Stephanie Coontz
That’s a really tough question. But as women and as people who are critics of hierarchical gender and class arrangements, we have to find ways to acknowledge the messages men have received about how to be men and the self-sacrificing or just plain helpful things they often do trying to live up to those messages, and at the same time explain that they don’t have to do all the painful stuff to themselves or to others that they’ve been told is part of masculinity.
Going back to the polls on gender you cited, we have to be more conscious of the fact that in most societies, gender has traditionally been the first thing people see about any individual in any setting. Almost all of us are flooded from birth with expectations about how we should behave toward others and how they will behave toward us based on the gender we most closely resemble. In experiments, when people are shown a video of a baby and asked to describe its behavior, they often can’t or won’t describe it unless told the sex. Told it’s a boy, they describe tears as anger; told it’s a girl, they describe the same crying baby as scared.
By ten months old, infants associate stereotypically female faces with gender-typed objects. Seventy percent of toddlers are employing gender labels before they’re two years old. One of the first things toddlers learn is how you tell a woman from a man, which one they’re going to be, and what tools and clothes their sex is supposed to use. Parenting hardly matters here: My son, who has a feminist for a mom and who had a female doctor, once insisted to me that women couldn’t be doctors. It’s so powerful. The more they learn about what their gender is supposedly good at or bad at or likes or dislikes, the more they tend to adjust their behavior to accord with it — or in other cases, to defy or reject it because they can’t or won’t follow those gender instructions.
The primacy of gender in identifying a person exists across cultures, with only minor exceptions: The Yoruba in West Africa, for example, prioritize age over gender to the extent that they will often say “I took my eldest to the store” instead of “my son” or “my daughter.” But in most societies we know of, gender has been the easiest, earliest, and most universal way to classify people.
All of which is to say that we’re approaching it wrongly if we don’t start from understanding how salient gender is and how threatening it is to feel unable to fulfill expectations you’ve had of yourself and others since you were eight or nine months old. We’ve got to start by understanding the fear and the disorientation people feel.
On these and many other issues, the right wing understands far better than most liberals and left-wingers that there’s always a good section of the population that is up for grabs, so to speak. There’s a substantial middle group between the minority of Americans who support equal rights for all people and the minority who unequivocally oppose them. Challenges and worries in people’s work and family lives or communities can create ambivalence or fear, insecurities that can be triggered and politically captured. We have to provide experiences and arguments that help people work through their ambivalence and not prematurely accuse them of being racist or sexist or fascist, which only makes them more likely to become that. As Loretta Ross, the former head of the National Anti-Violence Network, put it, “We’ve got three different kinds of allies: potential, problematic, and proven. We need to unite all of them. We’ve got different strategies for potential ones, problematic ones, and proven ones, but if we dismiss people because they’re problematic or unproven, then we weaken our ability to make change.”
The stereotypical gender roles of the modern period, which reached their height in the 1950s, continue to have a profound pull. There are reasons for that. Rather than condemn people’s nostalgia, it’s our job to explain that it reflects a legitimate, reality-based sense of loss, but it’s based upon a misunderstanding of what caused the stability of 1950s families: first, men’s legal authority over women and women’s inability to make other choices, which most people no longer agree with, and second, an economy in which one person could support a family on one wage, which is long gone.
A lot has changed since then, and we have not always explained those changes and the solutions we want in ways that are the wisest or the most sensitive to people’s doubts. This leaves an opening for the Right, and it is taking full advantage. It has constructed a conscious, very cynical alliance between the free-market proponents who want to remove all the postwar restrictions on Wall Street and the rich, and the social conservatives who want to reimpose all the postwar restrictions on gender and sexuality.
Still, while I don’t want to minimize the real dangers in the resurgence of older gender prejudices and privileges, it’s important to recognize that public opinion hasn’t been dragged back to what it was in the 1990s, much less the 1950s. There is an alarming shift, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mostly occurring among people who were already conservative, accelerated by the radicalization of conservatism in general. There’s probably a fairly steady base of about 20 percent of people who are opposed to racial, gender, and sexual equality, 20 percent of people who are absolutely for equality in all its forms, and a huge group that toggles in between. The first group is hardening its attitudes and becoming more militant. We have to redouble our effort to reach out to the in-between group on the issues where we agree and patiently explain the issues we don’t agree on but should keep discussing.
Great Job Stephanie Coontz & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
