Brain Sex

With my last post and Cuarto's arrival, our little family was complete (other than various pets added and subtracted over the years, many of which were interred in the pet sematary behind the house). Nowadays, four kids is considered a large family--well, I guess it was back then, as well. Big enough, at any rate, although there were several of us Herbertians who had four kid families. But we were the only ones with four boys.

One thing the four boy family gave us was a certain comfort level with noise and confusion. And I do believe that boy noise is different than girl noise--a few years of chaperoning girls on school trips has convinced me of that. Girls shriek and boys holler--the difference is huge. Shrieking enters your head like a sharpened vampire stake, while hollering just makes your holler back. And girls will shriek for anything--they're happy, they're mad, they've dropped their Barbie, they've seen a bug, they want the world to know they're there.

Boys, on the other hand, holler for emergencies (or what they consider to be emergencies)--they've fallen out of a twenty-foot tree, they're stuck on the railroad tracks, they've just dodged an exploding burning barrel and now they're trying to dodge YOU, etc. etc.

Jack and I firmly believed that we could raise kids who were gender neutral. By that, I do not mean we were bent on producing hermaphrodites. I mean we felt gender was pretty much a product of environment--there was no such thing as "brain sex", as the socio-biologists insisted upon. No, that smacked far too much of determinism for us, and we would have none of it. We were going to raise sensitive new age guys who would understand where women were coming from, who would "get" what Mr. Freud so famously asked: "What do women want?", who would assume their role in an equitable world where gender roles were the same.

We have since seen the error of our ways.

It started with a toy car. We watched, in fascination, as each of our boys would first discover the car, pick it up, spin its wheels on the floor, and say "Vroom!" Our nieces and the little girls of our friends did not do this. We would also watch in horror as each boy first encountered the dolls we insisted on buying them (well, okay, it was I who insisted--Jack was ready to draw the line on this one). They would dismember the dolls, pull their heads off, and then put them back together in various distorted ways. Again, our nieces didn't do this, although I can't attest to that as we didn't live with them. For all I know, some of them might have engaged in serial mutilation.

From the cars and dolls, it went on to guns. Of course, Jack and I forbade all forms of guns as toys, lest we feed into the military-industrial complex's all pervasive culture of death. Again, the boys defied our preconceptions. They simply made guns out of whatever was handy--sticks, carrots, wooden spoons, mailing tubes, Lego. We finally gave up and allowed water pistols--this escalated when Uncle Walt brought super soakers to a family barbeque one year. It was as if he'd armed the mujahadeen with AK-47's--our world was never the same again.

Increasingly, despite our efforts at raising boys with some consciousness of gender equality, it became obvious that little boys were different than little girls despite all our enculturating efforts. Little boys just thought differently than little girls. I'd always known that big boys thought differently, but I'd chalked it up to the oppression of patriarchy. Now, I had to re-think things. Maybe there was something to this notion of "brain sex"--maybe there was a biological difference in how boys and girls thought and learned. Maybe, just maybe, difference didn't automatically mean "bad" but just "different". Maybe I had to adjust my thinking about the whole notion of "difference" (I was likely studying Derrida and the Deconstructionists at the time--for a real mind-bender, google Derrida's term "Differance")--it's all in the final "a".

I also had to reconsider my reaction to some of Jack's behaviours. For years, I'd been asking him what he was thinking at any given time. More times than not, he'd say "Nothing." I refused to believe it--my mind NEVER was thinking nothing. Something was always percolating--there was no such thing as NOTHING. I would prod and poke: "C'mon, you have to be thinking about SOMETHING." I would fret--obviously he didn't want to tell me what he was thinking about, which meant he was thinking about me and it was something BAD and what a jerk he was being and how dare he not tell me what I wanted to know and I think our marriage is over.

Now, after years of insight into boys' developing thought systems, I realized that what Jack had been telling me all these years was true. Sometimes (well, okay, a LOT of the time) the male thought balloon is empty. True, ladies, as strange as it may seem--there's really nothing there (nothing conscious, that is). The brain is in idle, chugging along at its default position, waiting to be put into gear at a moment's notice (say, when a particularly delectable motorcycle or girl goes by, or any such other shiny object).

Raising boys has helped me understand the male mind, or as much as anyone who isn't male can do so. I watched our boys handle conflict within the family--they would bug each other until one broke and would start beating on the other. After the dust-up, everyone was friends again, until the next time. Grudges were not harboured. That would require remembering what led to the conflict in the first place, which would remove the enjoyment of executing the conflict over and over again. Primero ALWAYS succumbed to Tercero's needling, Segundo ALWAYS tried to (unsuccessfully) hide his Halloween candy, Cuarto ALWAYS fell for the various ways his brothers abased him, and all of them ALWAYS left the toilet seat up and incurred maternal wrath.

