Growing up Male or Female in America

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Thomas Bartlett recently wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about being a boy: The Puzzle of Boys.  (The title of this post links to the article ---at least I hope so.)

The fascinating thing about gender differences to me --certainly in humans--- is that they're so hard to think about objectively, and yet they're so fascinating when someone does write about them.  After thirty years, since feminism was first given the stature of a popular movement in the seventies, it seems that bringing up girls to be the way they had been for millennia: pretty and nurturing, is still going on in quite ordinary homes all over the world, and bringing up boys to be willful and aggressive (and "mission-oriented") is also taking place.  There was a limited movement towards a more gender-neutral approach to child-rearing, started as early as Benjamin Spock, but declining greatly during the more conservative times in the US, though enlightened conservatives must certainly be aware of the dangers of too enthusiastic gender-reinforcement in early childhood.

I suspect that there may be a subconscious belief in most Americans that the gender differences, even reinforced by feelings of discrimination among both genders, is what provides the tension that makes the social-cultural-economic dynamics of this society work.  There might be a suspicion that since it is Sex that drives the marketplace, too much unisex anything is bad for business.

I'm determined to write at greater length on this topic, but I'm going to close for now.

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