two ways out of this mess.  First, do as the Spartans did;  raise male and female children with the same nutrition, exercise, dress, training, educations and expectations -- and when they reach puberty, give the females enough adrenaline to match the males' testosterone.  Second, take the money away from the stereotypes.  This would mean creating an economy which rewards merit -- performance -- only, and to hell with everything else: race, religion, gender, family status, etc. etc.

It's hard to predict which would be the more difficult to do.

--Leslie <;)))><