I know, I know. I have complained about repetitive interview questions, but the truth is that is order for people to open their minds and let go of gender stereotypes, those of us who do this work must answer those questions over and over. Besides, every once in a while, we get one of those really fun interviews with someone we can share a laugh with, along with the information.


Last May, I had one of those interviews, with Shankar Vedantam of NPR’s Hidden Brain. We met at my local mall and strolled around the kids department in Macy’s, chatting about pink and blue, pockets/no pockets, and the missing character on the boys’ Star Wars T-shirts. (Can you guess who it was?) It was a double blast because inside I was fangirling like a twelve-year old. Hidden Brain is one of my favorite podcasts: smart, well-paced, and slickly produced like an audio documentary. And Shankar Vedantam is a great interviewer and host; being on his Rolodex was a dream come true.


So enjoy the podcast episode. Bonus: now I know how Lise Eliot (Pink Brain, Blue Brain) pronounces her name.

For my earlier posts on the RompHim (TM), see Part 1 and Part 2.

What is the appeal of rompers? The original rompers were designed as playclothes for infants and toddlers as a time when the standard clothing for children under the age of five years was dresses. Like dresses, rompers were one-piece, which was desirable for mothers who believed that children could be "spoiled" by too much handling. Compared with ankle-length skirts worn by young walkers, rompers allowed more freedom of movement. That's fine, but we now have many other options, and we no longer believe that babies are harmed by being handled in the process of getting dressed. But the image of romper as a childish style persisted, and has influenced adult casual wear. ​

Rompers, jumpsuits, overalls and the like all have a few advantages that make them attractive enough to appear in the fashion pages on a regular basis. They also have aesthetic and practical drawbacks that each generation seems destined to rediscover. To begin with the advantages:

​If you follow social media, you've seen the story about the leggings ban on United Airlines. This Reuters article is the most thorough reporting I have seen on the subject. I will quote from their excellent coverage:

Watts reported what she witnessed -- or thought she witnessed, and social media caught fire.

I have a friend who works in transportation who commented on Facebook that even though he works for a different employer, the same rules apply. Enforcement seems to be left up to someone at the gate, which was part of the problem, not unlike when vague school dress codes are interpreted by teachers and administrators. The issue also seems to have been resolved -- eventually -- so I will confine my comments to generalities, rather than the United situation.

The courts have ruled, over the last forty years or so, that employers are well within their rights in establishing dress codes to enforce a pleasing, uniform appearance, as long as the rules did not prevent a class of people (men, women, African Americans, Muslims) from being able to gain employment. Leisure wear and sloppy or revealing clothing is usually prohibited, though what Americans consider "leisure" is a moving target, and the line between "sloppy" and "casual" is practically invisible at times, and "revealing" -- forget trying to define that, beyond nudity.

In my study of dress code litigation in the 1960s and 70s, I found that the authorities usually argued that conformity and submission to rules was especially necessary for boys and young men. Girls’ dress codes, in contrast, placed a premium on modesty. The rhetoric in the dress codes reinforced this distinction.  Boys’ regulations were more likely to mention “conventional” standards; girls' restrictions were more likely to mention "revealing" styles or parts of the body that should be covered. Not much has changed since then; men and women are still expected to abide by gender rules that are very different. The rules for women dictate careful management of an image balanced between girlish/ladylike and seductive. For men, there is very little space or place for sexual display, or even individual expression. Instead, boys and men are trained to operate with a very limited visual range. 

Recently, I have been asked if leggings are pants. (Sort of, but some of them function more like a combination of stockings and foundation garments.) I have also been asked if they are going to go out of style. (Most likely; doesn't everything?) I know some school administrators and parents who will be very relieved when they do. Until they see the Next Big Thing.