It has been my (limited as it is, admittedly) experience with girls that they are far more canny about these things. Girls, like elephants, never forget. (I remember this--I was once a girl). They can harbour slights and take them out to caress like Gollum with his precioussss. They use words, not actions, to wound. If all this points to girls being smarter than boys (this used to be my position--I mean, it seemed so obvious), I'm not sure anymore that this is the case. Again, we are falling into the pit of difference being necessarily bad--that one thing is better than its other. Derrida and the deconstruction gang had much to say about this.

Over the last several years, there have been many fascinating studies done on the brain, and on how female and male brains are different, starting in infancy. It appears, from the studies, that girls are better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. This is not particularly earth-shattering to any woman who's ever asked her husband if those jeans make her look fat and the poor sap who actually ANSWERS. He obviously has not identified the emotional content of that loaded question--but now, he can relax, knowing that he's been hard-wired from babyhood to miss the boat.

Another study shows that girls 2-4 days old spend twice as much time maintaining eye contact with a silent adult and when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same (shorter) whether the adult was talking or silent. Again, any woman in a relationship can verify this male bias towards what guys see, rather than what they hear. This may account for the male ability to watch fifteen television shows simultaneously while tuning out their partner's demand to hand over the remote before she has a seizure.

Studies also show that baby girls like to gurgle at humans, while boys are equally happy jabbering away at toys or abstract geometric designs than at people. This could explain why men holler at televised sporting events or argue with Don Cherry between periods. (When you think of it, those jackets of his stand in admirably for the abstract geometric designs that babies jabber at).

Apparently, at four months, baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers, while baby boys cannot. This may be why husbands do not notice if their wives have new haircuts, new outfits, or new bones through their noses.

So now, these (to women) annoying traits can now be explained by brain sex. And the bitch of it is, women always suspected this is so. Even the most hard-core, radical, card-carrying feminist has conjected, deep down in her heart of hearts, that there is something going on in the male brain that is not going on in the female brain, regardless of the toxic environment patriarchy has erected over the generations.

However, lest people think that this lets men off the hook for being doofuses ("Hey, what can we do? We're born that way!"), we again must re-visit our notion of difference and the role of environment on the brain. For many recent studies have ALSO shown how environment can affect the brain's wiring, especially in infancy and childhood. AND, increasingly, studies are showing that older brains can be re-wired (unlike that toaster you've been waiting to have fixed by you-know-who).

So, it comes back to how we want to raise our boys (and girls), and how we feel about difference. For difference does not have to privilege one term over the other in Derrida's binary oppositional "violent hierarchy" where "one of the two terms governs the other"--in other words, no one gets to be the boss of the other.

What we've learned, since our boys have grown up and most of them found terrific women, is that despite the difference of brain sex, our efforts at providing an environment where boys were encouraged to play with dolls, have tea parties (we bought Primero a tea set--he loved it, but it got smashed to bits over the years--this wasn't a comment on the tea set--the boys were remarkably even-handed about what they destroyed) and only play with water-pistols did bear some fruit, or so their partners assure us.

Perhaps brain sex can change over time. As the outer world becomes more celebratory of gender difference (and, indeed, of all the many differences that make the world an interesting place), as little girls play with lego and little boys with dolls (NOT action figures), as parents demand and assume that the outer horizons for sll children are equally limitless and their inner horizons are cherished, then the inner world of the brain may change, and when that happens, the outer world will change even more, which will, in turn, act on the brain again, on and on, in a dizzying whirl of nature/nurture.

I was at a conference years ago when a researcher who'd studied supportive communities and their effects on children stated that the old opposition of nature/nurture no longer applied. The relationship between the two was more like an intricate dance, she said, where one partner might lead for a time, and then the other would take over in a constantly complex do-si-do.

Our own little family laboratory seems to show this--nature and nurture work together. Each generation learns a bit more than the one before, and in so doing, BECOMES different. And the older generation must honour that learning, for after all, it had a part in the process. And while we didn't raise boys who thought just like girls, we managed to raise boys who are respectful of difference and give it room to play. And who are smart enough to ask the women in their lives the answer to Dr. Freud's question of what women want (something that Sigmund apparently never thought of). Of course, like all women everywhere, their brain sex determines the answer--"Women want men to do what we say..."

No, if nothing else, raising four boys has taught me the meaning of difference, and that is a good thing. As the French would say, "Vive la difference!" As Mr. Derrida (wherever he may be--in whatever endless world of play inside the celestial text) would say, "Vive la differance!"