Women aren't always in need of chivalrous attention.
Like many parents of my class and background, I embarked on my childrearing adventure with an earnest commitment to gender neutrality. My children would not learn of “girl toys” and “boy toys”. My children would never have cause to think anything off limits to them because of their sex. My children would be — and how this was supposed to happen in defiance of the entire rest of the society and all my own baggage I cannot imagine, and yet I really did believe it would happen — beacons of individuality in a sexist world.
My children were, by the time they started school, both very much not with the plan. My daughter lived in a sequinned flurry of princess dresses and “clip-clop” shoes. My son’s favourite outfit was any miniature replica football kit. All things considered, it was a dispiriting experience, and many parents have simply declared themselves defeated upon experiencing the same wreck of their ideals against the stubborn will of a small child. If this is what their child wants, then it must be because there is a deep-down elemental truth to gender stereotypes that adult meddling cannot deny.
But children are not the finished article, something underlined by research just published in the journal Sex Roles by Matthew D. Hammond and Andrei Cimpian. According to the study (which surveyed children from New York and Illinois), both boys and girls are more sexist at five than they are at 11. What can seem like the instinctive expression of hard-wired tendencies — dolls and pink versus toy cars and blue, and each sphere vigorous in its exclusion of the other — is just a phase. Psychologist Cordelia Fine calls children at this stage “gender detectives”, in tribute to their dogged commitment to learning and applying every possible law of being a girl or a boy.
Which is to say, there’s probably something intrinsic going on here, but it’s about the process rather than the output. Girls aren’t attracted to pink because, say, their eyes are specially adapted to spotting berries (one of the more recherche theories of colour preference to have been advanced), but because they’ve figured out that they’re a girl and girls are meant to like pink. Boys don’t turn away from Barbie because she’s an affront to the “systematising” tendencies that Simon Baron-Cohen claimed characterise the male brain (the female brain is allegedly blessed with a complementary talent for “empathising”), but because they’ve learned that she’s not a toy for boys.
Over time, the zeal of this early rule acquisition relents, and all this is a lesson to parents – whatever their personal position on gender stereotyping – not to put too much stock in the preferences of small children. If you’re anxious for your daughter’s Snow White phase to end, all you need to do is white-knuckle your way through several hundred plays of “Some Day My Prince Will Come” while she gets over it. The same goes, incidentally, for parents who think their young child’s passionate attachment to opposite-sex-typical things means their child really is the opposite sex. As is often the case in childrearing, the best first response is to chill the heck out.
However, the Sex Roles researchers found that not all sexism retreats in the same way in all children. Sexism come in two flavours: hostile and benevolent. Hostile sexism is the kind of thing that can comfortably be recognised as misogyny. Considering women to be intellectually inferior, over-emotional or physically feeble all come under the heading of hostile sexism. Benevolent sexism covers those tropes that are harder to dispute, because superficially flattering — like the belief that women are naturally kind and sweet-natured, and so in need of men’s chivalrous attentions.
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