Nurture Girl
I’m starting this post from the lip of the tub. (Well I’m actually sitting on the toilet, but the “lip of the tub” sounded so much more poetic.)
I am in the midst of bath time. And, as you can plainly see, I’m not very attentive during bath time. I usually leave bath time to the boys. They enjoy swatting each other’s penises and I enjoy some time out.
But tonight my hubbie is cooking up some NOLA staples: roast beef po boys, homemade french fries w/ Cajun dipping sauce, and mint juleps. (Yes, I know that mint juleps are really a Kentucky classic but we always enjoy them at a little piano bar in the French Quarter. Therefore, it’s New Orleans to us.)
So, tonight, bath time is left to me. And, since my parents claimed that bath time meant pruned feet and a good book to them, it only makes sense that bath time should mean blogging space for me.
In many ways, it’s really quite refreshing. Silas is content splashing in a 3X5 foot pen and I am here writing and sipping my mint julep and preventing him from drowning. It’s almost a perfect set up. Save for the fact that the toilet is not a very comfortable seat.
***It’s, maybe, fifteen minutes later.***
Bath time is over.
I was just pushed from the bed by my son. He was asking for Daddy and Snuggle Time and when I climbed in the bed he said “No, Mommy, No Snuggle, Mommy, No” and then proceeded to push me until I left.
And they say that boys LOVE their mamas.
That has not been my experience. Silas is a Daddy’s Boy to the very core. Since the awful hour that my breasts stopped making milk, Silas has been a boy of boys.
***It’s, maybe, another fifteen minutes later.***
I was about to go on a long diatribe about genetics and society. The whole nature versus nurture thing. I was about to argue that my son, either by blueprint or by the fact that his mother just sucks or both, prefers boy time much more than he prefers mommy time. I was going to talk about all the people that suggest that little boys have this clinging thing with their mothers and how that’s so great for the mom (I guess that’s the whole Freudian thing) and how my boy just does not.
Then, Silas asked for me and we read Marvin K. Mooney and Paul and I had our regular dispute over the correct pronunciation on the “you can go by camel in a bureau drawer” page.
So, while Silas is still, by far, a Daddy-preferer, I am not so heated up as to go on that same tirade.
And, I really don’t think that, as a mom, I suck.
Still, the whole nature versus nurture thing is an interesting question for a parent, especially when their child is young. I often wonder why Silas is so fond of trains and trucks and tractors. (I used to think that he was fond of trucks because he called them “fucks” and thought it was funny. I was wrong. He pronounces the word correctly now and, as far as I know, he doesn’t know what “fuck” actually means. Although, he might know that it’s funny. Thanks to everyone who laughed at him.)
I hear people all the time saying that boys just happen to love trucks and trains and tractors because they’re boys. Sometimes, I, and I don’t know why exactly, nod as if I agree with them. Sometimes, I even suggest, you know, verbally, that I understand what they are saying.
Well, let’s get one thing straight here, I’m a nurture girl.
I believe that a large part of our gender identification comes from our society and not from our hormones.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure testosterone plays an incredible part in male aggression and sexual, um, prowess. And, I know that women have “nurturing” chemicals released in their brains. (You would not believe the physical withdrawal that I went through when I had to stop breastfeeding.)
Still, when it comes to Dora vs. Diego, I think it’s pure marketing.
We all (or rather some of us) like to believe that we are particularly sensitive to gender bias and that we would never ever subject our children to specific gender-bendering. That we would give our child the same opportunities whether or not they are boy or girl. That our sons would be welcome to Strawberry Shortcake and our daughters to, I don’t know, the World Wide Wrestling Federation. (Do you remember that Christmas scandal, oh about twenty years ago, when a group of “commercial terrorists” exchanged the voice boxes in the Christmas Barbie and the latest G.I. Joe?)
Still, while I recently arrived at day care to find Silas dancing around the living room in a lacy wedding gown and fuzzy purple hat, I don’t think that his preference for all things with engines is an accident. I think it comes from conditioning. (I wanted to say it comes from our day care and just wash my hands of it, but I don’t think that’s possible.)
