What to Expect When You Already Know What the Heck You're Expecting

Are boys inherently criminals who are uncaring, unloving, and unable to be empathic?  An overwhelming majority of criminals are male, all American executioners are male, and (as discussed last month after the shocking shooting of Rep. Giffords) most American assassins are males.  And reading "What To Expect in the First Year" when my son entered his 12th month, it's not very hard to see why.

A reader asked the authors of the book about her 11-month-old boy who, instead of bonding with a baby doll, was throwing the doll against a wall.  What to Expect (hereafter WTF) responds, "Sexual equality is an ideal whose time has come, but sexual sameness is an ideal whose time never can come..."

Oh the sexism...  Let's start at the beginning.

1. This woman's son doesn't know what a doll is, much less that he is throwing it at a wall.  These are experiments in gravity and physics, not some kind of rejection of fatherhood.  By insinuating that the son's throwing of this doll at 11 months is proof that he is already gendered as a traditional masculine boy, the authors of WTF are showing us how eager they are to protect traditional masculinity.  As the stay-at-home dad of a 1-year-old, I can assure you that he would just as soon cuddle with a soccer ball as throw a doll against a wall, and the girl 1-year-old contingent is equally likely to commit violence on their dolls as my son.
2. The impossibility of what the authors call "sexual sameness" is a statistical mirage.  While it is true that there is a difference between AVERAGE boys and AVERAGE girls, any individual boy is as different from other boys as girls (see Elise Eliot's, "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" for overwhelming evidence of this fact proven by an MIT professor of neuroscience).  At the high end, the differences between boys and girls on any given trait is a five to three ratio.  So while this is impossible to calculate, at least 30% of all boys are more caring and loving than 50% of all girls.  Just as Lindsey Vonn can ski faster than (say) all of the guys on the slopes who think they are the fastest thing to hit snow since an avalanche, it is equally true that your son can may be able to cuddle and kiss any girl baby on the block.  The gender differences that we encounter on a day-to-day basis are so unremarkable as to be almost entirely impossible to notice.  Think about it, for every 5 boys that you meet who are aggressive, you will meet 3 girls who are also aggressive.  Dr. Eliot points out that this is not enough of a consistent difference to make decisions about our children's lives, but...



Difference between boys' and girls' math scores.




3. unfortuantely we do make decisions about our children's lives based on exactly these loose statistical likelihoods everyday.  In fact, WTF is stating clear as day that I should assume that my son is not one of the 3 boys who is more loving than 5 girls, but one of the 5 boys who is more aggressive than 5 girls.  The statement seems like nonesense because it is nonsense.
4. But worse than being nonsense, it is downright offensive!  Fifty years ago there was a common belief (unbacked by actual science) that girls were bad drivers.  If this 11-month-old were a girl who repeatedly crashed a toy truck into the wall, the appropriate correlation would be to say that girls are just bad drivers from birth and there is nothing that you can do about it.  The very idea that my 11-month-old son already knows what a baby doll represents and is determined to commit violence upon that doll is remarkably disturbing and a flat out lie.  Boys as well as girls are being trained to be parents.  Fathers are important parts of our society and they all come (quite naturally) from baby boys.  Fathers do not throw their babies' against walls and they do love them so much that they would happily walk into a burning building to try to keep them from feeling any more pain than is utterly necessary.  What to Expect, an otherwise excellent resource when kept in context, is unfortunately an agent of pain for parents who are being told that violence is an inherent part of being a boy but love, kisses, and cuddling are not.

If a baby girl would have thrown a baby doll into a wall repeatedly, it would be assumed that she was just too young to know what a baby doll represents, but when my son does it WTF (an parents across America) ignores all the evidence to assume that he is inherently violent.  These assumptions have ways of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.  Boys are given toys that they are supposed to like, violent toys about war and battles, and they are encouraged to play at the games that they are supposed to like by their parents, their teachers, and (most likely for we liberal minded parents) their peers.  In a study of Asian girls, when the girls were told that the study was being conducted to test the ability of Asians to do math, the girls scores soared, but when the Asian kids were told that the study was about the ability of girls to do math, the Asian student's scores dived (see actual difference between boys' and girls' math scores above).  If the entire society believes hard enough that boys will grow up to become the majority of criminals, then we can get together to create those criminals.

Be on notice...  we men who are liberated will walk into burning buildings to stop people from making the assumption that our sons are inherently violent, and you can either join us by helping to liberate a man (or boy) in your life, or you can get out of the way.