Doing Difference

page four

The difference problem

Difference, in and of itself, is neither a good nor bad thing. For example, most people who haven’t suffered a catastrophic brain injury perceive there is a difference between a dog and a daisy. That dogs and daisies are dissimilar is not presumed to make one organism essentially better or worse than the other (although in the scope of Western thinking, the lives of animals do have a higher value than those of plants). Most people are capable of encountering dogs and daisies without automatically making positive or negative comparisons between the two.

There are obvious biological differences between males and females, particularly in their reproductive functions, but gender makes distinctions between men and women in ways that are unrelated to reproductive biology— such as defining the ways men and women normally think, feel and act in a vast array of social situations— and attributes a relative value to each set of characteristics. Unlike dogs and daisies, males and females are considered “opposites,” which means that if gender assigns certain characteristics to females, such as sensitivity and selflessness, males must therefore be callous and self-absorbed or the formula of opposites won't work. As a result, we are primed to accept preposterous gender equations that defy all observations of reality, such as “women only want committed relationships but men just want to get laid.” Consequently, if you are a woman who just wants to get laid, you might feel badly about yourself or you might feel judged by others as being of low moral character, and if you are a guy who only wants commitment, some people might question your judgment or your masculinity and women might mistrust your motives. Alternately, if you are a man who just wants to get laid you might act like you want a committed relationship because you’re convinced that’s what all women desire, which increases the likelihood you will end up hurting someone’s feelings and reduces your chances of hooking up with women who just want to get laid. This is just one small example of how the story of gender makes a mess of our lives.

On the macro level, gender works to persuade us that most men (but few women) possess the unwavering objectivity, decisiveness and inner drive to crush the competition that is so highly valued in the fields of business, finance, law, politics, academia, the military and the criminal underworld; and that most women (but few men) have an exceptional capacity for developing the emotional sensitivity, protective instincts and practical skills required to run a household efficiently and raise happy, healthy children. (By demanding equal opportunities for women in higher education and the professional workplace, second wave feminists managed to make some minor edits to the first half of this difference story— women now enter male dominated fields as a matter of course, but they still earn considerably less than comparable male workers, and are rarely admitted to the highest ranks of their professions.) Both men and women are credited with having some kind of essential ability, but the presumed sex-linked capacities of men are far more highly regarded and rewarded in terms of money, prestige and social power than the presumed sex-linked capacities of women.

Since women are not, in fact, inferior to men or less sensitive to injustice, their consignment to the second-class sex throughout the course of human history was bound to rankle. However, their lack of substantive social power prior to the nineteenth century made it difficult to set the record straight. One of the counter-strategies women developed, possibly to dull the sting of their subordinate status, was cultivating an alternate gender fable that subverts the assumption of male dominance. In Deceptive Distinctions, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein observes that

There has always been a theme in women’s folklore, at least in the Western world, that women know best what men need, that men are often childlike and incompetent, that their egos need bolstering because they are unsure of themselves and easily threatened at work, that they are vulnerable weak reeds depending on a woman’s strength in matters of emotion, and that they cannot cope with children, the home, or other aspects of the female domain. This is expressed visibly through the media most egregiously in articles in women’s magazines and in television comedies, and experientially in the jokes and conversations of women beyond the earshot of men. This cynicism occurs worldwide. I have heard it expressed by colleagues and journalists in the north of Europe, in the Mediterranean countries, in India, and right at home.

The “men are clueless” discourse seems as vigorous today as it did when I was growing up in the 1960s; I have vivid memories of the countless times my mother, with hands on hips, uttered -- in a low voice brimming with contempt -- a single word: “men!” (Taking this concept to new heights, David and Goliath, a Clearwater, Florida based clothing manufacturer, markets a popular line of t-shirts for teen girls bearing such inspirational messages as “boys are dumb— throw rocks at them” and “boys lie— poke them in the eye.” The tongue-in-cheek inscriptions are not meant to be taken seriously, but still you’ve got to wonder— what were they thinking?) Yet despite the unflattering light this kind of talk shines on them, men have done little to contest the assertion that they are— at least in the areas of life and love where women are assumed to have cornered the market— complete idiots. One recent advice-seeker writing to Salon’s Since You Asked column deliberated if and how to tell a platonic friend he was romantically attracted to her. “I’ve tried being more observant to see if I can get any sort of hint via her body language that she may or may not feel the same way, but alas, I’m a stupid male and can’t seem to read any signals one way or the other.” When Barbara Risman interviewed egalitarian couples for a study on how these co-parents shifted their attitudes about gender, she found that a key area of negotiation involved differing standards of cleanliness. As one father confessed, “I know the thing men have the hardest time learning how to do is noticing that there is dust. Men can’t see dust. Men don’t know what dust is.”

Perhaps when all the intricacies of the human genome are finally unraveled, we will discover that the male chromosome does indeed lack the dust perception gene— but until then it might be reasonable to theorize that men can’t see dust because, at least for the last few hundred years and probably for countless centuries beforehand, they’ve rarely been held accountable for it. The matter of dust is, of course, just one small quirk in the ever-unspooling tale of gender difference. The overwhelming issue with women’s blanket endorsement of men’s professed stupidity in the domestic/relational sphere is not just that men are willing to buy into it; it’s that if women cling to the belief that mothers are better adapted— because of biology, psychology, temperament, acculturation or whatever— for child-rearing and the type of housework that invariably goes along with it, they will never have enough confidence in men’s care-giving abilities to relinquish half the load. According to Epstein:

Women participate in the conspiracy; they protect men and help maintain the myths... Women who ‘prop up’ men …also protect their own sphere (the home) from male control by arguing that they have special competence for their domain as men do for theirs— asserting that women manage the home better and are more suited to it. Women prevent men from becoming competent in the home, holding that men’s personality traits are not suitable for women’s roles and that men’s biological makeup impedes their acquisition of the required attributes such as nurturance or home management. Men also conspire to remain incompetent, as women suspect, because such skills are poorly rewarded.

Whether it’s men’s resistance to taking on work that will degrade their status and power or women’s low estimation of men’s domestic ability that buttresses the inequitable distribution of domestic labor in our society, there can be no doubt that— with exception of a tiny minority of stalwart feminist couples— we're still “doing gender,” big time. For example, the results from the first American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2004) found that 84 percent of women, but only 63 percent of men, devote some time to housework every day. 20 percent of men reported doing cleaning, laundry or yard work— as opposed to 55 percent of women— and 66 percent of women, compared to 35 percent of men, prepared meals and washed dishes as part of their daily routine. We can joke about cave-men and cave-women and complain about the intransigence of human nature, but the bottom line is that the amount and type of unpaid labor women contribute to the economy is hazardous to both their short- and long-term well-being.

There is, in fact, plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence suggesting that men can learn to do this work just as well as women— when they have to. “Can only women be effective primary nurturers?” asks Risman in Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (1998). “The answer is crucial, for no one would want to abolish gender structure at the cost of harming our children.” But Risman’s study of 55 “reluctant” single fathers— those who had absolute custody of their young children because they were widowed or deserted by their wives— found these fathers were just as competent at “mothering” as the mothers in her control group. Risman also found that “responsibility for housework is better explained by parental role than by sex. Primary parents, whether men or women (housewives or single parents) reported doing much more housework than other parents.” Because the caretaking behavior of single fathers and fathers in dual-income couples was significantly different from that of the breadwinner fathers she studied, Risman concluded that men are perfectly capable of keeping house and nurturing children— but they are less likely to take on domestic/relational work when a women is available to assume the caregiving role.

next:
gender, new and improved

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