Sex Roles
Biology v. Culture
from Chapter 3 of
Sex and Politics
Sex Differences v. Dogma
by
Walter R. Dolen
Copyright (c) 1976-2008, 2012 by Walter R. Dolen.
All rights reserved, except as follows:
Published by the BeComingOne Press
[Order a copy, new in 2012]
Contents
Sex Roles1
Margaret Mead and Cultural Conditioning 5
Mead's Superficial Studies 10
Mead's Superficial Foreign Language Knowledge 11
Other Points Against Mead's Work 13
Experimental Societies Versus The Claims of Radical feminists 21
Kibbutz 24
Sex Role Neutrality-at-Birth Theory 31
Chapter 7 & 8 of Money's Book 38
Biology Limits and Causes Behavior 56
What the Socialization Theory Cannot Explain 64
Conclusions on Sex Role Development 65
References for Chapter 3 67
Sex Role Development
All radical religious and political movements lack balance
and appear blind as to what is practical, possible and/or
reasonable. The radical women's lib movement that began in the late
1960s was/is trapped in this mindset. We are not talking about
feminism here; we are speaking about the radical women's lib
movement. The group has in the last three decades propagated against
traditional sex roles, even denying the legitimacy of sex roles. As
far back as 1935 Margaret Mead wrote about the need for freer sex
roles.[1] Mead believed that women should be able to take part in
more activities usually associated with men. Others before her
called for more freedom from sex role stereotypes.[2] Sex role
stereotypes have to do with our expectations about the behavior of
males or females: men work outside the home, do the heavy work,
fight the wars, dominate most if not all spatial ability jobs
(mathematicians, Engineers, Architects), and control the most
powerful institutions; women bear and nurse the babies, care for the
young, work in or near the home, do the family cooking, etc., and
when they work outside the home they work in more occupations that
deal with children and interrelationships between people. Generally
in all cultures, men are expected to work mostly outside the home
and help provide for their family, while women are expected to stay
near or at home and care for the children, and to work in and around
the house, cooking, etc.
But in the last several decades sex roles have been
"successfully" challenged[3]: Not only are more women working
outside the home, but more women are working who have children.
"Thanks" to the (1) radical women's lib movement, (2) the need for
corporation to have cheaper labor and (3) domestic helping devices
such as dish and clothes washers, there has been some change
in sex roles. Not only do women bare and take care of the children,
they also work outside the house. The movement has "liberated"
women. So "successful" was the movement that in just a few decades
most women were working outside the home as well as in the home. Of
course, most women have always worked near and around their homes
close to the children. Today in modern countries most women with
children work away from their homes. According to the Department of
Labor's "Women in the Labor Force: A Databook," Table 6: In 2010 66%
of all women in the USA with children under 18 were
working outside the home; 73% of women with children 6 to 17 years
of age; 58% were working with children under 6 years old and 55%
with children under 3 years old. This makes it much more difficult
to raise children. This is not a success story because
women and children have paid an unfair price in these changes. Let's examine the
evidence.
Sex Role Foolishness
At the beginning of radical women's lib there were articles like, "Do
Children Need Sex Roles?,"[4] "Are You Harming Your Son Without Knowing it?,"[5]
which dictated to us about the "right" of junior to play with dolls, and the
"right" of the little Miss (Ms) to play baseball along with the boys. In the
beginning, Anne Eliasberg, then a college teacher and wife of a CBS executive,
said the following:
(1) "Indeed, this whole revolution, or evolution, of sex roles is in large part a
protest against blocking out at any early age one-half of a boy's (or girl's) potential as
a human being. The mothers and fathers who are now buying dolls for their small boys, and
giving a free choice of toys to their offspring of both sexes, want to help their boys to
develop those capacities for feeling and affection that have somehow been considered
'girlish' and therefore weak."
(2) "Women learn to be flexible because their work is always being
interrupted....Boys don't learn to do several things at a time because there's this notion
that men mustn't be disturbed at their work."
(3) "Another thing some boys reared in the traditional ways apparently fail to
learn is how to modify that 'all boy' energy and vigor...."[6]
In all three of these quotes Eliasberg is advocating and projecting naivete. In the
first (1) quote, she is advocating the idea that maybe some males have individual maternal
talents, and therefore we shouldn't "force" our sons into masculine roles
because maybe he really would be better in a maternal role. We should give our sons a
"free" choice ("Take this doll kid and be liberated!"). And vice versa
for girls.
The second quote (2) by Ann Eliasberg also conveys ignorance of biology. Men find it
more difficult to be interrupted because of the androgenic action which enhances
persistence and concentration on stimuli,[7] not because they were conditioned to act that
way. You can teach your son to be a little more considerate of being disturbed, but his
internal pressures make it difficult for him to be as flexible as females even when
brought up in the same environment.
And the third quote (3) by Ann Eliasberg suggests she doesn't know about
the biological influences of androgens. Ann Eliasberg thinks the androgenic influenced
effect ("all boy" energy) is socially conditioned. As we show in chapter 4,
this "all boy" energy is caused by androgenic activity. Sadly, today
(2000s) the boys androgenic-influenced behavior is being suppressed through
medication in almost all our schools through programs designed: (1) to make
money for the pharmaceutical companies, (2) to appeal to female teachers who
have trouble coping with the boys energy, and (3) to mother's interested in
helping their sons do better in school by suppressing their natural energy.
Instead of running these boys outside at recess, they are drugging them.
Margaret Mead and Cultural Conditioning
According to the well known anthropologist, Margaret Mead:
"All known human societies recognize the anatomic and functional differences
between males and females in intricate and complex ways; through insistence on small
nuances of behavior in posture, stance, gait, through language, ornamentation and dress,
division of labor, legal social status, religious role, etc."[8]
But Mead goes on to indicate that in other cultures besides ours the sex roles are more
flexible. She quotes evidence from primitive cultures -- that is cultures that are
not large in numbers or great in ideas or great in wealth. Mead believed, like other
radicals and the pop-educated, that sex roles and behavior are caused primarily by
cultural conditioning or socialization.
In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead described the supposed proof that sex
roles are culturally derived. Others such as Nancy Chodorow mention and relate Mead's
studies like this:
"Cross-cultural research suggests that there are no absolute personality
differences between men and women, that many of the characteristics we normally classify
as masculine or feminine tend to differentiate both the males and females in one
culture from those in another, and in still other cultures to be the reverse of our
expectations.
Margaret Mead's studies describe societies in which both men and women are gentle and
nonaggressive (the Arapesh); in which women dislike childbearing and children and both
sexes are angry and aggressive (the Mundugumor); in which women are unadorned, brisk and
efficient, whether in childrearing, fishing, or marketing, while men are decorated and
vain, interested in art, theater, and petty gossip (the Tchambuli)...."[9]
Nancy Chodorow is speaking about personality, or temperament differences in certain
few selective societies, for she realizes that in most cultures male and female
behavior does conform to our traditional expectations:
"This is not to claim that within most cultures, male and female differences do
not generally conform to our traditional expectations. George Murdock's and Roy
D'Andrade's data on the division of labor by sex indicate that most work is divided
regularly between men and women, along conventional lines. Men's work, for instance, is
strenuous, cooperative, and...may require long periods of travel'; women's work is mainly
associated with food gathering and preparation, crafts, clothing manufacture, child care,
and so forth."[10]
Therefore what Nancy Chodorow is saying, in her own words, is that: "Cross-Culture
research suggests that there are no absolute personality
differences...."[11]
Some like Chodorow say that the studies like Margaret Mead's suggest that many
of the differences in sex behavior are culturally determined, while at other times they
claim Mead's work prove that gender behavior is mainly determined by culture
conditioning. They forget often that Mead's work, even if it were true, can only suggest
that gender behavior differences are determined by culture conditioning, and thus they act
like it is true, or a proven fact. In Chodorow's own words; "This essay refutes the
claim for universal and necessary differentiation, and provides an explanation based on a
comparison of cultures and socialization practices to account for such differences where
and when they occur."[12] She projects her bias here.
Notice how Mead puts it in her book, Sex and Temperament. After describing three
cultures (Arapesh, Mundergumor, and Tchambuli) where sex behavior is claimed to be of a
different order than traditionally expected, Mead concludes:
These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those
temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine -- such as
passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children -- can so easily be set
up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of
women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such
aspects of behavior as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we
consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes,
in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions. The material suggest
that we may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called
masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and
the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.... We
are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding
accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions. The differences between
individuals who are members of different cultures, like the differences between
individuals within a culture, are almost entirely to be laid to differences in
conditioning, especially during early childhood, and the form of this conditioning is
culturally determined. Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this
order....[13] (my emphasis)
Margaret Mead first says that three different cultures suggest the malleability
of sex roles, then she concludes that culture conditioning determines sex behavior
differences "almost entirely, "we are forced to conclude that human nature is
almost unbelievably malleable." She believes sex roles are forced on the
sexes:
"In the division of labour, in dress, in manners, in social and religious
functioning -- sometimes in only a few of these respects, sometimes in all -- men and
women are socially differentiated, and each sex, and a sex, forced to conform to the role
assigned to it."[14]
Moreover in Mead's thinking, as in many radical feminists' thinking, if society
recognized individual differences instead of conditioned sex differences:
"It might abandon its various attempts to make boys fight and to make girls remain
passive, or to make all children fight, and instead shape our educational institutions to
develope to the full the boy who shows a capacity for maternal behavior, the girl who
shows an opposite capacity that is stimulated by fighting against obstacles. No skill, no
special aptitude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go because
the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other."[15]
Exceptions Rule. Mead as well as others base their 'thinking' on certain
cultural studies which seem to them to manifest the extreme malleability of sex behavior.
Of course these certain cultural studies are exceptions to the universal gender
behavior differences, but this doesn't stop radical feminists. For them the exceptions
rule. To them, we must change all societies to fit their idea of equality. And their way
to do this is through social conditioning. Thus, radical feminists call any thought
"sexist" if it manifests any idea of difference between the sexes. If there are
differences, they are culturally derived. Women Liberators only concede the very obvious
-- the genitals and breasts, and downgrade the other differences.
Representative Don Edwards before the Committee on the Judiciary House of
Representatives in 1971 concerning the Equal Rights Amendment asked:
"I refer you back to Margaret Mead who more than 50 years ago, who in her studies
of the New Guinea nation and tribes, came to the conclusion that sex roles result from
social learning rather than biologically inherited tendencies.
In other words she is saying that it is cultural, not biological. I am sure you will
recall that among the Mundugumor Tribe of New Guinea both the sexes acted about the same;
they were hostile, aggressive and violent, qualities that we generally associated with men
in this country.
In the Tchambuli Tribe, the women were practical, domineering and aggressive; the men
sensitive, artistic, emotional, and dependent.
In other words, the roles were theoretically reversed.
In the Arapesh, the men had the general temperament which some people think is
feminine.
Do you believe that men and women, except for the one or two obvious differences, the
differences of sex and the fact that women do have babies, do you think that men and women
are really about the same?
Witness Number Two Answers Edwards: I think it is the consensus that men are
sperm donators, women are baby incubators, and all the rest of it is the result of the
socialization process." (p. 493, Equal Rights for Men and Women
1971, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washing: 1971; Witness number two was from the
George Washington University Women's Liberation)
Mead's Superficial Studies
Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli. Let's take a deeper look at Mead and
her writings on the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli people. Mead published her
work, Sex and Temperament, in 1935. In 1936 Lewis M. Terman and Catharine Cos Miles
published Sex and Personality: Studies in Masculinity and Femininity.[16] In this work
Terman and Miles had some criticism of Mead which we will pass on here:
"In a recent treatise Mead has presented a mass of descriptive evidence favoring
the extreme environmental hypothesis for the causes of sex difference in personality....
