So I've been busy and the internet has been on the bottom of my to-do list. Not that I posted much to begin with, but I do enjoy reading others' posts and commenting. And letting people know I'm still alive, since for those of you who overlap with my fb friends, well, I haven't been on there much either.
But here's an interesting post about
gender bias about authors, which I just read while madly skimming through all I've missed in the past, um, let's say month. I've been thinking about gender differences for a while, off and on, and my train of thought started again when I visited my cousins earlier in the summer. We were sitting at dinner (the whole family: mine, theirs, and the grandparents) and my cousin M (male) tells a story wherein a friend of his said something insulting about my cousin S (female) so he punched his friend. The next day his friend apologized. I wasn't really in this conversation, it was more my cousins talking about their plans for the weekend, so while my aunt says 'I don't condone violence' (that's a quote) even though his friend did apologize, I'm sitting there thinking 'yeah, but wouldn't it be nice sometimes to actually be able to hit someone when you want to?'
I've always had pretty fast reflexes, and apparently, along with those reflexes came what I called my defensive* "hit-reflex." As in, someone pokes me, startles me, or whacks me, and I hit back without even thinking about it. I took kick boxing in 11th grade, but stopped because I was afraid I was going to hit someone and hurt them for no real reason. I've since trained myself out of the reflex, at least enough that I don't hit people anymore when I'm startled.**
But my cousin's story got me thinking about the difference in gender -- how much is really built in, and how much is society? Yes, women and men have different bodies, and slightly different hormones, but do we really have different brains? There are articles every so often with things like "boys are better at science and math," etc, and I've always been skeptical. Boys and girls start out very similar in make from the time they're fetuses; as we get older we get more different in body, but how different in mind? Then there are those people who even have a strange conglomerate of chromosomes -- they may appear female or male, but in reality have chromosomes that mark them as the opposite sex -- does their brain then work according to how their body looks?
Back to the story: girls aren't
allowed to hit, whereas it's expected in boys. If you see two sets of people fighting, where one set are women and the other are men, who do you think is having the worse argument? The women, usually. In order to physically hit someone, a woman has to overcome all the social teachings that say nice girls don't hit. Does that mean if they were taught that it's okay to hit, they would hit people more often? Probably.
I read a lot of books when I was younger with heroines in them. Alanna who dresses up as a boy to become a knight, Cimorine who runs away to live with dragons and learns magic, Sabriel who becomes the anti-necromancer of her kingdom and was second place in her girls school fencing class. I've since made it through puberty with a sense that it doesn't matter as much how "pretty" I look as how much I can
do (and a strong desire to learn some type of martial arts enough to be at least competent).
I was sitting outside my office (where I'm an intern) eating lunch this afternoon when a family walked by and stood next to the resturant on the lower level of the building (which I was sitting outside of) and discussed whether they wanted to eat lunch yet. (There was a mom, dad, grandma, daughter, and two sons, the kids all being middle school/high school age). I ignored most of their conversation, but as they were walking away I heard the mother say to one of the sons "stop being so sensitive." Presumably he'd lost an argument or something and not gotten what he wanted, so he was moping. I thought "would the mom have said the same thing to the daughter?" Maybe, I don't know her. But from my observations of people up to this point, I would guess not. It might have the same meaning in the end, but would most likely be phrased more like "stop moping, act nice." That comes with its own set of problems, but both of them are genderized.
I grew up with a sister and never had many guy friends. I think I'm more comfortable around girls because I'm used to them. But I was talking with my friend A a while ago and she mentioned that she was living with a bunch of her guy friends next near and it would be a relief because there wouldn't be as much drama. This harkened back to a conversation we'd had last year, where she talked about having too much "girl drama" and I realized I had no clue what she was talking about. Reminder: mostly girl friends. Still very little idea of what constitutes "drama" let alone "girl drama."
I mentioned the story about my cousin to A and we embarked on a short discussion of girls vs guys. She started with saying that guys, overall, were more chill than girls. I replied that that may be so, I don't know enough guys to really say, but if it is so, how much is it society conditioning rather than natural temperments?
You can see I'm big on this society conditioning thing. Most of my early stories have girls as main characters. When I first started adding boys into my stories I realized that I did not know any boys -- as in, never really talked to them. So what I decided then was that girls and boys were essentially the same, and if I was going to write a boy as a main character then I should ignore the "boy" part and focus on the "character" part. That was probably a good decision (despite the fact that I had yet to learn how to actually make a "character" a "person").
But there is a fact that I look at my stories now and still see females as the undisputed main characters. Yes, there are guys too, but rather few compared to the women when looking at point-of-view characters. When I ask myself why, one of the answers that often comes up (I don't really know the answer, these are more like suggestions to my mind about why it's thinking this way) is, well, I'm a woman, so I can better/more easily write how females think. Wait. Screech. Halt. Does this mean females and males think differently?
So then I run up against the thought that while I definitely think that guys and girls are essentially the same, some part of my brain is acknowledging the fact that I do also believe in a difference. So what, exactly, creates that difference?
ETA: This is further compounded by an article I read a few months ago which was a well written personal story talking about the bias against transsexuals in our society. I didn't want to ask this question, and be branded rude or insensitive, but I kept wondering how the author, when he was a kid,
knew he was a girl. I never "knew" I was a girl. I was told "you are a girl because of how you look" and was given dresses to wear and was sent to dance class. If I had been told I was a boy and had been sent to play baseball I would have followed just the same. Matter of fact, I was sent to kiddy soccer, probably for the same length of time I was sent to kiddy ballet and tap. I played outside and climbed all over our swing set, climbed the tree in our backyard until my mom yelled to stop because wh was afraid I was going to fall and kill myself (though how she saw that but missed the swing set adventures, I'm not sure).
So again, what's the innate difference?
* I realized while at home that my dad tends to to wave things like dishtowels or his hands in peoples' faces or ruffle their hair without warning. He also tends to tickle without warning. At some point I must have started wacking him to get him to stop tickling me or sticking things in my face and that turned into wacking people when I was startled. Well, duh.
** No wonder it was so easy to train myself out of the reflex when I went off to college.