Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković Until the age of ten, I grew up in Tehran, Iran, a country that had just gone through an Islamic revolution, and although you could clearly see that women were visible in public life, I could see that there were expectations from boys and girls that were quite different. From having to wear a headscarf, to going to a single-sex, girls school, I knew there was an understanding of gender polarity within my culture. Conversely, I lived in a very matriarchal family.
My grandmother was the head of the household; all the women within my family, my mother, my aunties, were highly-educated, strong and independent women. The marriages that got modeled to us were marriages of partnership, where the division of labor within the home was often very unconventional. Even when we moved to New Zealand, I did not live in a male-dominated household, and I didn't realize that this was uncommon till a year ago.
I remember being a child and getting frustrated if boys and girls got treated differently just because they were boys and girls. I remember going through a phase of refusing to shave my armpits, because boys didn't do it and it just didn't make sense. It wasn't hair that keeps growing, like on man's face.
What was going going on? Why did we have to do this? And then, I remember all the messages that my mom would tell me when I was a child.
She would say: education is really important for a woman; financial independence is really important for a woman; any woman who doesn't want to grow up and then have someone else tell them what to do. So, my experience of gender as a child, and the contradictions I experienced within the societies I lived in and within the home, must have shaped my interest in gender; what gender is, how it operates, and how it makes us who we are, how we take it on, and perform it. To understand our current model of gender, we need to look at it historically.
Since the Enlightenment period, we have followed a binary model where traits associated with men and masculinity have been elevated above traits associated with women and femininity. Even though this model has been critiqued for years, and it's definitely softening, I think it's still holding its grip. What we usually hear through the media and from pop psychology is that men and women are completely different species, with completely different desires and completely different traits, and that this is inborn, biological, and inevitable.
This is a model we urgently need to let go of. Not only is it a total fallacy, but gender is something that is not inborn, but fluid, changeable, and socially bound. You only have to look at the expressions of gender within history to see what I'm talking about.
For example, in Ancient Greece, your gender was understood based on the position you took in sex. So, adult men who were the givers of sex were often given the gender masculine, and the young men and the women that received this sex were given the gender feminine. During the 1600s, men wore bold colors, intricate patterns, high heels, tights, elaborate wigs, and often make-up.
During the Renaissance, the ideal female body was voluptuous, with small breasts, large hips, a tummy, and big thighs. In Victorian times, pink was associated with masculinity; it was seen as a masculine color; and baby blue, a feminine color. Context is thus hugely important in shaping not only how we understand gender, but the way we take it on and perform it on a daily basis.
Psychological research over the last 30 years has clearly demonstrated that men and women are much more similar than they are different when it comes to a whole host of psychological traits and cognitive functioning. This is with regards to cognitive performance, like mathematical ability, their personality and social behaviors, like temperament, emotions, aggression, and leadership style, as well as their psychological well-being. Some minor differences have been found when it comes to 3D mental rotation, the personality dimension of agreeableness and tender-mindedness, sensation-seeking behaviors and the expression of physical aggression, as well as some sexual behaviors, like pornography use, masturbation, and attitudes towards casual sex.
But interestingly, these differences disappear the more gender-neutral the context the research is carried out in, and the more gender-neutral the experimental setting. We know that, in countries with greater gender equality, there are much smaller gaps in mathematical performance and sexual behavior. After all, men and women are almost identical chromosomally.
Out of the 46 chromosomes that we have as humans, there is only one chromosome that differentiates us as male or female. Here, I want to make a really important distinction between sex and gender. So, sex refers to our chromosomal make-up; the physical features that distinguish us as boy or girl, that is, our genitalia, our facial hair, and so on, but gender is the socialization or the molding of us into feminine or masculine beings.
For example, we exasperate some of the natural physical differences that men and women have. You know, we've got a culture that needs men to be bulky and muscular, and for women to be wafer-thin and very, very slim, and we have a culture that requires women to have large breasts and men to avoid man boobs at all cost. (Laughter) So, again, we're not born feminine or masculine.
Rather, we become feminized or masculinized by a sort of a multitude of intersecting factors, like our history, culture, religion, social tradition, social conventions, our families, the modeling we do from our parents, media representations, and, of course, the way we talk about what it means to be a boy or a girl. We gender our kids as soon as they are born. How many times have you heard the term, "What a pretty little girl!
", or, "What a strong little man! ", when talking to a baby? What I've noticed over the last two decades is that we seem to be going through a regenderization process.
