Male and female are different? I think so, and I believe so. The Bible says so, but there is more evidence we can easily encounter in God’s creation. Listen to the following story: “When apes are given dolls to play with, one of two things will happen. If a young male gets a hold of it, he may tear it apart – mainly out of curiosity to see what’s inside, but sometimes due to competition. When two young males both pull at a doll, each may end up with part of it. In the hands of males, toys rarely enjoy a long life. If a female gets hold of a doll, on the other hand, she will soon adopt it and treat it gently. She will take care of it” (Different, 24). The primate literature is full of apes in human care – almost all females – who nurture dolls they have been given. They drag them around, carry them on their backs, and hold their mouth against a nipple as if they were nursing; or like Koko the sign-language gorilla, they kiss their dolls goodnight one by one, after which they re-enact a round of all of them kissing each other (Marilyn Matevia et al., 2002, quoted in Different, 20). These are not learnt traits. 

When children’s toys are given to monkeys, the wheeled vehicles ended up mostly in the hands of young males and the dolls in those of young females. The difference was driven by a lack of male interest in dolls. Male monkeys went for the wheeled toys. They were more single-minded than the females, who liked all the toys, including the cars. Due to the male’s indifference to plush toys, most of those ended up in female hands. Children show a similar pattern, with boys having more pronounced toy preferences. A common explanation is that boys are uneasy about appearing feminine, whereas girls worry less about appearing masculine. The reality may be more straightforward: dolls may just not appeal to most boys and male primates. 

Then, how about boys and girls? I mean human children. It is said that people socialize boys and girls through toy choices. By pushing our own prejudices onto them, we mould their gender roles. The idea is that children are blank slates filled in by their environment. While it’s true that many aspects of gender are culturally defined, not all of them are. 

Sweden, a nation that officially promotes gender equality, once pressured a toy company to change its Christmas catalogue so that it featured boys with a Barbie Dream House and girls with guns and action figures (Christina Hof Sommers, 2012). But when the Swedish psychologist Anders Nelson asked three- and five-year-old children to show him their toy collections, things turned out differently. Almost every child had his or her own room with a staggering average of 532 toys. After going through 152 rooms and classifying thousands of toys, Nelson concluded that the collections reflected exactly the same stereotypes as in other countries. The boys had more tools, vehicles, and games, and the girls had more household items, caregiving devices, and outfits. Their preferences had proved immune to the equality ethos of Swedish society. Studies in other countries confirm that the attitudes of parents have little or no impact on children’s toy preferences (Patricia Turner and Judith Gervai, 1995; Anders Nelson, 2005; quoted in Different, p. 24). In the most egalitarian country in the world, Sweden, boys are not different from boys we know of, and girls are still the same girls we know of. They are not constructed by any external factors. When they are left alone to be most natural, boys and girls are different.

Judith Harris, an American maverick psychologist, saw parental influence as a mere feel-good illusion. In her 1988 book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, she surmised, “Yes, parents buy trucks for their sons and dolls for their daughters, but maybe they have a good reason: maybe that’s what the kids want” (Judith Harris, 1998, 219). 

Fras de Waal says (Different, p. 27), “Even the 1949 book Male and Female by the most celebrated anthropologist of the previous century, Margaret Mead, says remarkably little about child play. Mead interviewed twenty-five adolescent girls—no boys—from various Pacific Island cultures. Toys didn’t figure into her account. For Mead, the source of socialization was not children’s play but the way adults talk about men, women, and their interactions in real life. Mead’s work is ground zero for gender socialization theory because she demonstrated how variable sex roles can be. It has inspired claims that these roles are mostly or entirely cultural. After rereading Male and Female, however, I am no longer convinced that this was Mead’s main message. She discusses several worldwide truths about being male or female. For example, she claims that girls are always kept closer to home and permanently clothed, whereas boys of the same age may go about naked and are given freedom to roam. A boy also learns that he’ll have a long way to go before he will ever be ‘the man who can win and keep a woman in a world filled with other men.’ Mead stresses the universality of male competition, stating that ‘in every known human society, the male’s need for achievement can be recognized.’ Men, to feel fulfilled and successful, need to excel at something—to be better at it than other men and better than women (Margaret Mead, 2001, orig. 1949, pp. 97, 145-9). Every civilization needs to offer men opportunities to realize their potential. A recent survey of seventy different countries confirmed this difference. Universally, men put more value on independence, self-enhancement, and status, whereas women emphasize the well-being and security of their inner circle as well as people in general (Shalom Schwartz and Tammy Rubel, 2005). To feel accomplished, women always have their biological potential to give birth. It’s the one thing they can do that men can’t. A mother’s job is so vital to society and so fulfilling that Mead thought that men must resent their inability to match it. She coined the phrase ‘womb envy’ ….. Later in life, Mead regretted her one-sided emphasis on culture. In the preface to the 1962 edition of her book, she noted, ‘I would, if I were writing it today, lay more emphasis on man’s specific biological inheritance from earlier human forms’” (Margaret Mead, 2001, orig. 1949, p. xxxi).

Frans de Wall (p. 29) also says about colour choices as following: “Testing eighteen-month-old infants on a variety of pictures, boys looked more at cars and girls more at dolls, but the color of the pictures had no effect. The children showed no preference for pink or blue. Young children are not yet under the spell of the color coding that’s all around us. The distinction between blue for boys and pink for girls was made up by the clothing and toy industries. At one time these colors were even reversed. Initially, all infants wore white, which was easier to clean and bleach. A 1918 article in Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department introduced the first pastel colors, saying, ‘The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’ It is only relatively recently that the West settled on the reversed color binary. If these colors now appeal to children—with girls refusing blue and boys refusing pink and parents worrying about ‘perverting’ their children by dressing them in the ‘wrong’ color—this is purely a cultural choice (Vasanti Jadva et al., 2010; Jeanne Maglaty, 2011).

God created male and female, and He created them (Genesis 1:27). They are different.
I’ll continue….

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