I have friends that claim that they have never, in any way, exposed their child to gender-specific conditioning. But somehow, just somehow, the girls love princesses and the boys love monster trucks. I absolutely, in no way possible, buy that statement. If you’ve brought your child to the store with you, you have exposed them. Period. End of story.
At the University of Florida (Go Gators!), I studied gender and linguistics. We studied things like the effects of saying “his and her” versus “her and his” and the tendency for teeny-bopper girly magazines to write about females in the passive rather than in the active. But, we also studied other languages in which there were no markers for gender (as in no “she” or “he”) and no marker for hierarchy (only “God”, “Animal”, and “Non-Animal” with all subcategories taking the same value).
The culture that surrounded these languages often found little to no gender superiority and often had what we would consider to be reversed gender roles (as in the women were the breadwinners and the men the housekeepers). While that may not sway you, it was enough to sway me. The linguistic and social analysis of these cultures gave me the “hard data” to back up what I already believed: gender is a social and cultural construct and social and cultural constructs are largely inescapable.
We are all products. You know like Kleenex or Tampax.
I want to say here and now that I had no intention of getting into this debate. I wanted to write about muddling mint and sugar water but it seems that I have, somehow, and to a great extent, missed that literary boat.
***It’s about 24 hours later.***
Silas just pushed me from the bed again. I’m trying not to take it personal. Honestly, I’m just looking it as a chance for another break.
The po boys turned out well. Somehow Paul didn’t know that Bragg’s Liquid Aminos is a lot like soy sauce (and yeah, he added a bit too much to the gravy) but still they were good.
So, I guess I should reflect on last night’s sociological or anthropological or linguistic or whatever rant. I still believe that boys love trucks because they find out from other people that trucks love boys.
I also think, and I’m not sure how this fits into the debate, that Silas loves his daddy so much because his daddy has a “pee pee” (or as my friend’s toddler calls it a “vagina snake”). Silas loves trucks so much because Daddy drives a truck therefore people with pee pees love trucks therefore Silas also loves trucks. He also sees pictures of boys on boxes of toy trucks. He also is, I’m sure, encouraged, however inadvertently, to play with trucks. You know, because he is, as many people say “pure boy.”
I could be very, very wrong.
But, I’m not.
How could I be?
Still, if you’d like to challenge me to a duel, I’d be happy to go there. I’m not even opposed to the idea that you might change my mind. Maybe Silas doesn’t like me as much because I’m the heavy. (Still nurture.) Or because I’m not attentive at bath time. (Still nurture.) Or, because he is around women all day and a man’s voice is a certain comfort. (Still, pretty much, but could be argued, nurture.)
Anyhow, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I feel like this is a very odd sort-of post for me. I’m usually not really very political and I don’t know where this came from.
But, yeah, thanks for listening. Go nurture!
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:31 am
I think it’s both. Nurturing is definitely a big part of it & I don’t appreciate our society’s constant messaging to our kids about what they should & shouldn’t like or what color clothes they need to wear. How many pastel colors do you see in the toddler boys department? But I firmly believe that boys and girls are wired differently or maybe a more pc way to say it is that there are male and female brains. Just from a biological standpoint we are different – we have very different reproductive functions and hormones. Even if everything were gender neutral, I think some clear differences would emerge.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:17 am
I agree with that. There is proof that male and female brains are wired differently. (Although some of that wiring might be socially predicated as well.) Still, I don’t think that wiring draws a child to trains or Barbies. Barbies are girl characters; trains are largely boy characters. The difference is easily identifiable. Even to a toddler.
October 24th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I have this funny feeling that “friend” you’re talking about is me. Because I do believe, based on what I’ve seen from my own children and family (which admittedly is not a randomized sample), that sometimes you cannot influence socially what a child will do or prefer. To be sure, our society has constructed a rigid, disgusting, and often oppressive code for how each sex should behave. However, I believe that code has a basis in biological differences that encourage tendancies towards one behavior or another. I also believe that there really are not just two distinct genders the way we pretend there are, but that masculinity and femininity, whatever those words mean, exist along a multi-variate continuum.