​    Children are born into an intersectional network of culture. In addition to being surrounded by racism, classism, religious and political beliefs, and myriad other norms, children learn to define and shape their gender identities according to prevailing gender rules which are predicated on a binary. According to the binary view, there are two sexes: male and female, and two genders: masculine and feminine. (The first is anti-science, and the second defies common sense, but the binary exists, nonetheless.) However, boys AND girls are influenced by girly culture, and girls AND boys are shaped by masculine culture. Consider the cultural landscapes and boundaries marked by pink and blue. A firm knowledge of girly culture is required for boys to avoid being contaminated by femininity or anything associated with women and girls. Pink identifies “girly culture” for both girls and boys. Pink is visual femininity repellent for the very young boy.
    If all we need to protect the fragile masculinity of boys is a visual culture (pink-unicorns-sparkles) that signifies GIRL so clearly that no child under the age of six months will ever mistake one for the other, why do we need blue? In some ways, we don’t; we just need not-pink. It’s been clear for me for some time that pink and blue are not just opposite equivalents, functionally.

What do men learn from boy culture? (Little macho culture? Machito culture? Still looking for the right word!)

According to some of my male friends and former students (a very small convenience sample)* , they learn:

• a boy is not a girl
• a boy should never be mistaken for a girl
• boys should have nothing to do with girly things 
• boys should play with boys doing machito things
• machito things are more exciting and interesting than girly things
• boys are better than girls
• boys who are like girls or who like girly things are sick/bad/scary

,*Many thanks to ZS, CC, and WW for their contributions!

I would add to this my own observation that boys also learn that girls who are like boys or who like machito things, can be good friends, but that boys should never allow them to win.

       Have you ever had your neural synapses re-wired? I love when that happens. In this case, I was reading a non-fashion book and BOOM, there was the answer to a question lurking in my brain. (From my upcoming presentation at the Popular Culture Association meeting in Seattle.)

       Since the 1950s, it has become commonplace to define sex as biological and gender as culture. According to one medical dictionary,

Sex is "The biologic character or quality that distinguishes male and female from one another as expressed by analysis of the person's gonadal, morphologic (internal and external), chromosomal, and hormonal characteristics."
    Gender is "The category to which an individual is assigned by self or others, on the basis of sex."

     As some feminist biologists have argued, the way in which we assign sex, whether at birth or after examining a grainy sonogram image, is itself cultural. Ignoring chromosomes, hormones, and internal anatomy, we assign sex based on external genitalia. We then surround babies with gendered sights, sounds, and interactions that, we are now learning, influences brain development. Instead of nature and nurture as separate forces, biology and culture work together to create us first as male and female, and then as masculine and feminine.  That is only part of the larger picture that includes other forces and experiences that we incorporate into our sense of self and belonging. These forces include not only sexism, but racism, classism, and -- most relevant to this paper -- ageism. What is the relationship between the categories we use for ourselves and our beliefs about those categories?

      In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that race is the child of racism — that the way we define and categorize race comes from a racism -- a deep belief in the innate superiority a dominant group. This not only resonates with me in terms of race, but so many other categories of difference. It could follow that class is the child of classism, gender is the child of sexism, and age is the child of ageism. The way we define and delineate age categories stem from cultural beliefs about the life course, that, like the beliefs about gender and race, are not so much biological truths as the result of our selective assumptions and expectations about biological events.  Yes, we as humans experience birth, puberty, menopause, and death, but the way we envision our lives’ progress or decline through these events is shaped by culture. What is  the “right”age for a boy to wear a dress -- “up to age four” or “only when he is christened”? This same principle applies to notions of what constitutes “age appropriate” clothing for girls and women across the lifespan, and it is the focus of my next book.

      Learning to be female is not a weekend workshop or even a four-year-degree program. It is a lifelong process of education in the truest sense — being led into each life stage along a cultural path shaped by beliefs about aging and gender. We continually measure ourselves against mass -mediated images of female  and standards of femininity.

