Geneticists say they can explain why little boys are slugs and little girls are sugar and spice. But Susie Orbach and Joseph Schwartz disagree
There is a curious new twist to the latest skirmishes in the genetics and gender debate. After a century of medical theories arguing the essential weakness and inferiority of women, we now have a theory that proposes that women’s propensities are valuable and that it is boys who have a deficit.
It is as though, in the attempt to underpin speculative genetic research, throwing a bone to female superiority will quiet the natural distrust of those who question the validity and social usefulness of this kind of research. Panels of experts have rushed to reassure us that intuition and sociability can be learned. Indeed, they say, we need to address the deficit and focus our attention so that boys won’t be antisocial or losers. This reassurance pulls a veil over the actual research and tries to anchor it in a nineties-style conversation.
But we don’t need to make a genetic argument to account for gender differences (especially around sociability and intuition). Gender differences feel as intractable as anything that is hard-wired. For gender differences are all around us, something we take for granted, like gravity, and we depend on them and act on them without even realising it. But unlike gravity, which is generally stable, gender differences – the complex ways we perceive and inhabit ourselves and our femininity or masculinity – are made within cultures and vary between cultures.
Any anthropologist can cite evidence of non-Western cultures in which what we call intuition and sociability is the preserve of men. What this debate should open up is whether sociability and intuition are traits we wish to extend. What is the medium that makes such characteristics grow and how do we unwittingly or purposefully continue to relate to girls and boys in dramatically differing ways?
It’s commonplace, but worth repeating, that among the first questions we ask on hearing of a new birth is the sex of the infant. We do this because without that information we are literally unable to bring ourselves to the child. We don’t have a conception of sexless babies, not because we are especially prejudiced but because every way in which we bring ourselves to infants is imbued with a sense of our gender and theirs.
Whether we realise this or not, we coo in a different pitch and tone depending upon whether the infant is male or female. We hold baby boys for longer periods of time than baby girls. We breast feed boys for longer, wean them later and each feeding period is longer than it is for girls. We potty train boys later.
On the other hand, we have proto conversations with girls earlier and for longer periods of time. We encourage boys’ physicality while bringing a certain reticence to girls (still). Differences such as these are gross and easily noticeable. They are based not on logic or rationality but on our internal sense of what masculinity and femininity mean, what they elicit in us and what we try to confirm about our own sense of gender through the unconscious imposition of nuanced behaviour towards baby girls and baby boys.
What psychoanalysts can bring to the discussion are the ways in which unconscious expectations are perceived or projected on to children; the ways in which gender proscribes on the one hand and extends on the other, the possibilities that exist for girls and boys and the ways in which we might understand empathy, intuition and sociability, particularly its unequal appearance in women and men.
Some of us hypothesise that the greater capacity among girls for intuiting and empathising with others, for putting others at ease and for knowing what they might need, is a consequence of what we might consider a deficit in their upbringing and should be queried rather than valued. Because of the unconscious identification between mothers and daughters and the lack of psychological separation between them, girl children have often experienced staccato relating.
Mothers who, because of their historic social position, have been brought up with a deep sense of unentitlement and unworthiness have unconsciously (and reluctantly) transmitted to their daughters a sense of the frailty of their own position. They are often inconsistent in relating to their daughters’ emotional needs – responsive one moment, withdrawn the next.
The volatility and instability in the mother-daughter relationship combines with what has for many years been a social requirement of femininity that girls and women care for others, intuit their needs, be midwives to the activities and desires of others.
The daughters managed their own unmet needs, so the argument goes, by giving to others with whom they then vicariously identify. Girls and women then rely on an identity as a giver as a way of consolidating a shaky sense of self. This identity is continually and compulsively reinforced until it is intrinsic to the girl’s sense of self.
Now you might not like this alternative explanation for girls’ sociability and capacity to intuit. But is a resort to genetics more satisfying? Sure, the “nature-nurture” debate continues to sell. But, like tabloid journalism, this kind of sensationalism is corrosive and plays to the fundamentalist aspects of our intellectual life. Genetic theories of social behaviours are a quick fix, a sudden but unsatisfying release of tension from social complexities that need addressing.
Susie Orbach is the psychotherapist who wrote the book Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Joseph Schwartz is a former professor of physics and psychology and has written several books on science