First, all mothers panic about the effect they may have had on their children but I know better than to try and persuade you that you did no damage then and certainly no lasting damage. I remember that when my friend's daughter was about 4 she simply would not accept the idea that my partner and I lived together and were not married. The world was strictly divided into unmarried people who lived alone and married people who lived in pairs (lesbian and straight, by the way). Even when she saw our apartment she didn't believe it (one bedroom was mine and the other was my partner's, according to her - despite the fact that "mine" was clearly an office). Then she saw that we both had the same cat. She had accepted that we weren't married and for some reason the sharing of the cat persuaded her that we were a couple.
But I think your admonition to your kids of finding a woman rather than a man if they were lost sort of supports my point. We know that men are much more likely to be criminals than women and much, much, much more likely to be pedophiles than women. This is true in all cultures and has never, to my knowledge, not been true. That one gender is associated with sexual violence almost exclusively is, I think, strong evidence of the different sexuality between men and women. Men just objectify much more easily than women do and I don't think there can be any question about that, given the mountain of behavioral evidence.
boddi
On 11/17/05, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I used to think I had it all straight about gender. Then, when my
> daughter was about two years old, playing one of the many "what is it"
> kind of games one plays with two-year olds, I asked her to tell me
> whether so and so was a boy or girl. She seemed a little confused by the
> question. I don't remember whether she got the first question "right" or
> not, but continued questioning revealed that she was getting about 1 out
> of 4 "wrong." I distinctly remember that she guessed Grandma was a boy;
> otherwise, I don't remember the specifics. What I will never forget is
> the extreme anxiety she experienced after this conversation. Formerly
> careless about her dress, she now swung into a anxiously hyper-feminine
> phase, and for the next couple of years would not step out of the house
> except in frilly dresses, jewlery, and every other mark of "femaleness"
> that could be scrounged around the house. I took a deep breath and just
> went with it because this is the kind of mistake (mine) that you can't
> just back out of. You kind of just have to let it run its course. By the
> time she was five, she was once again extremely comfortable wearing
> whatever the occasion (rather than ideology) demanded, and she has been
> fine since.
>
> What this taught me is to let the whole gender thing go. And when the
> issue of correct labeling or intrinsic difference comes up, what mainly
> interests me is "why do you want to know"? I can think of four cases
> right off the bat where knowing makes a difference:
>
> -- If I'm a doctor, I would probably be interested in whether a patient
> is male or female, because they present illness in different ways. For
> example, generally, men have very different symptoms for heart attacks
> than women.
>
> -- If I'm a woman trying to get pregnant, then I'm very interested in
> whether my mate is physically capable of making that happen.
>
> -- When I tell my kids what to do if they get lost in a crowd, I say
> "ask a woman for help. It's much safer. And I trust them to be able to
> find a woman....by the conventional signs...in the crowd."
>
> -- If I were a psychoanalyst, I feel that I would need to know both what
> gender a patient is perceived as belonging to and which they perceive
> themselves to belong to; and I also want to know about all their
> gender-related fantisizing and imaginings -- because it's a deep and
> pervasive psychic metaphor.
>
> Otherwise, I'm not sure why I would need to know or why it would matter.
>
> Joanna
>
>
>
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