GENDER: Ampersand posts a fierce and heartfelt rebuttal of my blog comments (and possibly my JWR column?) on gender roles.

He argues that supporting gender roles at all means fostering the kind of brutal enforcement of rigid gender roles that made his youth awful: “The belief that there is a correct ‘gender role’ which must be taught inevitably leads to child abuse, in my opinion.” I can definitely sympathize; it should be obvious that I think what happened to him was evil. In fact, I think in a lot of ways we’re trying to address some of the same problems, including/especially male bullying and violence. So let me make my position a little clearer:

1) I’m not advocating for rigid gender roles. Tried to make this point in my JWR piece:

“Rosalind, Antony, Lear, Beatrice, Iago, Emilia, Leontes–could any of them exist in a genderless world? I think not; and I think even the apostles of gender neutrality would miss that menagerie when they were gone.

“And also: Could any of them exist in a world where women were ‘angels in the house’ and men were Strong Silent Types? Again, no; I can only hope that the apostles of gender rigidity would miss them.”

Don’t know if I succeeded. But anyway, this is not about whether you like sports or shopping. (I hate both.) I think there’s a very wide array of possible gendered roles–in some ways analogous to the wildly varied lives of the saints.

2) I doubt that rigid gender roles (boys are good at sports, girls think math is hard) can be promoted without harm to children’s well-being and self-image.

However, I’m pretty well convinced that flexible gender roles can be promoted in ways that respect kids; I’ve seen it. It happens. A lot.

3) If you take away the gendered incentives to act rightly–gendered roles, gendered heroisms–you don’t get a genderless world. You get bad gender roles. If a man can’t be a masculine hero, he is a lot more likely to choose to be a masculine bully or a masculine womanizer rather than a gender-neutral feminist.

In the JWR piece (sorry for linking this so insistently but I do think it addresses a lot of Amp’s concerns) I suggest some reasons this happens. These reasons are deep-rooted enough in the human heart that I don’t think there is really any chance of just saying, “Well, but we shouldn’t want gender. Let’s make it so people don’t want gender anymore.” Here, I’ll quote the piece:

“Children want gender because they want a role in the world, a place in the story unfolding around them, a role to live up to and by which they can judge their actions. Gender fits us into the cycle of family and fruitfulness; it connects us to our parents, who have taken on the most obviously gendered roles of all when they became mother and father; and it provides children with a connection to their future maturity, and thus to sex. Children want a sexual identity even when they do not plan on kids or a spouse, because they want an adult identity.”

OK. Will post on some of Amp’s other points in a bit.