That Mead's contribution offers impressive evidence of the modifiability of human
temperament will be readily conceded, but we are by no means convinced that the case for
nurture is as strong as a casual perusal of her book would suggest....It is not to be
supposed that the field anthropologist, any more than the psychologist, is immune to error
in such estimates [of the degree of masculinity or femininity]; indeed, because the groups
under observation by him belong to an alien culture, and because his command of the tribal
language is almost invariably limited, the anthropologist who attempts to rate the
masculinity or femininity of behavior in a primitive tribal group labors under tremendous
disadvantages."(p. 46l)
Mead, herself, adds to this thought train of Terman and Miles in one of her writings:
"explicitly, as a matter of training we [anthropologists] send our students out to
remote and exotic peoples, where they will be exposed to ways of behavior quite different
from our own, so different in fact that no effort of the mind will work that simply
redefines the new ways in terms of the known old ways. Living among a people all of whose
ways are alien, anthropologists make many adjustments. We learn to speak, or at least to
hear and think, in quite different languages, in which there may be many genders or none,
in which words may be put together in ways that defy all our attempts to fit them into our
familiar grammatical categories...."[17]
Anthropologists like Mead go to areas of the world with customs and languages that are
unfamiliar to them. It is difficult for us to observe and correctly judge our own society
even our own family, neighbors, and friends let alone alien societies with radically
different languages.
Mead's Superficial Foreign Language Knowledge
Mead spent only seven months with the Mountain Arapesh, three and one-half months with
the Mundugumor people, and only several months with the Tchambuli people.[18] Yet in these
few months she supposedly learned their languages and enough of their customs to make
judgments on these alien peoples. But did she?
Pidgin English. Margaret Mead claims that primitive cultures are
simplistic enough to learn much about them in short periods of time vis a vis such
complex societies as America where it is much more difficult.[19] But this may be so to
Mead merely because she knew the foreign languages only superficially. Mead has said:
"In all cases the language was learned, a base was established in a native village,
and one village was intensively followed and studied."[20] But how were the languages
learned?: "In Manus we had to analyze the language, using pidgin English as the
interpreting language, and this was true also of Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli
...."[21] (emphasis mine) Thus, she used an interpreting language, Pidgin English
"from a Manus-speaking schoolboy with an understanding, although hardly any speaking
knowledge, of English...."[22] In the case of the Tchambuli people she admits,
"They speak a difficult Papuan language...."[23] This is preposterous. Only the
pop-educated can exalt a study based on pidgin English.
Mead's preposterous Study. Mead, we are supposed to believe,
spends a few months in alien cultures, studies one tribe in each culture, and in
this period learns their difficult languages (made even more difficult by their many times
unknown histories), ascertains their customs, and through her training unbiasedly
perceives their true gender behavior. Then because of Mead's dubious study of these
primitive cultures with small populations (about 85 people of the Mountain Arapesh, about
500 people of the Tchambuli, and about l000 people of the Mundugumor)[24]; and because of
other such studies by Mead and other anthropologists, we must acknowledge the possibility
of the malleability of sex roles and therefore agree and accept the mass conditioning of
the sexes into "true equality" as defined by the radical feminists. This kind of
reasoning is twisted. It should be called what it is: a baised, mystical, almost cultic
exercise in myth making. And the detrimental actions by our government, schools, and
institutions that force this twisted-cultic reasoning on us is radical feminism
Other Points Against Mead's Work
Biased Work
(1) Mead's outlook before she studied these tribes was biased. Terman and Miles
wrote in a footnote about her bias back in 1936, in their book, Sex and Personality:
"In the specific case at hand, it is no reflection upon Dr. Mead to call attention
to the fact, verifiable by examination of her earlier writings, that she entered upon her
study of sex and temperament with definite leanings toward the environment hypotheses in
the interpretations of human behavior patterns. If the composite verbal pictures of her
three New Guinea tribes had been sketched by a equally competent observer of different
bias, there is no way of knowing how they would have differed from the dramatic contrasts
presented; we can only be certain that they would have differed."(p.462)
Parenthetically, as to whether sexual behavior was culturally or biologically
determined, Terman and Miles were unsure. (pp. 451, 460) Margaret Mead went to school in
an age during which such books as Patterns of Culture[25], by Ruth Benedict, were
published. In the first chapter of this 1934 book we read:
"The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the
patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his
birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour." (p. 18)
Mead's and Benedict's Homosexuality. Probably the main reason for Mead's
bias was that she heavily leaned towards homosexuality, thus she was trying to propagate
her own bias belief to make her peculiar behavior more acceptable. "Margaret Mead,
who died in 1978, and Ruth Benedict, who died in 1948, were bisexuals. They were lovers,
but each had been married--Mead to at least three husbands, Benedict to one. Rumors of the
Mead-Benedict affair were hushed around Columbia University circles in the 1930's, and it
was not well known in other academic centers. An account of the affair appears in a
Margaret Mead biography written by her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. It's titled 'With
a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson."' (Parade,
January 27, 1985, p. 4) Mead's daughter's book was published in 1984 by William Morrow
& Co.
Was Mead rationalizing her homosexuality when she wrote:
"Where 'logic' is regarded as male, and 'intuition' as female, little girls with a
capacity for logical thought may be pushed toward [sex role] inversion as a preference,
for a socially perceived difference between expectations for men and women, or as an
identification with a father whose mind corresponds to the cultural stereotype." (Mead, p. 1455, in 111)
When I began researching sex differences in the early 1970's I had no idea Mead was
sexually ambivalent; now we can all examine Mead's work better with this knowledge of her
bias.
Poorly Documented and Vague
(2) A second point against Mead's work is that careful analysis of Mead's
material is most difficult. Notice what the authors, Talcoot Parsons and Robert F. Bales,
of Family, Socialization and Interaction Process say about this:
"She [Mead] often states what does not appear among the "X" or
"Y" -- in comparison usually to the American family -- than what does appear.
The system reference continually shifts, which is confusing from the present point of
view, if not from her own. And if she had realized what she was saying in certain cases,
she certainly would have looked twice. Such, for instance, is the case for the
Arapesh."[26]
Parsons and Bales go on to show some weaknesses in Mead's assertions. It should be
mentioned that these authors state on the same pages that they, "must accept
the position that the predominant pattern of [sex] differentiation is not constitutionally
inherent...."
Other authors like John Nash in his text book, Developmental Psychology: A
Psychobiological Approach(p. 206ff), and Ralph Piddington in his book, An
Introduction to Social Anthropology (Vol. 2, p. 632ff) also write about Mead's
inferior study. From Piddington's book we quote:
In presenting her material, Dr. Mead constantly asks us to accept at their face value
her own formulations, in a different language, of the attitude of individual natives and,
more questionable still, of the culture as a whole. To describe, for example, the
Mundugumor as "a society that counts loyalty to be a stupid disregard of the real
facts about the essential enmity which exists between all males" implies a degree of
abstract formulation not usually found in primitive society, and the manner in which such
concepts are used without any attempt to correlate, them with real human behavior suggests
that the ethnographer merely hypostatized her own impressions of native life. Such
impressions may be wholly or partially correct or may be entirely misleading. The absence
of detailed and comprehensive documentation makes it impossible to decide, and the
position was well summarized by Nadel: "One cannot help feeling dubious and a little
helpless in face of this ambitious theory of sex, based as it is on so meager a material,
and so simplifying and elusive an interpretation. The complete lack of exact definitions
and tangible criteria in Dr. Mead's book turns this most intricate problem of human
psychology into a subject of novelistic exercise rather than of scientific
examination."
In spite, however, of the lack of documentation, we should be more inclined to accept
Dr. Mead's impressions if there were indications that the facts had been comprehensively
observed and objectively considered. Unfortunately, so far as empirical material is cited
at all, it is always from a specific point of view, and it is impossible to escape the
conclusion that facts which might lead to an entirely different type of interpretation
have been overlooked, while we find the same facts interpreted in contradictory ways in
different contexts, in order to fit them into the pattern. (pp. 633-634)
Based on my own study of Mead's work and on other authors' opinions noted above, it
would be very careless of anyone to base any theory on her dubious material. Mead's work
is nothing but a pop-novel, a fictional work projecting to us her naivete or more probable
her hidden adgenda of making homosexuality more acceptable. The inclusion of her
superficial works in our colleges is an indication of our colleges' pop-scholarship.
Broken Cultures
(3) A third point against Mead's work is that the three societies studied by
Mead in Sex and Temperament were broken cultures, according to her own report:
(a) The Tchambuli people when studied had seven to eight years previously just
been brought back to their ancestral land by the government because they had fled their
land in fear of the warlike Iatmuls. The Tchambuli people were in the process of trying to
rebuild their broken culture when Mead was studying them.[27] Such a broken primitive
culture, that has been transplanted or restricted from its native land, is filled with
problems, as indicated by the Ik tribe's experience.[28] Such problems do affect the
broken culture's behavior.
(b) The Mundugumor people when studied, "presented the picture of a broken
culture. Ceremonials were infrequent; a large number of men were away at work [this
explains why the women had to fish, climb coconut trees, and their seemly aggressive
behavior -- their men were away], only a few of the first group of recruits to go away had
come home."[29]
(c) The Mountain Arapesh when studied had a big problem obtaining food,
"Conditions of life are hard, food is scarce, the protein intake is very inadequate,
and members of the tribe who live under primitive conditions exist well below their
potential energy output...."[30] This helps to explain why the men of this culture
seemed more co-operative, nonaggressive, had little sex drive, and so forth. It is well
known that men pound per pound must have more protein, and more energy foods because they
burn more energy pound per pound.[31] And it is also known that semi-starvation leads to
loss of sex interest.[32] Another possible reason for the male Arapesh's lack of
passionate desire for their mates,[33] is that their wives are betrothed to them at the
age of five at which time she moves into his household as one of the family.[34] As recent
research in kibbutz communities indicate, when unrelated boys and girls grow up in the
same dwelling place amorous relationships are rare in later life, even though such
behavior was not looked down upon in the kibbutz communities.[35] The intimacy of rearing
the child bride in the same household as her future husband, thus, has a diminishing
effect on the husband's desire for her. Furthermore, in a culture setting where males
don't receive enough protein, they are less muscular, and thus strength differences
disappear. Hence, the males would be less physically aggressive in such a situation.
