Talking about sex differences is America's second favorite indoor sport. (The first is practicing them.) Women wonder why little boys love guns, dump trucks and robots, why men hog the remote and why their husbands don't talk about their feelings. Men wonder why women talk so much about feelings and don't just get on with it. Maybe, we privately think, scientists really will one day discover a techno-gizmo gene on the Y chromosome and a recessive verbo-blather gene on the X. Everyone is fascinated by sex differences, and that's the problem for researchers who study them. More than any other topic of inquiry, we live this one--in our beds, boardrooms, playgrounds, kitchens--so we all have our favorite theories that fit our experiences and prejudices. Scientists, though, must confront what they call "the paradox of gender": the fact that while they are rummaging around in their laboratories trying to find sex differences and locate their origins, in the outside world sex differences rise and fall (so to speak) as rapidly as hemlines and stock prices. A mere 40 years ago, for example, who could have predicted the blurring of gender rules and roles we see now? What would Ozzie and Harriet have made of basketball star Dennis Rodman, sashaying around in outfits appropriate for several different genders; the growing political activism of transsexuals, intersexuals and bisexuals; sex chat rooms on the Internet; hard-muscled women running marathons; and soft-hearted men changing their babies' diapers? In The Two Sexes, Eleanor E. Maccoby, professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has taken a terrific stab at the paradox of gender. The most important theme of her book is that the behavior we attribute to gender is not a matter of individual personality; it is an emergent property of relationships and groups. What people say, what they do and how they speak with members of their own sex differ considerably from how they behave when the other sex is around. Maccoby threw a hand grenade into her field of developmental psychology years ago when she showed that gender differences in children couldn't be accounted for by personality traits but rather by the gender composition of a group. Little girls aren't "passive" as some ingrained quality, for example; they are passive only when boys are present. This approach shows why traditional efforts to measure sex differences in terms of individual traits or abilities (empathy, vanity, submissiveness, intelligence, math abilities and so forth) are fruitless and become quickly dated. Sex differences that show up in any study tend to be artifacts of education, power, the immediate social context and the historical moment, which is why they wax and wane with the times. For example, "female intuition" about other people is actually subordinate's intuition: both sexes are equally intuitive when they have to read a superior's mood, nonverbal signals or intentions--and equally thick-headed, when they are the bosses, about their subordinates' feelings. Maccoby sets out to explain the great mystery of gender development: the virtually universal existence of gender segregation among children, which remains impervious to the best efforts of egalitarian-minded parents and teachers. Boys and girls will play together if adults require them to, although it's often "side-by-side" play, in which each does his or her own thing, but given their druthers, children self-segregate. The result, Maccoby argues, is the emergence of a "girls' culture" and a "boys' culture" that are strikingly different in play styles, toy preferences and ways of interacting. Before long, as with any two nations, schools or ethnic groups, boys and girls identify with their own in-group, they stereotype and disparage members of the out-group, and they misunderstand or feel uncomfortable with the other group's ways of doing things. The most puzzling fact about the two cultures of gender, however, is their asymmetry. Boys' groups, Maccoby shows, are "more cohesive than girls' groups: more sexist, more exclusionary, more vigilant about gender-boundary violations by their members, and more separate from adult culture." Throughout childhood, as throughout life, there are fewer penalties for girls who encroach on boys' turf and who like to do boy things than for boys who venture onto girls' territory. And so the great question is: Why? Why are children, in the words of sociologist John H. Gagnon, the Gender Police, enforcing rigid stereotypes that many of their parents have long discarded? Why do they behave differently with their own sex than with the other? And what, if anything, is the link between childhood and adulthood, considering how many members of the Gender Police eventually become gender criminals, breaking as many gender rules as they can, or gender revolutionaries, trying to rewrite the rules altogether? Maccoby's answers are both timely and old-fashioned, falling squarely between two antithetical trends in the current study of gender. Opposite or Other? One, the oldest empirical tradition, takes an essentialist approach. Essentialists regard a gender-related attitude, trait or behavior as being something embedded in the person--internal, persistent, consistent across situations and time--and thus they tend to regard the sexes as "opposites": men are aggressive, women pacifistic; men are rational, women emotional. The most extreme version of essentialism is represented by pop-psychologist John Gray, who thinks men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But here on Earth all kinds of other notions of inherent sexual opposition are widespread. For Jungians and psychoanalysts, men and women are guided by opposite archetypes and unconscious dynamics. For some feminist psychologists, men and women have inherently different ways of knowing, ways of speaking, ways of moral reasoning and the like. For neuroscientists, men's and women's brains operate differently. For sociobiologists, male promiscuity and female monogamy are