So, although we've made quite a lot strides in gender equality, the differences between boys and girls are being fiercely promoted at the moment within our culture. You only have to step into a toy store to see how limited the range is, especially for girls. The toys that kids play with impact their sense of reality and feelings of what they are, who they are, and who they can be.
I remember being a child myself and playing with a blond, blue-eyed Barbie and thinking, "This is ideal womanhood! ", and, "Hey, I'm all the wrong colors! " And that took a long time to unlearn, and a good ten years at university.
(Laughter) So, what are the messages we get about masculinity and femininity within our culture? When it comes to idealized femininity, we value youth, beauty, being slim, toned, hairless; white, but tanned; smart, but not too smart; sassy, but not aggressive; fashionable, sexy, heterosexual; sexually available and up for it, at any style or fashion. What we teach young girls is that the most important thing about them is how they look and how sexually desirable they are to men, and of course, they'll never measure up.
No wonder 90% of people with eating disorders are girls or women. Up to the age of eight or nine, boys and girls tend to have the same level of self-esteem, but this seems to deteriorate for girls consistently as the emphasis on looks becomes more prominent as they get older. Girls have much higher rates of anxiety and depression, and young women are twice as likely to be hospitalized for intentional self-harm.
In the workplace, we know that women earn 10% less than men. Women spend twice as long per day doing unpaid labor. Only 20% of university professors across New Zealand are women.
There is a huge lack of women in the STEM fields; that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, which is a surprise, considering we have the same mathematical ability. And we know that women are still hugely underrepresented in parliament, CEO, and governance positions globally. But I think most alarming of all is the statistics around violence against women.
We know that about one in four women globally will be sexually assaulted by a man in her lifetime. Rates of family violence, domestic violence, or gender-based violence, whatever you want to call it, remains steady. And if a woman is killed, 50% of the time it was her partner or a male family member.
What about men? And what about idealized masculinity? The type of manhood we value in our culture is someone who has status, resources, money, is rich, is powerful, is sexually successful, sexually aggressive, popular with the ladies, a leader, competitive, tough, sporty, and most importantly, not openly emotional.
What we know within psychology is that what makes people well-adjusted individuals is not only a good relationship with their own emotionality, an understanding of what emotions are, what they mean, and how to process them, but to be able to communicate those in safe and appropriate ways to others. But what we teach our boys is to not only suppress their emotions, but to not show them to anyone, except, maybe, if it's anger. Boys need to be tough, strong, hard, top-dog, get all the cash and the ladies, and, of course, they'll never measure up.
No wonder, men are less likely to have emotional competency or seek support for psychological or health issues. Men's feelings of low self-esteem, low self-worth, anxiety, and depression often manifest in conduct issues and substance abuse problems. Men suffer emotionally and in isolation, and are twice as likely to commit suicide worldwide.
Not only is it hard for men to pursue traditionally non-masculine roles, like being a stay-at-home dad or a carer, but buying into our dominant and toxic model of masculinity increases men's need to have power over others, especially power over women. And men are actually the biggest victims of other men's violence. So, our binary gender system does not only lead to gender inequality, something that we've known for a long time, but it feeds into a whole host of individual and social problems that we have within our society.
And even if men as a whole group might benefit from the current system, it limits opportunities for both boys and girls within our culture. What do we do about it? How can we change this?
First of all, we need to become aware; what Paulo Freire calls a process of "counsciousization," an awareness that men and women are actually not that different from each other, and our gendered and polarized system is not natural, but it has become normalized for us. Once we realize that gender is much more fluid and changeable, we will realize the freedom this provides all of us. We need to challenge everyday sexism in the workplace, at home, within our institutions, and within our media representations.
We should change our consumer patterns and reward companies that don't promote sexist ideas. We need to raise our kids differently and in a more gender-neutral way to challenge the status quo. And most importantly, we urgently need gender equality education within schools from day one.
Because our binary gender system does not work for boys or girls, and we need to teach our kids they don't need to be defined by the rigid gender expectations of our society. I want to see a future where gender is much more fluid. I want to live in a world where we move beyond this binary system of the masculine and the feminine.
I want there to be no association between having a penis and having to be masculine, or having a vagina and having to be feminine. The link between genitals and gender needs severing. We need to carve out a culture that offers our children lots of different versions of what they can be, one that suits them and their own desires and sensibilities as a person, one that allows them to treat each other ethically and with compassion.
I want a future where there is no gender polarity, and no battle of the sexes, but a unification and celebration of us all as unique, but equally human.