Other works also indicate that many of the supposed female dominated societies are
broken societies or superficially examined societies. From John Nash in Developmental
Psychology:
The existence of matriarchal societies has also been taken as evidence for the cultural
nature of sex differences, especially in matters of dominance and leadership. The fact is
that matriarchal societies are both unusual (and hence atypical) and also involve an
apparent rather than a real dominance by women (Piddington, 1950). The Iroquois is often
cited as an example of matriarchal society.... Because many men died young and active in
battle, there was reduced survival of wise old men to run the affairs of the tribe at
home, and of necessity a great deal of authority was delegated to women. However, the
important business of this society was making war, and this remained firmly in the hands
of the men (Piddington, 1950). Similar instances can be seen today in various parts of
Europe, as in Scottish fishing communities. Here also there is what could be described as
a matriarchy and for somewhat the same reason. Each year the men spend several months away
from home as they follow the shoals of herring around the coast, and the women remain at
home in charge of affairs there. They administer the finances, and frequently order the
gear and supplies that are needed for the boats. One might interpret this as a feminine
control, but again the central activity of the community is held by the men, who maintain
the boats and take them to sea.(p. 206-207)
Traditional Roles Still Prevailed
(4) A fourth point against Mead's work is that traditional roles still prevailed
in the three cultures described by Mead:
Women cooked, did the housework, nursed the children, and cared for the children most
of the time.[36]
Looking past Mead's rationalizations, men still had as much authority and dominance as
in most other societies, considering the nature of these broken societies.[37]
The men worked outside and away from the homes vis a vis the women's work in and
around the home.[38]
Traditional Roles are in All Other Primitive Societies.
(5) A fifth point against Mead's work is that in most, if not all, primitive
societies beside the ones studied by Mead the following is true, according to authorities
on the subject:
(a) The division of labor is along traditional lines: men work away from the homes,
they do the heavy work, they do the hunting, the war fighting, the fishing; women work
close near the homes, care for the children, cook for the family, and so forth.[39]
(b) Men ultimately control or dominate the societies through the most powerful
institutions.[40]
Persons in Reversed Roles were Maladjusted
(6) A sixth point against Mead's work is that in her study, the most maladjusted
persons were those of the sex that were, according to Mead, in reversed positions or roles
from the world's traditional role forms.[41] This indicates that traditional sex roles are
more comfortable to each sex's biological and psychological make-up.
Hormonal Levels not Studied
(7) A final point against Mead's work is that in cross-culture studies various
biological sexual factors such as the sex hormonal ratios between androgens and estrogens
have NOT been ascertained in most, if not all cases.[42] Thus, the radical feminists
cannot prove their claim that culture conditioning vis a vis biological factors
causes sex difference without proof that the persons studied in these primitive cultures
had normal hormonal ratios. Those studied with seemly offbeat sexual behavior may, for all
we know, have been freaks as far as sex hormonal ratios go, or as other sex factors go.
Mead knew of this problem:
The second difficultly is that nowhere in primitive studies do we have determination of
chromosomal, gonadal, and hormonal sex, or of somatotype constitutions of the individuals
in the society whose sex behavior has been studied. (Mead, in 111,
p. 1437, footnote 3; Mead did note a single exception to this)
In concluding, contrary to what radical feminists assert,
cross-cultural studies by Mead and others do not prove that the main sex roles and
behavior of males and females are culturally determined. The supposed exceptions of Mead
and others, when analyzed are not clear exceptions but follow the traditional patterns of
the world. And these traditional patterns are caused mainly because of the absolute
functional differences between the sexes, and only secondly, because of other relative
differences between the sexes. (see chapter 4)
Experimental Societies
Versus The Claims of Radical feminists
Various groups and societies like radical communes, the communistic Russian society,
and Israels's kibbutzim help refute the radical feminists claims that most sexual behavior
is cultural conditioned. Show us the new society where "equality," as radical
feminists define it, exists. Communes of all kinds have failed and continue to fail. If
any have succeeded, you can bet that the Women Liberators would bring it to our attention
again and again.
Russia's Equality
The old Soviet Russia has failed in her mass effort to create "equality"
between the sexes. They at first tried to, in effect, abolish the family. Divorce was made
easy,
"the decrees of December 17 and 18, 1917, permitted every consort to declare that
he wanted his marriage to be canceled. No reasons were to be given to the board... In
addition to this, incest, bigamy, and adultery were dropped from the list of criminal
offenses. Abortion was explicitly permitted by the decree of November 20, 1920... If one
of the consorts was absent, he or she was notified by a postcard....The anti-family policy
was crowned by partial success: around 1930, on the average, family ties were
substantially weaker than they had been before the revolution. But this partial success
was more than balanced by a number of detrimental effects unforeseen by the promoters of
Communist experiment. About 1934, these detrimental effects were found to endanger the
very stability of the new society and its capacity to stand the test of war. Let us review
these effects....
1. ... ominous decrease of the birth rate... in 1934, in the medical institutions of
the city of Moscow, 57 thousand children were born, but 154 thousand abortions were
performed.... In 1934, in 100 marriages there were 37 divorces..
2. The dissolution of family ties especially of the parent-child relations threatened to
produce a wholesale dissolution of community ties, with rapidly increasing juvenile
delinquency as the main symptom... crimes in which the sadistic joy of inflicting pain....
Sometimes the schools were besieged by neglected children; other times gangs beat the
teachers and attacked women, or regularly fought against one another.
3. Finally, the magnificent slogans of the liberation of sex and the emancipation of
women proved to have worked in favor of the strong and reckless, and against the weak and
shy. Millions of girls saw their lives ruined by Don Juans in Communist garb, and millions
of children had never known parental homes... The unfavorable development had to be
stopped and to achieve this the government had no other choice but to re-enforce that
pillar of society which is the family....
And actually in 1935, the Soviet government started to prosecute men for rape who
'changed their wives as gloves,' registering a marriage one day and divorce the next....
In the official journal of the Commissariat of Justice these amazing statements may be
found:
The State cannot exist without the family. Marriage is a positive value for the
Socialist Soviet State only if the partners see in it a lifelong union. So-called free
love is a bourgeois invention and has nothing in common with the principles of conduct of
a Soviet citizen. Moreover, marriage receives its full value for the State only if there
is progeny, and the consorts experience the highest happiness of parenthood."([43] pp. 55ff)
Thus, when the population growth rate of Russia took sharp drops after their
revolutionary effort to make the sexes equal, birth-control clinics were limited, sale of
contraceptives slowed, abortions became more prohibited, and so forth. When divorces
increased, they were made harder to obtain.[43]
Women Liberators can't turn to the large number of working women in Russia as something
achieved through new equal social conditioning, for Russia lost about 20,000,000 men in
the second world war. Russia greatly needed her women workers: "Indeed, it may be
fair to say that the Soviet economy and Soviet society, at least until now, could not
operate... without the labor provided by women."[44] And because of this Russia used
much propaganda to keep and gain women into the work force.[45]
Four-fifths of the Soviet working women are occupied in production, and less than
one-fifth in services like teaching, science, and medical, and they are under represented
in management and top government jobs.[46] Furthermore the Soviet men do not help most
women workers with the housework, thus these women perform almost double the work of their
husbands.[47] Some equality! And when Soviet women achieve a large percentage of a
profession -- over 70% of the doctors at one time in Russia were women -- they don't even
gain status since doctors in the Soviet Union are considered a low status profession.[48]
Even Karen DeCrow, a formal president of the National Organization for Women (NOW),
thought equality had not arrived in the old Soviet Russia. According to DeCrow,
"Equality is not part of their ideology. In their heads, women are different. There
is a sexist attitude to women...."[49]
Kibbutz
The "Equality" in Israel's Kibbutz
Israel's kibbutz is another example where social conditioning has failed. Dan Leon, the
author of The Kibbutz, tells us that one of the Kibbutz's goals was that,
"equal rights would be granted to all...this would include equality between men and
women."[50] Dan Leon continues:
The emancipation of the woman and complete equality of the sexes was one of the most
important goals of the kibbutz from its inception....
The determination to free the woman from their traditional role as dependent upon the
master of the house or breadwinner, and from exclusive subjugation to the household and to
the children, was one of the sources of communal education. The communal nursery would
open the road to real and not only formal equality. The woman would be free to do equal
work and become an equal member of society, sharing equally in its obligations and
privileges. This was both an economic need and an integral part of the kibbutz vision.
The vision has come to life in the kibbutz. As a wife, the woman is no longer
economically dependent upon her husband, and as a mother no longer tied down remorselessly
to her children. She is an equal member of the community, enjoying the complete security
it offers her and her family, and the community has removed all those barriers which might
prevent her from playing her equal role in every field of its life. Yet the realization of
this dream has probably been accompanied by deeper problems and a deeper consciousness of
the disparity between the hope and the reality than in any other aspect of kibbutz life.
Though, as elsewhere in kibbutz life, light and shadow exist side by side, it would be
dishonest to deny that some of the problems of the woman in the kibbutz still await their
complete solution.[51]
Problems with Women in the Kibbutz
There is a "problem with women" in the kibbutz.[52] According to M.E. Spiro,
the author of Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, the women of the kibbutz have poor
morale:
One source of the woman's morale is that many women are dissatisfied with their
economic roles....When the vattikim [original settlers] first settled on the land, there
was no sexual division of labor. Women, like men, worked in the fields and drove tractors;
men, like women, worked in the kitchen and in the laundry. Men and women, it was assumed,
were equal and could perform their jobs equally well. It was soon discovered, however,
that men and women were not equal. For obvious biological reasons, women could not
undertake many of the physical tasks of which men were capable; tractor driving,
harvesting, and other heavy labor proved too difficult for them. Moreover, women were
compelled at times to take temporary leave from that physical labor of which they were
capable. A pregnant women, for example, could not work too long, even in the vegetable
garden, and a nursing mother had to work near the Infants House in order to be able to
feed her child. Hence, as the Kibbutz grew older and the birth rate increased, more and
more women were forced to leave the "productive" branches of the economy and
enter its "service" branches. But as they left the "productive"
branches, it was necessary that their places be filled, and they were filled by men. The
result was that the women found themselves in the same jobs from which they were supposed
to have been emancipated -- cooking, cleaning, laundering, teaching, caring for
children, etc.
...What has been substituted for the traditional routine of housekeeping...is more
housekeeping -- and a restricted and narrow kind of housekeeping at that. Instead of
cooking and sewing and baking and cleaning and laundering and caring for children, the
woman in Kiryat Yedidim cooks or sews or launders or takes care of
children for eight hours a day....This new housekeeping is more boring and less rewarding
than the traditional type. It is small wonder, then, given this combination of low
prestige, difficult working conditions, and monotony, that the chavera [female member of
the Kibbutz] has found little happiness in her economic activities.[53]
Traditional Family Tendencies in the Kibbutz
The women of the kibbutz often became proponents of "familistic tendencies."
According to Menachem Gerson, the writer of the paper, "Women in the Kibbutz":
...Age-old problems of women persist in the kibbutz. Many women of the founder
generation are dissatisfied and disillusioned. Now middle-aged and older, they find that
many of their once-meaningful jobs have become too strenuous. Kitchen and dining room,
laundry, and tailoring chores are often too hard -- or too boring. Middle-aged women who
used to find satisfaction working in early childhood education often have difficulty
cooperating with younger, second-generation women, whose style of work with small children
is more easygoing.
Older women frequently feel that their kibbutz career has not provided them with a
skill, that women are more restricted in their choice of work than are men. Whatever the
reasons, kibbutz women are less active than men in fulfilling prestigious tasks, such as
the central-managerial ones, and they are less vocal in the weekly general meeting, where
many kibbutz problems are decided. Quite a few women in the kibbutz still struggle with
traditional feelings of female inferiority or dependence on male esteem. For most women in
the kibbutz, then, it is not their work and social activity but their marriage and family
that form the center of their lives.
Women have often become proponents of familistic tendencies in the kibbutz. This
term...denotes the demand of the family for greater authority in decision-making involving
a member of the extended family, a demand frowned upon in kibbutz practice. It also
conveys the family's desire to increase contact between parents and children by having the
children sleep in the parent's apartment rather than in the children's houses.
