The Lost Gender

I took a field trip with my friend Sue and her twin 11-year-old girls to Whidbey Island a couple of weekends ago. It has been a late Seattle summer, warm, crisp and sunny this September, but that Saturday was a drizzly, gray, precursor to our often miserable winters. It wasn’t too cold though, and after we waited a bit for the weather to clear, we decided to take the gamble and make the trip out to the island. There is something refreshing about walking along the shore in the off-season, and I had never explored the island much, and, plus, I always like talking with Sue and feel I have more in common with her girls than I do many of the people I interact with...

We walked along the beach at Ebey’s Landing, the girls and Sue pointing out birds to each other and me hopping from rock to rock. One of them was talking about school, and a writing assignment a teacher had given the class to argue a point. The boys, she said, all argued their justification for getting cell phones and PlayStations, and the girls, she said, arguing to save abandoned animals and endangered species and rainforests. Now, I know, of course, that at that age, any arguments one has enough information to write more than a few paragraphs on is largely taken from the culture of the home. For instance, when I was in Lower School, they held a school-wide mock-election for the President of the US and my sister and I were probably the only people who voted for the Democratic candidate. Do I have any idea who it was? No. Did I have any idea, in the second, or third, or fourth grade, what any of his positions were on the issues, or what that meant? No. But of course that was who my parents supported. And for my conservative classmates, the same, although all of our political views have since, I’m sure, tweaked a bit in our growing up. So what I took from this, from the girls’ story, which they mentioned as an interesting aside, fell in line with what I have observed in my own view: that girls, from an early age, are more taught to think outside themselves, of their greater community, or their role in nurturing and protecting the underrepresented (granted, fuzzy wolf pups are a timeless easy sell for young girls), while boys are no longer encouraged in this same sense of responsibility outside of themselves, and instead are allowed to pursue more self-centered interests.

A sweeping generalization, I know, and far from across-the-board. For instance, in my experience the more young and active members of the Christian community have a more outward looking sense of responsibility to community and others. And obviously my perspective of this is shadowed by my own life experience. But an interesting observation, layered upon my experience, that women these days have a (sometimes oppressive) sense of their responsibility to the world around them – their community, their parents, their friends, their partners; while men have been freed of the cultural conventions, stereotypically 1950s, of having the responsibility of being the sole breadwinners, defining their success in life by being able to provide the best possible home for their family, education for their children, most active role of civic duty to their community.

A few days later… an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Maureen Dowd, talking about how women are getting unhappier, at the same time as men are becoming happier. To extract and quote:

“Before the 1970s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives…. ‘Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy.; … pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. ‘Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.’ Buckingham and other experts dispute the idea that variance in happiness is caused by carrying a bigger burden of work at home, the ‘second shift’… When women stepped into male –dominated realms, they put more demands – and stress – on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties – and grad school, work, office deadlines, and meshing a two-career marriage…. Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men. They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants… Buckingham says that greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances, and no longer have the pressure of having women totally dependent on them.”

In short, to layer this on my own thoughts, guys are now relieved of their societal burdens and responsibilities, yet have nothing to prove against stereotype (except perhaps, that they are “sensitive”). And so they have fun.

While women – relishing the choice of fulfilling their multi-faceted potential, weighed down by their indebtedness to the women before them, driven by their sense of responsibility and feeling the expectation that they must give back to the best of their ability – are heavy, layered, stressed, and torn. They feel rooted by the idea of their purpose in life based on all they can – must – contribute, but overwhelmed by it as it is added to what society has, for generations, expected of them. And, on top of it all, meeting these interesting, dynamic, intelligent guys, who are so close to perfect, except that part of their levity comes from having no sense of responsibility to anyone other than themselves, to what they primally want – a cell phone, a PlayStation, being able to live without concern for what they do or don’t provide to those around them. And so, if these guys are inherently good people, they are caring and helpful and wonderful… but only to the degree that they are not put-out, made uncomfortable, or expected to have any responsibility to be more than they want to be outside of their own needs. Those guys who could so easily help to relieve some of this burden of responsibility that women feel to themselves, the world, their mothers. Yet who have no incentive, no motivation, either internally or externally to suffer under that unnecessary weight.

Of course, a sweeping generalization, and only the beginning of an observation, but…