I have never, ever encouraged my daughter to love princesses or pink. I have taken her to Target on multiple occasions. I encourage her to read. She saw for the first year of her life, and still to this day, that dad is a caretaker. Mom works. Mom is also a care taker and dad works. She see us both cook, clean, use tools, avoid sports, exercise, sew, and bathe babies. I’m sure she possesses some culturally stimulated qualities, given that she does watch tv, talk to outsiders, and play quite a bit with school aged children. However, I feel like I can comfortably say that she has preferred pink, cats, reading, and drawing from a very young age, before we let her watch tv and before she could reasonably interact with the other youngsters. Those seem to be parts of her inherent personality, the same way that she talked at nine months, did not walk until 14 months, and cries when you look at her the wrong way.
On the other hand, Henry has witnessed the same gender descriptions in this household, although Kevin was not home quite as much (he still cares for them on his own, 1-2 days/week while I’m at work). Henry has been in the same text and language rich household, has no male friends or cousins, probably watched more tv as a youngster. My mom definitely encourages him to play with trucks. So he does. (I encouraged Lily to play with trucks, but she does not unless they are wagons for the animal parade.) I would not say he loves monster trucks, just things with wheels in general. I can say pretty comfortably that his inherent personality consists of humor, compassion, the love of the letter e and number 2 (kidding, kind of). He prefers books, blocks (so does Lily), and trucks. He walked at nine months and only at 17 months is he really using words for communication. He laughs when you look at him the wrong way.
So are those boy or girl qualities? I’m not really sure now. But it seems to me like they each act in some gender neutral ways, in some ways that are typically ascribed to the opposite gender, and in some very bigs ways in their expected gender roles. (That describes Kevin and I as well.) I don’t deny that I had a part in that, but I suspect that some of it might be more hard-wired than I wanted to believe, back before I had children and believed I would have complete control over them.
I agree that it is impossible to not expose your child to socially constructed gender identities. However, I don’t believe that exposing them to those constructs dooms them to repeat them. Just because your kid sees something on tv or at the store does not mean she/he will absorb it as a truth/value/way to act. I believe what kids see adults doing around them is much more impactful (and in fact what we generally believe, based on how we normally educate our children about how to live life).
So this is a very disjointed comment to say that I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree with you. But I love you all the same.
I have more thoughts about how the biological differences do not exclusively or necessarily result in the personality traits society has dictated. But I don’t yet know how to explain what I’m thinking.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I hear you loud and clear. I often wonder about inherent personality. I do, of course, believe that there is a mix. (Nature and Nurture.) But, I think “nurture” plays a stronger role then we would like to believe. I often only somewhat agree and somewhat disagree with myself. And, while we have had that conversation, you are not the only “friend” I was referring to. Of course, I would love you no matter what. Em
October 25th, 2009 at 8:16 am
While I was sweeping and mopping yesterday, I decided that it doesn’t matter to me if society influences my kids to act in certain ways, provided that my kids are not oppressive to others, feeling oppressed, or acting completing against my aesthetic. I would be disappointed by a bad-beer swilling football May-neee-Aac or an Abercrombie-zombie. But being boyish or girlish, not gender neutral, is ok with me.
October 25th, 2009 at 10:55 am
That’s okay with me too. Was just wondering about the whole girl toys/boy toys thing and thinking that it isn’t just “boys will be boys” as everyone says. And, everyone says it alot. As everyone says that boys are just s attached to their mothers. A lot. That’s where the post really stemmed from: Silas’s preference for Paul which sometimes hurts my feelings. I like to chalk it up to being a penis thing. (But that could be all nature.) So, then I try to think that maybe his obsessions come from boy identification. Which is fine. I have no problem with how Silas is turning out. It just makes me wonder.
Plus, I think the whole dads not caring thing (and other 1950s-style stereotpyes) is really passe. The gender nouveau would probably have to do with subtle nuances. Of which, examples are escaping me right now. I don’t think there is as clear a line between gender roles today. Still, there are certain stereotypes– women can multitask and men hate cleaning– which I think come some from nature but a lot from society. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. Well, not really.