...Supporters see the tendencies as a way to win back women who feel estranged from
kibbutz life, but I find them regressive from two points of view. [The author then conveys
his reasons against "familistic tendencies."]
But the emergence of women's problems in the kibbutz raises nagging questions....If
changed social conditions do not bring far-reaching change in feminine characteristics,
does that not prove the existence of an essential feminine character, rooted in biological
structure? The scientific approach does not permit us to shy away from facts, even if they
challenge our beliefs. But acceptance of this traditional image of women would mean
renunciation of the equalitarian character of kibbutz society, and would entail a serious
setback for women's emancipation movements everywhere. Before drawing conclusions, then,
it would be well to examine the historical conditions that have affected kibbutz women.
[The author goes on to analyze the kibbutz's stages of development, and then makes some
conclusions.]
Thus, with all of the achievements of the kibbutz, two basic problems of women remain:
Dissatisfaction in the sphere of work, and comparatively little participation in civic
activities and the management of the society.
It would be easy enough to play down the problems I have raised. One could say that
such dissatisfactions and tensions are typical of middle-aged women are not interested in
civic activity and careers, stop forcing them into a role that fits only your own utopian
ideals of kibbutz society -- and all the so-called problems will disappear! Perhaps. But
other things will disappear as well, including the hope of active women fighting in the
kibbutz and elsewhere for a change in the traditional image of women. And without this
hope the kibbutz is doomed. Its very existence, as a socialist cell within a capitalist
society, is a miracle. But if its women continue to find life frustrating, it is hard to
expect the kibbutz to survive.[54]
This latter quote is from an article by Menachem Gerson, head of the Institute of
Research on Kibbutz Education, Oranim, Israel, published in July, 1971, called "Women
in the Kibbutz." His words are important to us for they were written by one who
believes in the type of "equality" the kibbutz is striving for, but has not
really obtained. In the great experimental society of the kibbutz, biology has raised its
power and has prevented the "equality" radical feminists are pushing on us. In
this quote by Gerson it should be noted that he makes value judgments about what kind of
work is prestigious. He in effect is saying that what is traditional women's work has
little prestige and for women to get prestige they must do what men do or have
traditionally done.
Avraham C. Ben-Yosef also has written on the problem of women in the kibbutz in his
book, The Purest Democracy in the World:
"The fact remains that, in general, the kibbutzim suffer from a shortage of women
which, of course, affects the kibbutz social structure and, in the most serious cases,
even its stability.
There is a good deal of substance to the belief that it is more difficult for a woman
than for a man to find complete satisfaction in the kibbutz, unless, of course, her
personal relationships within the kibbutz are ideal for her. The belief is growing that
the private housewife actually enjoys her almost constant work and worry entailed by her
taking care of her house, husband, and children. Sometimes she frankly admits that this is
the case."[55]
To Summarize. Much of this so-called problem of women in the
kibbutz is that these women are in the wrong environment. But instead of the kibbutz
changing the environment to suit the biological tendencies of women, they continue on in
their own naive beliefs. Motherhood has been and shall be the prime profession of women as
long as the human race continues to reproduce. Any society that denies this and fails to
give due value to motherhood will have unhappy and dissatisfied women even though
other factors such as food and material goods are abundant. The "equality" of
the kibbutz is a failure as much literature confirms in more detail than what we have gone
into here.[56] Although Margaret Mead's work was superficial and biased, and all
experimental culture have failed, another work by John Money and his associates seemed to
be far more scientific and seemed to manifest a sex role neutrality-at-birth
phenomenon.
Sex Role Neutrality-at-Birth Theory
John Money. Some knowledgeable radical feminists may point out the
studies of John Money, Joan and John Hampson of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. These
professionals believe in a psychosexual neutrality-at-birth theory. The psychosexuality of
a person is his gender identity. In their dealings with hermaphrodites Money and Hampsons
came to the conclusion: "We conclude that an individual's gender role and orientation
as boy or girl, man or woman, does not have an innate, performed instinctive basis as some
theorists have maintained. Instead the evidence supports the view that psychologic sex is
undifferentiated at birth -- a sexual neutrality one might say -- and that the individual
becomes psychologically differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of many
experiences of growing up."[57]
According to them then, males have no innate tendencies to behave in masculine ways
after birth. They are born males, but not with masculine identity and masculine role
behavior. They could just as easily be taught to behave in a feminine way, or to fit the
feminine role even though they are born as males. That is, males can be reared just as
easily to act and behave like females as they can be reared to act like males. Margaret
Mead also believed that the sexes were this malleable. And radical feminists would love
it, if it were true, for then they could bring up their daughters to behave just like men.
Let's examine the psychosexual neutrality theory.
We'll examine two well-written critiques against this theory. Corinne Hutt of Oxford
wrote a refutation of the theory in her book, Males and Females,[58] and Milton
Diamond wrote a comprehensive paper on it.[59] We will use some of their ideas and add
some of our own.
Hermaphrodites. The whole idea of males and females being
neutral-at-birth in regard to which role they will eventually play in adulthood, gives
great emphasis to environmental and cultural factors. The idea implies considerably more
malleability in infants than reality has heretofore manifested in mankind. Money and the
Hampsons based their neutrality-at-birth theory on their studies of hermaphroditism.
According to them a hermaphrodite is: "an individual in whom there exists a
contradiction between the predominant external genital appearance on the one hand, and the
sex chromatic pattern, gonads, hormones, or internal reproductive structures, either
singly or in combination, on the other."[60]
Another definition of hermaphroditism by Money is: "As ordinarily defined,
hermaphroditism or intersexuality in human beings is a condition of prenatal origin in
which...the reproductive system fails to reach completion as either entirely female or
entirely male."[61]
A hermaphrodite individual is sexually unfinished or partly male and partly female. It
was with studies of such children that these doctors deduced their theory as far back as
1955.[62] But the infants studied were not normal males or females. They were intersexed.
They were not males or females. They were hermaphrodites. We would expect such intersexed
children to be more flexible in their gender role potential. To compare such atypical
children with typical males and females is not the best proof, if it is any proof at all.
Even when we closely examine Money and the Hampsons best arguments regarding
hermaphrodites, we find much to be desired. They fall short in proving their thesis. In
fact, in Money's book Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, he seems to have conceded
that humans are biologically biased at birth in some respects to either a male or female
role direction because of the prenatal hormonal actions.[63] Money's change in attitude
from his 1955 stand is due to the sound evidence that males and females have different
organizations of the brain.[64] Nevertheless, Money still asserts in his book the greater
importance of postnatal experience: "much that pertains to human
gender-identity differentiation remains to be accomplished after birth."[65]
In Money's book, co-authored with Anke Ehrhardt, it mentions that chapter 7 and 8 are
of possible use to the women's liberation movement. This is so because these chapters
emphasize environmental factors. Although Money and Ehrhardt make the case for the
interaction of biological and environmental factors as the explanation of behavior, they
still emphasize, we believe unwarrantly, environmental factors. They think there is a
large potential flexibility in sex role behavior because of the alleged environmental
factors in sex role development. Thus, because the book and papers of Money and the
Hampsons are misused, we shall examine their psychosexual neutrality-at-birth theory even
though Money has somewhat conceded the importance of biology's influence on sex behavior
in his 1972 book.
Sex Role Assignment
The psychosexual neutrality-at-birth theory tries to prove that the gender role that
one has been assigned by their parents at birth, will remain his gender identity in
adulthood. Money and the Hampsons in several papers have listed patients that were reared
in a sex role opposite to their sex chromosome type (XY or XX), or opposite
to their gonadal sex (testes or ovaries), or opposite to their hormonal sex (ratio
of androgens to estrogens), or opposite to internal sex organs (Wolffian or
Mullerian duct system), or opposite to external genital appearance (penis-like or
vulva-like).[66] Almost all of the approximately 113 patients studied, with the exception
of about 5 individuals, were said to have accepted their sex assignment and acted in
accordance with it. Gender role reassignment to the opposite sex was possible in some
cases, when it was done early enough. In order for gender role assignment to be effective
the parents must not be ambivalent toward the assigned sex of their child (must not show
doubts), they must assign the child's sex as early as possible (preferably before 18
months), and the child must also believe that he or she is of the assigned sex. If the
child has doubts, then he will not accept the assignment. Sex reassignment after 18 months
to 2 years is not advised.[67] According to Money and his co-workers, the fact that some
hermaphrodite children were assigned and reared "successfully" as a member of a
sex opposite to their gonadal, or their genital appearance is supposed to be proof that
parents can teach any child to act out successfully either a male or female role. And this
is because sex identity and behavior is neutral at birth, according to the theory.
Problems with Sex Role Neutrality-at-Birth Theory
(1) Hermaphrodites are not typical males or females -- they are neither male or female;
they are intersexual. Therefore they may seem more biologically malleable in regard to sex
identity than normal males or females.
(2) Even though the world has many different ideologies, and deviations of sex play,
over 99 percent of the earth's people are reared in hard traditional sex roles. If the
human race is as old as some think, why haven't sex roles other than our traditional ones
appeared more often than has been reported? If there is gender role neutrality-at-birth,
where is the mass of cultural evidence of its existence in the form of contrary sex roles
among large groups of people or among nations?
(3) At birth, infants are assigned their sex by appearance of their external genitals.
Hermaphrodites are likewise assigned. Because the appearance of the external genitals
indicate the influence of androgens on the hermaphrodite child (the more the androgenic
influence, the more a penis like organ appears; the less the influence, the less the
genitals look like a male's), then when these children were assigned, they were assigned
more as to what the child was, then what the child wasn't. In other words, the more the
prenatal influence of androgens on a child, the more the chance the child's
"brain" would be male-like, the more the chance his genitals would be male-like,
the more the chance he would be assigned as a male, and the better the chance he will be
effective in his role. The less the prenatal influence of androgens, the more the child
would be female-like. Thus the more chance she would be assigned as a female, and the
better her chance to be effective in such a role.
(4) Merely because the hermaphrodites don't outwardly seem to show the desire to give
up their assigned roles, merely because they are erotically attached to their opposite
sex, merely because they dress like their sex, merely because they perform their role,
doesn't mean that they are as at ease with their role, or function as well in their role,
as a typical male or a typical female. For example, those who were assigned as a female,
but who were masculinized prenatally because their mother took hormonal injections in
pregnancy for some ailment, acted male-like.[68] Money called them tomboyish. These
"females" showed: (a) more athletic interest than normal females; (b) more
self-assertiveness than typical females; (c) less self-adornment than typical girls in
clothing, hairstyle, cosmetics, and jewelry; (d) less rehearsal of maternalism in
childhood, less enthusiasm for baby-sitting; (e) less interest in marriage and romance
than interest in career and "achievement;" and (f) manifested visual erotic
perception like males. Thus, Money's androgenized females performed their sex roles in a
masculinized manner. If they were assigned as males, they would have performed more
typically than they performed in their female assigned roles.
