DO CHILDREN NEED A MOTHER AND A FATHER?--PART ONE: Eve

This question boils down to three mini-questions: 1) Are we men and women, or just people?; 2) How important is the family in teaching us what it means to be a man or a woman?; and 3) Is it enough to have male or female role models who are available when we need them, but not part of the family?

1) We--especially those of us in the intellectual trades--are encouraged to think of ourselves as basically non-gendered, minds with bodies accidentally attached. But both introspection and reading prove that sex differences deeply color our personalities and our worldviews.

Introspection will show us how often our formative experiences were gendered. I've written on my blog about how much I identified with male characters in the books I read, but you know, that was misleading. In the real world, no matter how much I wanted to be Grantaire or Pepe Le Pew, I experienced menarche; I knew I was more likely to be targeted for sexual assault; I knew people like me were the people who got pregnant. My friendships with both girls and boys were shaped by the fact that I was a girl.

And reading will show us how deeply all the great characters are gendered. Even pop culture will tell you this--throwaway pop and ageless art agree here. Artemis, Antigone, Rosalind, Molly Bloom; Loki, Kronos, Hektor, the Redcrosse Knight, Mickey Sabbath. And also Scarlett O'Hara, Roseanne, Captain Kirk, and Tony Soprano. Could these characters ever exist in a genderless world, where whether we were men or women was purely incidental to our True Identities?

I hope these lists make clear that I'm not advocating for rigid, cliched gender roles--just pointing out that gender is real and we want it. When we make up images of who we should be, those images are gendered, because gender is something almost all of us seek out.

Men and women aren't really "opposite sexes." But our differing experiences strongly color our worldviews, and our differing biologies strongly influence our needs and desires. ("It's a wise child that knows his own father"...) The modern, genderless view of human nature is weirdly antiseptic and anti-literary.
posted by Eve at 12:48 AM | link

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