Forgive the lazy post, but it was the first week of classes, I am in the middle of reviewing the page proof for Sex and Unisex, and I am being dogged by three other projects all with deadlines on or around September 15. In the meantime, the news items about dress and gender just won't take a break! Here are a few that distracted me long enough to read, even though there was not time to add commentary.

Rastafarian High School Student Sent Home From School For Ten Days For Having Dreadlocks (ThinkProgress, 9/4/2014)

School Dress Codes: The Funny-Not-Funny Video You Have to See (Soraya Chemaly for the Huffington Post, 9/5/2014)

Hear Us Roar: Finding Feminism in Fashion (Maya Singer for Style.com, 9/5/2014)

Tell Me About It: Boy who likes ‘girl’ things needs guidance, not shame (Carolyn Hax, syndicated, 9/5/2014)

OK, a little bit of commentary. Carolyn Hax's response to the concerned auntie contained brightened my dreary, ink-spattered life.

Indeed!

I couldn't resist, and maybe you couldn't, either. Quizdoo posted a "What is Your True Gender" quiz, and of course I had to take it. Here are my results.

For anyone who knows me, this is hardly surprising. I am not now and never have been a girly girl, but I do like my rom coms and chocolate. My fashion preferences are solid color basics (and lots of them) with a few carefully-selected prints added to relieve the boredom.

So what's the problem with the quiz? (Besides the sad confusion of sex and gender in the title.) If you guessed the hidden binary, you're right! After all, the possibilities are essentially female, male, or a combination of the two. So whoever made up the quiz was visualizing gender as a line with masculinity and femininity as opposites. They do get extra points for recognizing that between the male and female extremes there might be a continuum, but it still perpetuates a binary, oppositional model of masculine and feminine. Fo years ago, psychologist Sandra Bem introduced a new model that, while still based on the gender binary, made much more sense to me.

Instead of a line with femininity and masculinity at either end, she proposed a model with a feminine axis and a masculine axis, creating four quadrants. The upper left quadrant she labelled "feminine" and the lower right, "masculine". The opposite diagonal represents all the people who would end up in the middle of the binary model, but she considered another possibility: some people are neither very masculine nor very feminine ("undifferentiated"), and others might score highly on BOTH measures ("androgynous"). She also developed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), an instrument designed to measure individuals gender identities and sort them into one of the four axes in her model. (You can take a version of it here.)

My results from the quiz would place me in the middle of the binary model, slightly toward the masculine end. My BSRI results:

locate me in the upper right, "androgynous" quadrant, since I identify fairly strongly with both masculine and feminine traits. The BSR I is hardly the last word. After all, it was created over 40 years ago, and it still retained a skeletal binary framework. But before you take your Quizdoo results too seriously, consider just what a multidimensional wonder each of us is.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it isn't the signifiers, it's what they signify. OK, I haven't said that before in so many words, but it is the underlying theme in all of my work. The problem is the binary. Humans seem to love catagorical thinking and the gender binary is one of the most powerful set of sorting boxes we have.

The problem is that the boy-girl binary has no basis in science. Even if you only sort babies by their outsides, some will end up as "other". If you add in chromosomal or hormonal analysis, the binary falls apart.

So why reinforce it? Why ENFORCE it? Because doing so is cute/fun/harmless/traditional?

As this article clearly shows, enforcing the binary is far from harmless. For the thousands of intersex individuals surgically reassigned as infants, insinuating on either-or was devastating. It's time to bury the binary.

Although I have been buried in copy edits, the latest media explosion about a transgender child has been a hard story to ignore. Here is the video about 7-year-old Ryland Whittington, which has gone viral:

Here is a very short article about them posted to the "Good Morning, America" website. And here is one of the many (many) negative, judgemental reactions to the video and their story. 

One of my (very astute) former students nudged me on Twitter, wondering about my stake on the story. As I am fond of pointing out, I am a historian, not a psychologist. I am going to take the lazy way out and post a long quote from the last chapter of my book.

Then I saw this comment. *sigh*