(5) Hormones did influence the behavior of Money's hermaphrodites: (a) the prenatally
androgenized females, whose mothers during pregnancy took masculinizing hormones, behaved
in a male-like manner even though they were reared as females; (b) the hermaphrodites with
the Turner's syndrome (XO chromosomes), who are not influenced by androgens in
their prenatal state, were found to be "hyperfemales." That is, all the behavior
typically known as feminine was abundant in these individuals. By comparing these two
groups, one sees the influence of prenatal androgens on the infant's subsequent
behavior.[69]
(6) Money and his associates used hormonal replacement therapy, cortisone therapy, and
plastic surgery to correct hormonal levels and to make these individuals appear the same
as those of their assigned sex.[70] Although these individuals may have begun with
ambivalent and contrary hormonal influences and outward appearances, they were medically
treated so as to be biologically like typical males or females. This point, in itself,
rules out the conclusions of Money and the Hampsons.
(7) In the cases of an individual being reared in a sex role opposite to the sex
appearance of his or her genitals, there were enormous problems "to surmount in
coming to terms psychologically with their paradoxical appearance. It has been our
experience that more than anything else, the visible anatomic genital or bodily
contradictions occasion the greatest psychologic distress."[71] Even though these
children's genitals were not as developed as typical individuals, they nevertheless
suffered because of their contrariness. Moreover, it must be remembered, it was not only
the contrary visual appearance, but also the contrary hormonal internal influence that
made these individuals suffer. Normal males and females would find it even more difficult
to overcome their biology. This difficulty encountered when an individual attempts to
behave contrarily to his biological nature is another proof that normal persons are not
neutral-at-birth in regard to gender identity.
(8) One other important proof against the neutrality-at-birth theory is that there are
many cases of sex reversals after the so-called critical development period. The critical
development period for sex role development is between birth to 2 or 3 years of age,
according to the theory. The theory says that up to 2 or 3 years of age, a child can be
conditioned to behave and identify as either a male or a female. But after this critical
period, the child finds it almost impossible to change his or her sex role. Although the
neutrality-at-birth theory indicates great flexibility in role identity in infancy, it
paradoxically says that after the critical period sex role identity is not changeable. But
below we shall give some examples of sex reversals after the critical period. It should be
noted that many of these changes occurred because the individuals did not feel at ease
with his or her assigned sex role. This uneasiness is probably due to internal biological
pressures of the individual that are opposite to his or her assigned sex.
Dewhurst reported 20 cases of sex reassignment after 3 1/2 years of age. Most were
successful, four cases were doubtful.[72] These children were brought up in one sex role,
but in the assigned sex role, they manifested the opposite sex's behavior, and many wanted
to be the opposite sex: "We believe (and this is all we claim) that, making due
allowance for the difficulties we have mentioned, the results show that some children can
have their sex changed after the age of 1 1/2 to 2 years without disastrous results and
perhaps with complete success.
"Our records also provide some interesting information on the view of Money et
al., that the sex of rearing is of such paramount importance in establishing the gender
role. Although we agree that the sex of rearing is very important in this respect, some of
these cases do suggest that the children had an affinity to the sex opposite to that in
which they were being brought up."[72] The authors note that just because there are
cases where individuals have changed their sex role, it doesn't mean it is easy to
reassign one's sex role. It just means in some cases it can be done when it is to the
advantage of the patient because he has biological and cultural tendencies toward the new
sex role.
Berg reported a successful sex reassignment at puberty.[73] Diamond in his critique of
the neutrality theory lists several other cases.[74] Diamond lists one particular case of
interest where "an unambiguous male was raised from birth as a female." If
gender role is neutral-at-birth, then such a child should behave like a female, but
"despite attempts by the parents to make this child a girl, almost from birth on the
child refused to be comfortable in the assigned sex or sex of rearing, continuously
fighting all attempts from her feminine mother to be a feminine daughter." (p. l54)
The above points (1) to (8), are good evidence against the neutrality-at-birth theory.
We will now turn to other so-called evidence of the neutrality-at-birth theory and of the
socialization of sex roles. This supposed evidence is found in Money's and Ehrhardt's
book, Man & Woman, Boy & Girl.[75]
Chapter 7 & 8 of Money's Book
Let's examine chapter 7 of Money and Ehrhardt's book. The contents of both chapter 7
and 8 are used by radical feminists. The evidence against the cases presented in chapter 8
of their book is much like the 8 points listed above. For one thing, the individuals named
in chapter 8 were given hormonal therapy and plastic surgery. Thus, they were not only
reared in a certain sex role, but hormonally and appearancewise prepared for the assigned
role.
Two Cases
In chapter 7 two cases were presented that were supposed to prove the
"extraordinary influence" of shaping a child's sex role behavior by the parents'
differentiated patterns of rearing the child.
First Case: Identical Twin Boys. The first case involved identical
twin boys. One of them in his seventh month had his penis burned off in a surgical
mishap during a circumcisional operation. At the seventeenth month the parents finally
decided to rear their son as a girl because of various medical advice. The twin boy was
thus sex reassigned as a girl.
She (the reassigned twin boy) was then conditioned to behave as a girl. She was given
girl's clothes and toys, given girl's tasks, and treated as a girl by the family
thereafter.
But even though she was conditioned to behave like a girl she "had many tomboyish
traits, such as abundant physical energy, a high level of activity, stubbornness, and
being often the dominant one in a girl's group." (p. 122) Even though "her
mother had tried to modify her tomboyishness" and even though the mother was very
direct in conditioning this child to behave like a girl, this ex-boy, nevertheless,
manifested typical boyish activity levels. In fact, she was "the dominant twin,"
she dominated the other boy twin like a "mother hen."
In a 1983 book by Jo Durden-Smith and Diane de-Simone, Sex and the Brain, they
wrote about this case:
Set against all this, of course, is still the one case of the American male identical
twin, surgically altered soon after birth and raised successfully, all accounts, as his
brother's sister. "You have to understand," says Milton Diamond of the
University of Hawaii, "that this one case was seen, and is still seen, as being of
absolutely crucial theoretical importance. Throughout the 1970's, it was written up in an
enormous number of textbooks in psychology and sociology. It was included in virtually every
book on sex differences, every book that addressed itself to the roles, in this society,
of men and women. ... In 1965, Milton Diamond wrote one of the first scientific papers
that attempted to gather together all the existing evidence that might support the idea of
the prenatal sexual differentiation of the human brain. And in following years, in a
series of other papers, he went on to buttress his case. In 1979, then, he was approached
by the British Broadcasting Corporation for his help in a film the producers wanted to
make about the American twin. They had already talked with John Money and had secured his
assistance -- he was to be the leading voice in the program. And Milton Diamond, because
of the view he was know for, was to be a sort of foil.
"Well, the producers went off to do their filming," he says. "And they
talked to a number of psychiatrists who'd been first introduced to the child when she was
about thirteen, some three years before. It was plain that the child had not made
the successful gender switch that has been claimed for her. She was having major problems.
She'd refused to talk about any difficulties she'd had in the past, and had been reluctant
to talk about sexual matters at all. She had shown considerable ambivalence about her
position as a female.... She was feeling that boys had a better and easier life and wanted
to be a mechanic. She looked quite masculine. And she was described as unhappy and
ambivalent about her status. One psychiatrist said: 'She is having considerable difficulty
in adjusting as a female. At the present time she does display certain features which make
me suspicious that she will ever make the adjustment as a woman.'"
When the BBC told John Money what they had found, he simply withdrew his support and
refused to be interviewed. The program, however, was aired in Britain at the beginning of
1980 without him. And since then Money has failed to address the issue in print, though
his version of the case's outcome is still everywhere quoted. ... "But it [cases like
the twin boys case] certainly doesn't support," he says, "the idea that
gender identity and sexual orientation are dependent entirely on social learning --
which is the one and only idea being persistently peddled in the sort of books I was
talking about. This is something that everyone -- scientists included -- ought to face,
and face squarely. All the evidence so far gathered points to the fact that the foundation
-- the fundamental directionality -- of a man or a woman's future sexual identity is laid
down in the masculine or feminine brain before birth... ." (pp. 101-103)
The New York Times on their front page in the Spring of 1997 had an update to
this story. Despite everyone telling him constantly that he was a girl and despite his
being treated with female hormones, his brain knew he was a male. (See next chapter)
Eventually his father told him the truth and he had surgical help to repair his sexual
organs enough so he married and had sexual relations as a man. But this one case more than
any other was used by the radical feminist to push their neutral-at-birth
theory. Their theory is dead wrong and have been misused to further confuse the sexes.
Second Case. The second case given in chapter 7 of Money's book was about
a genetic male (XY chromosomes) with a very small penis. "The phallus was 1cm long,
so small as to resemble a slightly enlarged clitoris, and like a clitoris, it did not
carry a urinary canal." (p. 123) Although a female sex assignment was suggested to
the parents at birth, the parents on the advice of a specialist decided to rear their
child as a boy, "despite the absence of a penis." But after many months of
weighing their decision, the parents decided at the seventeenth month to reassign the
child as a girl. Because the so-called penis of this child was more like a clitoris, and
because the child was so young this reassignment was apparently "successful"
according to Money, through parental conditioning of the child. However, this child
manifested tomboyish behavior, and "would say occasionally that she was a boy and not
a girl." (pp. 124-125) When she was three, her "behavior still seemed quite
tomboyish...she also still seemed to have more physical energy expenditure." (p. 125)
These two cases were supposed to show that parental rearing has "extraordinary
influence on shaping a child's psychosexual differentiation and the ultimate outcome of a
female or male gender identity." (pp. 144-145) We disagree. The evidence we have
presented is contradictory to their neutrality thesis. Events after birth do have a great
effect on children, but these events do not overcome or suppress the children's biological
underlying sex differences. The prenatal hormonal influences caused these two
"girls" described in chapter 7 of Money's book to behave in rough tomboyish
ways. This was the case even though they were conditioned by their parents to be females.
Furthermore, these children were to receive hormonal treatment as they developed. This
would enable them to develop in their assigned sex role properly. Without such treatment,
at puberty, the social conditioning would more than likely have failed completely.
In the last part of chapter 7 Money takes a look at cross-culture studies which seem to
indicate flexibility in sexual partnerships of humans. It is possible for otherwise
typical individuals to perform homosexual acts or bisexual acts, as it is possible for
some to murder, etc. But these possible variations of sexual acts among mankind are not
proof of the overwhelmingness of environmental factors as Money's work tries to indicate.
Without the majority of a society practicing heterosexuality, the society would not last
long. And it is biology that predestinates mankind to heterosexuality, not social
conditioning.
Although Money presents several cases of flexibility in sex play, nevertheless, in his
presentation we frequently see manifestations of the underlying biological sex
differences. Among the Melanesian people, "boys are made fun of for having an erect
penis." Yet, "they continue to play with it, nevertheless." (p. 136) This
shows young males typically more asocial behavior.
Contrariwise, girls are scolded "for touching their genitalia in public. Soon they
cease to do so." (p. 136) Unlike the males, girls show prosocial behavior as typical
females frequently do. Both sexes were taught not to play with their genitals, both
reacted differently.
Another example of sex difference is that among the Pilaga, "women
are considered weak and of less value." (p. 140) If women were the value makers, then
would they be calling themselves weak and of less value than men? As we have mentioned
before, one of the differences manifested in almost all cultures (if not all, except
broken ones), is that men are the value makers. The universal manifestations of males as
the value makers are an indication that there are underlying biological factors for this.