opposite, hard-wired reproductive strategies. (When sociobiologists learned that the males of many species are nurturant and monogamous and the females of most species are promiscuous, they reconnoitered and decided that these reproductive strategies too are adaptive.) In contrast, researchers who take a social constructionist approach vigorously dispute all forms of essentialism. Social constructionists hold that there is no "essence" of masculinity and femininity, for these concepts and labels are endlessly changing, constructed from the eye of the observer and from the historical and economic conditions of our lives. "Opposition," for example, is a social construction, not an empirical reality; it is a stereotype that blinds us to the greater evidence of gender similarity. Are men rational? Sure, except in love, war and sporting events. Are women unaggressive? Sure, unless you define "aggressiveness" as the intention to harm another, in which case they don't differ from men. Constructionists regard gender as a performance, not an attribute. People don't have a gender, they do gender, which is why their behavior changes so much depending on the situation. A teenage boy may "do" masculine when he's with a pack of his male friends but "do" feminine by tenderly caring for his baby brother (if his friends aren't watching). For the constructionists, therefore, the really interesting news about gender lies not in the traditional oppositional categories but in the increasingly diverse and growing numbers of people who aren't conforming to the categories at all. Even to the fundamental categories of male and female: biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and others have shown that human dimorphism is neither as obvious nor as universal as most people believe. The number of "intersexed" infants born with anatomical, hormonal or genotypic ambiguities is about 2 percent of all live births--a small percentage, but many thousands of individuals. Recent books in this genre include Suzanne J. Kessler's Lessons from the Intersexed, Marianne van den Wijngaard's Reinventing the Sexes and Alice D. Dreger's Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Maccoby, calling her book The Two Sexes, is not remotely interested in the "transgender" research that is revolutionizing gender studies; she finds the whole subject tangential to the question of male-female differences. Yet she also rejects biological reductionism and other essentialist ideas of opposition. She refers always to the "other" sex, never the "opposite" sex; she never assumes that biology is the whole story, emphasizing repeatedly that it interacts with experience and culture. For example, childhood sex segregation may be universal, but it differs in form and degree depending on culture. Societies in which men clearly have higher status than women, Maccoby reports, are those in which boys make "the earliest and strongest efforts to distance themselves from women and girls--from their own mothers, as well as from other females." In the second part of her book, Maccoby reviews the voluminous research on biological factors, socialization practices and cognitive processes that might explain the mystery of children's self-segregation. Many of the findings here are fascinating. For instance, sex segregation does not originate because boys have a greater "activity level," as commonly believed. In fact, boys aren't more physically active than girls when children are playing on their own. But when boys play with other boys, they become more excited and aroused than girls do and by different things: threats, challenges and competition. High rates of male activity are a consequence of male-male play, not a cause. Besides, activity levels decline from ages four to six, when gender segregation steadily increases. Maccoby, a scrupulous scientist, gives us a state-of-the-art review of the research, not a cohesive argument designed to support a thesis. In this age of simplistic pop-psych overgeneralizations, her caution and scholarly rigor are refreshing. Yet readers may occasionally get lost in the dense thickets of evidence for and against each line of explanation. I felt I was eating many delicious raisins while being denied the satisfaction of a whole piece of cake. The third section of the book, in which Maccoby examines the links between childhood and adulthood, is the weakest, perhaps because of her own ambivalence. On the one hand, she argues that the gender segregation established in childhood and the asymmetrical cultural differences that result from it persist in many adult contexts, including the workforce and men's and women's habits, preferences and disputes. Many men don't listen to their wives, Maccoby suggests, for the same reason that little boys refuse to be influenced by little girls. On the other hand, she subtitles her book "Growing up Apart, Coming Together," which accurately reflects the fact that vast changes in men's and women's relationships have occurred "in spite of, rather than because of, the way boys and girls are socialized by their parents"--and in spite of, I might add, sex differences in hormones or alleged brain function. Among adults, circumstances and experiences supersede the maturational pull of genes and hormones and even the socializing pull of parental instruction. That is why a random group of 50-year-olds is more diverse than a group of five-year-olds and why adults today find themselves doing things they once would never have imagined for themselves. And it's why Maccoby's generalizations about adults seem flat and stereotypic (although certainly they have an element of truth), in contrast to her brilliant portrayal of children. The war between essentialists and constructionists is bound to continue, and this book will provide ammunition for both sides. But perhaps the war between men and women will find a lasting truce if, as Maccoby hopes, we understand that men and women don't have to be the same in order to be equal--in opportunities, income or love.
