What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails… actually, Dr Sebastian Kraemer, child psychologist, would disagree. At a conference recently, Kraemer made an impassioned plea urging parents to treat baby boys more like baby girls: cuddle them, pick them up more, let them cry, don’t toughen them up.
His findings, which were picked up by newspapers around the world, suggest that boys are actually more fragile than girls — right from the start. Male foetuses are more likely to have problems in the womb; boys suffer more reading and learning disabilities than girls and are more “psychologically vulnerable” to their parents divorcing; men are more likely to be violent, to use alcohol, drugs, crime and sex as an escape from emotional problems. Kraemer suggests that if we could just stop doing the old “blue is for boys, pink is for girls” thing, we might have a shot at bringing up healthier and better adjusted men. In another article, Professor Lewis Wolpert stressed the differences between the sexes (same old news, different spin), but began with a statement that might surprise some of us: “The basic human body is female. Males are essentially hormonally modified females, a process that takes place in both the embryo and after birth.”
Somewhere in the background, I can hear Professors Rosalind Barnett and Carolyn Rivers sighing. The two academics have just come out with Same Difference: How Gender Myths are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs. Their thesis is that the huge differences that are supposed to exist between the genders are mythical. There isn’t all that much difference between boys and girls or men and women, and ground-level research suggests that every myth we’ve been fed, from the caveman stereotype and the hunter-gatherer cliché onwards is just plain wrong.
I can just see some of my friends shaking their heads in disagreement: like my feminist friend who hates Barbie and has produced, to her consternation and bafflement, an ultra-feminine little daughter. “She’s solved the nature-versus-nurture debate for us,” she told me while her daughter announced her desire for a “peh-ple” sari to go with her collection of pink bangles. “It’s nature all the way.” I can also see my sister telling me in no uncertain terms that the good Professors Barnett and Rivers have it all wrong: yes, her son is just as happy to play with cooking sets as with tanks and guns, but when you see him charging around the house making war whoops, you know he’s all boy.
But for every “feminine” little girl I’ve seen, I’ve come across little boys who love playing with mummy’s clothes and make-up too; it’s just that we don’t encourage them to continue doing that. And anyone who thinks girls are quiet and peaceful souls should reflect on this columnist’s record: thumped Ashish in the sandpit when just three, beat up Vikram in the school bus at the ripe old age of six; conducted insurrection in convent school, pitting modified water bottles against nuns as an 11-year-old.
But reflect on this for a second. If we didn’t endorse the caveman (and cavewoman!) models, promote the idea of the self-sufficient alpha male, accept the concept of Woman as Mother and shove all of these stereotypes down our kids’ throats, how would they grow up? One word: equal.