Sex Role Development and Environmental Influences
In the paper, "Sex Roles and the Socialization Process,"[76] the author,
Sverre Brun-Gulbrandsen, tried to determine "the extent to which actual differences
in behavior and attitudes between the sexes can be traced to environmental
influences....We do not exclude the possibility that biological differences can be
significant in the cases we study; we merely focus our attention on environmental
variations." (p. 62) Although the author was aware that sex differences "may
stem from biological differences" he chose to concentrate on environmental variations
much like the radical feminists. The radical women liberators emphasize and re-emphasize
environmental causes of behavior, while relating biological differences as secondary. To
them biology is no more important in understanding sex behavior than sex-differentiated
clothes wearing.[77] Therefore, since Brun-Gulbrandsen emphasized environmental factors
like the radical feminists, and since he wrote his paper well, we shall take a look at his
paper.
The main conclusions from Brun-Gulbrandsen's paper about sex role development were:
(1) Even boys and girls, who were brought up "by mothers who profess verbally to
believe in equality and similarity in childrearing," have the rules and norms of
traditional sex roles "well internalized." (p. 66-67)
(2) "Because the parents have so completely internalized their views of social sex
roles they are unaware that they clearly and systematically influence their sons and
daughters through numerous negative and positive sanctions to accept different behavior
patterns." (p. 67)
(3) "Children are not led to accept the sex role pattern by force or violence, but
usually by more subtle means." (p. 69)
(a) First they are encouraged to do a typically masculine (or feminine) activity and
then rewarded for doing so. This social reward makes such activity enjoyable, and so he
(or she) continues in such behavior.
(b) Another means is to use negative verbal reinforcement when he or she does something
not appropriate to their roles.
(c) All these small "pushes" in "systematically different
directions" make the resulted sex roles seem natural.
(4) A major obstacle to sex equality is that "people interpret an attempt to
introduce greater similarity to sex roles as an attempt to change human nature." (p.
70)
(5) As socialization of sex roles change and become more equal, what was once thought
of as natural, will show itself to be "a product of early indoctrination."
(6) But because the traditional system has gained such a firm hold "parents
consciously [among those who believe in traditional sex roles] or unconsciously [among
those who do not believe in traditional sex roles] rear their children largely in the same
way as they were reared: change is introduced, but slowly and over a span of
generations." (p. 77)
Parenthetically, this last conclusion (6) is probably why Simone de Beauvoir quoted
Stendhol, "The forest must be planted all at once," for she understood that
perfect equality could only come according to the socialization theory if all social
pressures were negated at once. Otherwise, equality as radical feminists describe it will
only come slowly, if at all.
The findings (1) to (6) sum up in a few words how radical feminists understand and
relate the socialization of sex roles. These points are environmental ideas on how sex
roles have come about. But these points do not answer the question: why are sex roles
almost universally the same in all cultures? When we say "sex roles" here, we
mean the hard traditional ones: men work outside the homes, work at more physically
strenuous and riskier tasks, dominate all spatial ability jobs (mathematicians, Engineers,
Architects) run the major ruling institutions, etc; women work in and around the homes
most of the time, care for the children, cook, sew, etc., and when they work outside the
home they work in more occupations that deal with children and interrelationships between
people.
Brun-Gulbrandsen also asks the same question about why the traditional gender roles are
so universal: "But why is it that certain forms of behavior are ascribed to the male
role and others to the female role? This interesting problem has yet to be
solved...." (p. 72) The reason this "interesting problem" hasn't been
solved is because the author merely focuses his attention on environmental variations
instead of bringing the biological variables into the picture. It is not scientific to
leave out the biological variables, but Brun-Gulbrandsen did and radical feminists do.
Brun-Gulbrandsen writes about children of both sexes aged 8, 11, 14, and 15 years, who
were asked to identify various kinds of behavior, as either being what boys usually do or
what girls usually do. The great majority of these children identified antisocial and
delinquent behavior as being the behavior of boys. The children felt that girls were more
pro-social. Girls in the eyes of the children seemed to possess qualities of behavior
deemed good by society. Brun-Gulbrandsen then asks, "One may wonder whether it is
possible for an ordinary 8 year old to have such a clear image of asociality in male
nature." He then answers his question, "The stereotypes are
'internalized'."
They are internalized, according to the author, through the children's continued
subjection to the "notion" that males are asocial. And because of our society's
view, males are "permitted" to show more aggression. To the contrary, females
are not allowed much show of aggression. If they show aggression various negative labels
are thrown at them. Walter Mischel describes a similar process of socialization in his
paper in the book, The Development of Sex Differences.[78] Therefore, sex roles or
gender roles are primarily learned, at least according to the feministic way of thinking.
Nothing could better illustrate radical feminists thinking on this than the following
quote by a feminist that we quoted before in this book: "I think it is the concensus
that men are sperm donators, women are baby incubators, and all the rest of it is the
result of the socialization process."[79] And this same feminist thinks, "The
Women's Liberation Movement is our [radical feminists] force to break through the chains
of socialization." (p. 492)
Asocial & Prosocial Behavior
Let's examine this asocial and prosocial behavior of boys and girls respectively. The
author, Brun-Gulbrandsen, says that males are more asocial merely because they are
permitted to behave that way; girls are not allowed to show aggression and are taught to
be nice young ladies. Walter Mischel reported similarly, [80] as do many of those pushing
women's "liberation." But Mischel also said: "Unfortunately [for the
environmentalists], present evidence that the sexes are indeed treated differently by
their parents with respect to the above behaviors [dependence & aggression] is far
from firm...." (p. 75) When researchers who believe in the learning theory find
parents, with equalitarian ideas on childrearing, but that have children of obvious sex
differences in behavior, they are forced to rationalize and explain away their findings.
They point to some dubious "unconscious attitudes" in the parents that somehow
influence the children's behavior.[81]
Let's examine a study that revealed obvious biological influence on sex behavior, but
the authors mixed it for some extreme rationalization because the contrary results were
not the desired results wanted by the environmentalistic authors.
In a study by Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, they interviewed 379 mothers of children in
public-school kindergarten in the Boston area. They were looking for differences in child
treatment by the mothers that might help to explain the differences in gender role
behavior of children. In Sears words:
"The results of this inquiry are astonishing and disappointing. In the first
place, almost no relationships were found, as indicated by correlations, between
childrearing practices and antisocial aggression, in either sex. The same was true for
prosocial aggression in boys. But the astonishing part of the results comes with respect
to the girls, and the antecedents of their prosocial aggression....We find a clear picture
of a significant relationship between high use of masculine child-rearing
procedures [physical punishment]
...and high prosocial aggression...The results are exactly the opposite of what
one would expect, namely, that feminine (prosocial) aggression would be greater in those
girls who were more femininity treated [with withdrawal of love method, or verbal
punishment]...."[82]
After stating the results, the authors move on and intellectualize away the contrary
findings. But we can see the results as clearly helping to prove that biological factors
do influence the sex behavior found in the study. Boys showed more asocial aggression in
the study because of the androgenic influence: (1) that makes their bodies more active
than girls; (2) that makes their bodies in need of more physical activity than girls; and
(3) that causes them to express their aggressive behavior in more physical ways (which
seem more destructive than girls more refined aggression). Girls to the contrary, showed
more prosocial aggression due to the physical punishment from their parents because: (l)
girls show more sensitivity to discipline than boys (they don't want to be spanked again,
therefore they show their aggression in more indirect ways); and (2) they have a greater
innate need for parental approval than boys. This prosocial behavior by girls is not
because they learned it through differentiated parental discipline.
The question is, should we change our society for the views of the
radical feminists? Some of their ideas have been activated in our society over the last 25
years but have only made still more unhappier women. There have been and are social
experiments with the "equality" that the Women Liberators are propagating. But
they have failed and will continue to fail. We shouldn't any longer let the so-called
Women Liberators pressure social "reform" that will only add to our problems.
The main sexual behavior differences between men and women have to do with biology, not
the environment.
Functional Differences and Behavior
From a study of cross-culture papers by Herbert Barry and others, the following is
pertinent to our discussion in this chapter:
The childbearing which is biologically assigned to women, and the child care which is
socially assigned primarily to them, lead to nurturant behavior and often call for a more
continuous responsibility than do the tasks carried out by men. Most of these distinctions
in adult role are not inevitable, but the biological differences between the sexes
strongly predispose the distinction of role, if made, to be in a uniform direction.
The relevant biological sex differences are conspicuous in adulthood but generally not
in childhood. If each generation were left entirely to its own devices, therefore, without
even an older generation to copy, sex differences in role would presumably be almost
absent in childhood and would have to be developed after puberty at the expense of
considerable relearning on the part of one or both sexes. Hence, a pattern of child
training which foreshadows adult differences can serve the useful function of minimizing
what Benedict[83] termed "discontinuities in cultural conditioning."
The differences in socialization between the sexes in our society, then, are no
arbitrary custom of our society, but a very widespread adaptation of culture to the
biological substratum of human life.[84]
This important quote gives us the reason we rear our children to be sex differentiated
in certain ways. Mothers in childhood must be taught how to care for infants or in their
mothering days they will be inferior mothers with inferior children because they failed to
learn how to be good mothers in their childhood.
In the book Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, by Parsons and Bales,
we read:
"In our opinion the fundamental explanation of the allocation of the roles between
biological sexes lies in fact that the bearing and early nursing of children establish a
strong presumptive primacy of the relation of mother to the small child and this in turn
establishes a presumption that the man, who is exempted from these biological functions,
should specialize in the alternative instrumental direction."(p. 23)
We agree with this position, and an unbiased analysis of the human situation manifests
this clearly. Only the most radical are blind to nature and its calling.
Women have Babies; Men Do Not
Women have babies; men do not. This is the main (but not the only) cause of the
differences between sex roles. Mothers have closer biological ties with their children
than fathers because of the nine months of pregnancy and its hormonal effects. Judith M.
Bardwick, a professor in Psychology, in her book, Psychology of Women, has put it
this way:
I feel that there is a biological origin of maternal nurturance, especially of small
and helpless infants. My reasons are intuitive, unscientific, and unsupported. A few years
ago I watched an enormous colony of monkeys chasing one frantic female. The lone figure
ran, terrorized, screaming and panicked, away from the chasing throng. In her arms she
held the rigid corpse of a dead infant. In all the time I watched, the colony never
succeeded in separating her from that body. I have been impressed with the exquisite
tenderness older children, especially girls, show toward young children. My own daughters
never played with dolls, never rehearsed maternal roles with toys. Their response to young
children and animals is nurturant and gentle. I myself had never seen an infant before my
eldest was born. Preoccupied with school and work, I had never given much thought to even
my own imminent child. My response to my child was immediate, unrehearsed, and unexpected.
In a second she was incredibly precious -- to be loved and protected. My husband's
response I remember better than my own: "No man will ever be good enough!" The
anecdote is glib but my intent is serious. My reaction to my child was not comprehensible
in terms of the differential reinforcements of learning theory. This was a primitive,
gut-deep response, not amenable to easy verbalization, similar in kind and intensity to
that of the monkey who could not give up the body of her dead infant. I have found that
this feeling diminishes slowly as my children grow and successfully achieve their
independence. But each new birth, each new child, brought forth the same immediate,
profound surge of love and protectiveness.[85]
Bardwick goes on to state some proof that maternal tendencies are caused biologically
through hormone levels and/or because the sexes, as some good data indicate, have sexually
differentiated brains. See chapter 4 for further biological information on maternal
behavior. Of course these motherly tendencies can be turned off by adverse environmental
conditions. A few mothers even come to hate their babies. But in most cases mothers love
and care for their children.
Even in the days when I wholeheartedly believed in many radical aspects of feminism and
culture conditioning, I observed with some amazement the warm and spontaneous reaction of
girl friends and other women when they were around infants. I have met very few men who
come close to the warm responses that the typical woman manifests around infants and
children.
Real Reasons for Sex Roles
Because of women's biologically close relationship to infants -- they grow them, they
nurse them -- societies of all kinds in all ages have women in the important role of
caring for children. Human children need much more caring for than any other beings on
earth. The human child needs a great deal of teaching, training, and loving in order to
survive and function in this world. Mothers have traditionally done the caretaking for the
world's children. Therefore, because of the nature of children, homes were established.
And because women were at home caring for the children, they also performed work around
the homes and in them. Thus, women traveled less because of their jobs at home. This
helped to set up a division of labor, where men performed the needed work away from the
homes because women were busy with the important caretaking of children at home.
Furthermore, since women are relatively less muscular than men, men performed the heavier
work, and a division of labor due to strength was created. In this paper earlier we showed
how this very same process happened in Israel's kibbutzim to a certain degree in this very
century. Other relative physical and mental differences have also contributed to the
divisions of labor between the sexes. (see chapter 4)
Science to Help Women's Lib?
Now some radical feminists admit that the functional differences between the sexes have
caused many of the behavioral differences, the sex roles, and the division of labor in the
past. But they insist that the industrial revolution and science have the means to set
women free from motherhood. They claim that artificial insemination, test-tube babies,
child care centers, and machines will set women free to enter on equal terms with men in
the labor market. They also mention that because of the population boom, there will be
less need for mothers, and thus, this will set many women "free" from
motherhood. But the women liberators overlook important factors like the following:
(1) Most people of the world live under conditions of little industrialization.[86]
(2) Population, pollution, economic, and energy problems will keep total or indefinite
growth of industrialization from reality.[87]
(3) The economics of most industrial nations are based on growth.[88]
(4) Because of (3) any society that achieves a zero population growth rate must
increase production to survive in this competitive world, yet (2) rules this out in the
long run. The fact that zero population growth societies have more older retired people
than a growing society, helps to rule out increasing production.
(5) Artificial insemination is a method most, if not all, men are psychologically
against, if they are fertile. Artificial insemination in mass will never happen, for men
rule all powerful institutions. (6) Test-tube babies (grown totally outside the woman's
body) are nothing but a fictional notion.[89] There are many problems to be solved before
this can ever take place. It may never be possible because of the huge complications
science must overcome. But if it were possible, only through some mad leader in some
future age could this be brought about in a mass form against mankind's psychological
needs. Such babies would have no mothers who would truly care for them since there would
not be any true and close biological mothers. Test-tube babies would be deprived babies,
and deprived babies are inferior children, and make unstable and inferior adults.[90]
(7) The idea of child care for everyone would not work either, because child care
centers are inferior for rearing children.[91] Furthermore, they are expensive, and
therefore economically infeasible for many. Also women (97%) mostly care for the children
in day care centers, so women would not be freed by this method. They would only directly
or indirectly be caring for other children besides their own, but in a much more
disadvantageous setting for the children. The taxation for mass child care centers would
force many mothers to work and thus their own children would be forced into these inferior
institutions. (Of course in some family situations, like ones with too many
children and too little money where the mother can't properly care for her children, day
care centers may be better, but not as good as a proper mother-child
relationship.[92])
(8) Most women like to care for their children; they merely work at jobs to supplement
their husband's income, or because they have no husband.[93] And even career women in top
jobs feel that the family comes first if a conflict should arise between work and family,
as a Political and Economic Planning report called Women in Top Jobs indicated.[94]
Therefore, because of the reasons given above (1) to (8) and other reasons, most women
in most countries will continue to be in the profession of motherhood.
Working Mothers with Children
Radical feminists may point to statistics that tell us that more women today with
children are working at full time jobs outside the homes than previously.[95] According to
a recent Labor Department study, Children of Working Mothers, "Almost 27
million children in the U.S. -- or 42 percent of those under age 18 -- had mothers who
were working or seeking work in March, 1974. About one out of every four of these children
(6.1 million) were below regular school age...." That was 1974, but in 1990 about 57
% of all mothers with children under 6 years of age are working outside the home. In 1960
this percentage of working mothers with children under 6 years of age was only about 18
percent. But this increasing phenomenon does not mean that biology does not tend to
dictate different and universal roles for each sex. This increasing involvement of
mothers outside the home may continue for years, but biology will eventually have its say.
The inferior children brought up by today's working women will slow down this society as
it did others like the Roman Empire and Communistic Russia in the 1920's.
Some of the reasons more women are working today outside the home are:
(1) birth control and abortion enable women to work for years without interruption
because of accidental pregnancy;
(2) fast food restaurants, canned foods, microwave ovens, and frozen foods grant women
more freedom from long hours of food preparation;
(3) schools are in effect being used as child care centers by some parents so they can
work;
(4) their families can't buy a house unless they work because of the economic reality;
(5) women are entrapped in material desires propagated by the media and the national
spirit, and they feel (or their husbands feel) that they must work to support these
desires;
(6) women are indoctrinated by radical feminists and other male chauvinists to think
they are only valuable when they work outside the home;
(7) some of the tasks that should be theirs, like teaching their children to read and
write, have been taken over by the state and therefore taking away some of their
challenges and rewards of staying home.
Biology Limits and Causes Behavior
Absolute and Relative Limits
There can be no doubt that biology limits behavior. There are many obvious examples:
(a) Fish are limited to water environments ;
(b) Mankind is limited to oxygen environments;
(c) All living animals except mankind are biologically limited from verbal
communication.
All three of these examples are absolute limits of biology. The biologies of
fish, mankind, and animals would have to be altered in order for them to respectively
breath air, live in outer space, or talk. And, of course, if these creatures are
biologically changed, they would not be fish, or men, or animals, but something different.
There is no known method to change them in such radical ways. And pertinent to our
discussion, if females are changed through hormonal methods to be "freed" from
their functional destiny of motherhood, they would not be females, but male-like creature.
Besides absolute limits of biology there are also relative limits:
(a) There are biological limits to how fast men can run;
(b) There are biological limits to how much men can learn (brain organization and
life-spans are factors);
(c) There are biological limits to how well one can perceive his environment
(sensitivity of eyes and ears are factors).
Therefore, we have two kinds of biological limits: one is absolute -- mankind
can't live without oxygen; the other relative -- mankind can only see and learn
about part of his environment.
In regard to males and females, the absolute biological limits between them are the
reproductive ones: women have babies and have breasts to feed them; men do not. The
relative biological limits between the sexes are such factors as strength, spatial
ability, verbal ability, etc. (see chapter 4)
Now the radical feminists believe there are only minor differences between the sexes.
But we know there is at least one major difference that sets the foundation for behavior
differences between the sexes. The fact that women have babies limits females, as the fact
that men don't have babies limits males in various ways.
But the radical feminists tell us that biology can be overcome. Some futuristic ones
even suggest that test-tube babies (grown totally outside the womb) are the ultimate
answer to allow women the "freedom" of men. They tell us we can set up child
care centers to help set women "free" to work outside the home. They tell us we
can use machines to compensate for differences in strength. But they overlook biology.
Science is far from growing babies outside the womb. And even if it were possible, it
is psychologically improbable that mankind would accept it, except for the radical
feminists. And if it were possible, and if some mad group or leader forced it upon us, the
resulting children would be mother-deprived children, and in the end this would weaken the
society and eventually destroy it.
As we have mentioned and will show in greater depth in chapter 5, child care centers do
not work, for they are inferior to a good mother-child relationship. A nation that
enforces mass child care centers will soon find that their children are inferior compared
to other nations, and will eventually be seriously weakened by the experiment. Some
radical feminists might argue, saying, institutional childrearing isn't all that bad, but
the evidence is against such radical feminists. (see chapter 5) Furthermore, child care
centers are economically expensive. Women would staff them, and therefore many women would
not really be "freed" from children.
There are also many economic reasons why machines can't be used in mass to wipe out
every need for male-like strength in heavy jobs. It just can't be done in the near future
due to the world's economic, pollution, energy, and other problems. To try and overcome
biology is expensive and many times impossible. The only reason some women with children
can still work in their professions is because they underpay the females that care for
their children. One study near Modesto California, showed that child care paid an average
of $5.41-6.66 per hour, assistants made only $4.39-4.82 per hour. [96] If they paid what
good child care personnel should be paid, then they could not afford to work. In a way,
these women liberators are enslaving their sisters.
Absolute biological limits cannot be overcome without changing the animal, and most
relative biological limits cannot be overcome throughout the world because it is too
economically expensive. Not harmonizing with biology is economically reckless. It is much
easier to accept biology. This acceptance is too difficult for the radical feminists; they
can't seem to do it because they are indoctrinated to think their biological destiny isn't
worthy enough for them. This may be one reason why they are pro-abortion. They
subconsciously may want to kill those little things that remind them of their biology.
They would never admit it, but they want to be men, that is, they want the status they
think men have.
Biology is the Main Cause of Behavior
Yet not only does biology limit behavior, it also causes behavior. In fact, biology is
the main cause of behavior.
Biology is the main cause of sexual behavior in mankind. Women liberators imply or even
say the main cause is the environment. Most authorities on sexual differences tell us that
the only true answer for the cause of sexual behavior is the interaction of biology and
environment.[96] We are not saying that the interaction or interplay of biology and
environment doesn't cause some sexual differentiated behavior, for some differences are
caused by the interaction. But we are saying that the main cause of most sexual
behavior is because of the biological nature of mankind.
Food. First, let's give an example of an absolute biological cause of
behavior. What causes a person to eat? Is it biology? Is it the person's environment or
culture? Or is it the interaction of both biological and environmental reasons? Does
someone eat merely because when he was growing up his parents always ate, and he learned
from them to eat? No, of course not, he eats because his body (biology) needs nourishment
to survive and because his parents taught him eating food from his environment was the
best way to satisfy his need. If his body was self-sufficient, he wouldn't need food. And
without the food, he wouldn't have anything to eat. Therefore, the interaction of both his
biology and the fact that his environment has foodstuff to eat causes him to eat. But the
real reason and main cause for a man to eat is biology -- his biological nature is not
self-sufficient. He biologically needs to eat. If his biology was different, and if food
was available, the food itself would not cause him to eat. A person eats because there is
a biological need for him to eat.
Clothes. Next, let's look at an example of a relative biological cause of
behavior. Take for an example of a man who leaves a house of 70 degrees fahrenheit into
the outdoors of 30 degrees fahrenheit. After entering the cooler environment, he puts on
warmer clothes. What causes the man to put on the warmer clothes? Is it biology? Is it the
environment? Is it the culture? Or is it the interaction of biological and environmental
reasons?
Environmental reasons do play a part. The weather is cold (environment). The man is
living in an age where men who are cold usually put on warmer clothes (culture). And yes,
the interaction of biological (his body's reaction to the cold) and environmental reasons
is the cause of the man putting on warmer clothes. But what was the main reason or
cause of his behavior? It wasn't the environment, for other creatures (polar bears) would
not have to put on clothes to keep warm in cold weather. The low temperature is merely a
cause of secondary nature. But the real and main cause is that the man has biological
limits -- his body can only tolerate a certain degree of coldness. If this man was
biologically constituted differently to withstand lower temperatures, then he would not
have to put on warmer clothes when he entered the cold environment. This is an example of
relative biological causation of behavior because it takes a certain amount of biological
reaction to the cold for him to put on warmer clothes, and the degree of biological
reaction regulates the amount of clothes he puts on himself. It's his body's reaction to
the temperature that causes him to put on the warmer clothes. If he had a biological
reaction to low temperatures like polar bears, then he would not have put on clothes to
warm himself.
Biology is the Main Cause of Sex Behavior
In regard to sexual related behavior, biology is also the main cause of the behavior.
The obvious, of course, is birth. Women give birth because they have the biological
equipment to give birth and because it is needed for the survival of the human race.
Because of this, nature gives women the desire to give birth (psychological hunger) much
like nature gives her the desire (hunger) to eat, and for much the same reason --
survival. The main cause is not because females have traditionally given birth (culture),
but because nature predestinates women to give birth.
Women usually feed and care for their children not merely because it is culturally
taught that they should do this, but because of biological reasons. They have breasts with
milk; men do not. Breast milk is the best food for infants.[97] Women are more nutrimental
towards children than men (proven through comparative culture studies). Women are of less
strength than males, and have other different qualities than men. Thus through various
processes a division of labor was established: women mostly care for children; men mostly
do not care for the children.
Women are usually less physically aggressive than men.[98] This has been proven
repeatedly as hormonally caused. Males have a higher ratios of androgens to estrogens than
females, and males' greater size and strength than females are some of the causes for the
males' greater physical aggression.[99] Cultural conditioning in the eyes of radical
feminists may influence males to be less aggressive than females in an environment where
males are greatly encouraged to be non-aggressive and where females are greatly encouraged
to be physically aggressive. But in reality biology cannot be easily handled in this way.
Bio V. Culture Forces
Although biological drives in mankind have less effect on them than other creatures,
and hence they are more culturally malleable,[100] the innate drives of mankind will
nevertheless win out because innate biological drives are continuous while cultural forces
are arbitrary, discontinuous, and sporadic. I'll repeat, innate biological drives are
continuous while cultural forces are arbitrary, discontinuous, and sporadic.
Nations Against Biology. Groups or nations that allows its males and
females to behave according to their biological tendencies will be more economically
stronger and more emotionally stronger than nations that go against the nature of the
sexes, for the nation that goes against the biologically directed drives of the sexes,
will have to spend too much time and money to condition their population to act against
their inclinations. Not only does such a nation waste time and money but they cause their
people to behave against themselves. This causes internal reaction and possible
detrimental emotional effects. The nation that spends great amounts of time and money on
training men to be maternal and women to be physically aggressive because of some naive
ideological theory, is not doing what is biologically the easiest for the sexes, and thus
is at a great disadvantage to other nations which do not try to fight biology. What does a
group or nation expect when it fights against biology? Does it think Lamarckism (the
theory that characteristics acquired by habit, use, or environment can be genetically
inherited) is a true theory? Does it think culture pressures can change biology?
Talking. Humans speak while lower primates do not. This is so, mainly,
because man is biologically prepared to speak while monkeys are not biologically prepared
to talk.[101] If human infants are reared in an environment where a language is spoken,
then they will talk only because they are biologically prepared to learn the verbal
language, for they have the pertinent built-in biological organization. A monkey doesn't
talk because he is not biologically prepared to speak, not because he is culturally
deprived, for many monkeys are reared in milieus much like human infants, yet they never
learn to talk. Humans are biologically equipped to speak; lower primates are biologically
limited from speaking. Humans are able to speak because their biological make-up enables
them to talk. Granted, the interaction of biological and environmental factors (being
reared in a verbal milieu) causes him or enables him to speak, but the biology of man is
the main reason that he learns to speak. And as we said, one proof of this is that monkeys
can be reared in similar environments and yet they will never learn to talk solely because
of their lack of biological equipment.
Following this line of reasoning, it is also true that when we see consistent differing
behaviors between males and females, we see this because of the biological differences.
Many of the pop-educated say the differences are because of early childhood conditioning
by parents and society. Parents treat sons and daughters differently. But why do parents
sometimes behave differently towards their sons and daughters?:
(1) It is because parents see the outward physical differences;
(2) because parents see the different behavioral reaction from their children due to
their interaction with them;[102]
(3) because they see different energy levels;
(4) because they see different mental and physical abilities;
(5) because parents know their children must eventually fit into and function well in
the existing society in order to survive in quality.
Often women liberators point out some alleged examples of contradiction from
traditional sex behavior as proof that sex differences are conditioned differences. But
when they point to a few supposed examples of contradiction to consistent sexual
differentiated behavior, they prove little as we show herein. Also there are a certain
very small percentage of human beings of either sex who are biologically constructed as
hermaphrodites (those whose biology is sexually ambiguous) and/or as either hormonally
masculinized females or hormonally feminized males.[103] Those who differ from the norm in
some cases do so because their biological sex make-up isn't normal. It should be noted
here that as we show herein the examples of sexual reversals in many cases (if not most,
or all) are biases accounts, or poorly researched and reported accounts of misinterpreted
events. Remember too that these supposed contradictions are far and few between. The
typical and traditional sex differences are in the great majority.
What the Socialization Theory Cannot Explain
As we have tried to show herein the socialization theory cannot explain many aspects of
sex differences. The following are some of the facts that socialization cannot explain:
(1) It can't explain why 99 percent of the world's people live within the hard
traditional sex roles, and always have as far as records show.
(2) It can't explain why sex-differentiation is in the same direction everywhere: most
males act in traditional masculine ways; most females act in traditional feminine ways.
(3) It can't explain the tomboyish behavior of the female androgenized hermaphrodites.
(4) It can't explain the "hyperfeminine" behavior of those with Turner's
syndrome.
(5) It can't explain the sex differences in spatial ability or verbal ability.
(6) It can't explain the differences in the vigor of activity between boys and girls.
(7) It can't explain boys more aggressive, assertive behavior, or their more asocial
behavior than girls.
(8) It can't explain girls more affiliational needs than boys.
(9) It can't explain physical differences between the sexes in such aspects as
strength, height, maturational rate, and so forth.
(10) It can't explain the differences between the male and female brains. (see Brain
Sex & Sex and the Brain, and Chapter 4 of this work)
Conclusions on Sex Role Development
Sex roles are the way they are in this world because:
(1) Biology limits and prepares each sex in different ways which in the
long run has produced the hard traditional gender roles we have today. The traditional sex
roles cut across all cultures because biology has dictated limits to how far each sex can
stray from their innate behavioral tendencies.
(2) Biology limits and causes a bio-cultural pattern of behavior. Since
males and females are biologically dissimilar everywhere in the world, their biology
limits and causes a universal bio-cultural pattern among mankind.
(3) This bio-cultural pattern is incorporated within the thoughts and
institutions of mankind. The incorporation of behavioral patterns within the
thoughts and institutions of mankind reinforces and magnifies the behavior patterns.
(4) The parents reared in the universal bio-cultural pattern, teach their
children, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, to behave
according to their proper gender roles.
(5) The children accept their assigned gender roles because their sex
pertinent innate influences make it easy for them to accept their sex assigned roles.
(6) If parents fail to rear their children in the traditional sex roles,
for ideological reasons or from ignorance, then the children are hampered in their
development by: (a) their opposing innate biological drives; (b) the opposing cultural
pressures from those properly reared.
(7) If a whole society goes against the historical reality of traditional sex
roles, then that society helps to destroy itself because: (a) the society drives
each individual against their innate biological drives (which weakens the individual); and
(b) the society because of (a) falls behind other societies in productivity since too much
energy is used to promote their ideology and to fight against their biology.
In summary, we see that biology is the main cause of behavior. Although
it is true that cultural and other environmental factors have a part in affecting
behavior, the interaction of biology and milieu is not the main cause of behavior. A horse
acts different from a lion mainly because of its biological construction not because of
environmental factors. Men and women are different because of biology, not because of
culture. Men and women think differently because they each perceive the world differently:
there is a male brain; there is a female brain. (see next chapter)
Now let's turn to sexual differences and their biological connection.
References for Chapter 3
[1] is 109 of the Bibliography list
[2] 95
[3] 36; 85
[4] 207
[5] 49
[6] 49
[7] 86
[8] p. 1451 in 111
[9] p. 260 in 35
[10] p. 261 in 35
[11] p. 260 in 35
[12] p. 259 in 35
[13] pp. 259-260 in 35
[14] p. 16 in 109
[15] p. 293 in 109
[16] 184
[17] p. 53 in 110
[18] p. 389, 392, 395 in 110
[19] p. 246ff in 110
[20] p. 377 in 110
[21] p. 377 in 110
[22] p. 387 in 110
[23] p. 395 in 110
[24] pp. 389-395 in 110
[25] 20
[26] pp. 321-322 in 138
[27] pp. 395-396 in 110
[28] 190
[29] p. 392 in 110
[30] p. 1438 in 111
[31] pp. 462-463 in 4
pp. 158-160 in 151
[32] 91
[33] p. 111 in 109
p. 1441 in 111
[34] p. 1439 in 111
[35] 160 & 161
[36] pp. 54-55, 114-115, 170, 175,
182, 186-191, 226-227, 234 in 109
p. 1439 in 111
[37] pp. 49, 132-133, 173
183-184, 246 in 109
pp. 322-323 in 138
pp. 636-637 in 142
[38] pp. 389, 392, 396 in 110
pp. 37-39, 54, 168, 180,
227, 237 in 109
[39] pp. 176ff in 38
[40] pp. 188ff in 38
[41] pp 252-255 in 109
[42] p. 1437, footnote in 111
[43] in 189
[44] p. 220 in 54
[45] pp. 225ff in 54
[46] pp. 221, 223 in 54;
pp. 133ff in 168
[47] pp. 227ff in 54
chapter 5 in 168
[48] pp. 130, 134, 72 in 168
p. 55 in 11
[49] 172
[50] p. 9 in 98
[51] pp. 128-129 in 98
[52] pp. 178 ff in 38; 64
pp. 80ff in 22; 98
[53] pp. 221-230 in 173
[54] pp. 567, 568, 572 in 64
[55] p. 82 in 22
[56] 22; 64; 89; 98; 173
[57] 76; see 122
[58] 86
[59] 45
[60] 76
[61] p. 5 in 120
[62] 122
[63] p. 1-2, chap. 6 in 120
[64] chapter 6 in 120
[65] p. 114 in 120
[66] 75
[67] 76
[68] 120
[69] 119; pp. 111-114 in 120
[70] 120; 76
[71] 75
[72] 44
[73] 24
[74] 45
[75] 120
[76] 30
[77] 109
[78] 100
[79] p. 493 in 196
[80] 112
[81] 188
[82] p. 145 in 156
[83] 19
[84] pp. 206-207 in 14
[85] pp. 33-34 in 9
[86] chapter 35 in 192
[87] pp. 100-101 in 192; 79
[88] pp. 100-101, 339-341 in 192;
214
[89] 186; 203
[90] 210
[91] 210; 97
[92] 210
[93] p. 276 in 90
[94] 55
[95] 135 see latest almanac
[96] (Modesto Bee, Aug 25, 1988)
[97] 120; 151; 191; 7;
etc.
[98] 131
[99] pp. 323ff in 133
[100] pp. 108ff in 86; 61; 152; 120; etc.
[101] pp. 292ff in 18
[102] 157
[103] 124
[104] 120; 212
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