I tend to believe that much (though not all) of what passes for gender difference is culturally encoded (if not determined) and brought out situationally. So I should have been prepared to find much commonality with Pollack, another narcissistic and self-indulgent writer-type; with Stracher, a lawyer, law professor and writer struggling with the personal and economic fallout of cutting back on work in order to make it home at least five nights a week to cook dinner for his kids; and to a lesser extent with Lerman, a much more testosterone-y kind of a character, who left a career in journalism and as the co-executive producer of “America’s Most Wanted” to stay home full-time with his preschool-aged son. They’d all rejected traditional fatherhood to become, in a certain sense, “moms.”
and
On the surface, this profound identification with the dads was vindicating: it validated what I’ve tried to say in the past – that men’s and women’s human similarities are far more meaningful and significant than their sex-specific differences...Yet on some other level it was vaguely troubling: Am I less a woman for finding the best depiction of how I experience myself as a mother in the voice of a dad? The words “Stockholm Syndrome” intruded upon my thoughts.
Seriously. I really do not believe in the idea that men and women are fundamentally emotionally different, a view typified in the vulgar extreme by "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus". I think that our emotional responses and general mental age and health are strongly conditioned by society, and as such, Society has different expectations of men and women. Society however is not entirely an independent entity, it is certainly a greater force than the sum of its parts, but it is ultimately made up of men and women. Ergo, men and women impose and propagate, or have imposed and have propagated, certain gender expectations that result in this artificial perception of deep-down-difference between men and women.
Some might say, probably rightly, that men did most of the original imposing, but women have had a share in the propagating and now we spend so much time and energy debunking unpleasant-and untrue- stereotypes. I do not know how or why these roles were allotted to the genders in the first place, there is any amount of tired, hackneyed, insightful, intelligent or just plain hokey literature out there that addresses the subject, and all of you are smart and erudite enough to know the speculations on the subject. Maybe because I am a biologist, I cannot understand the idea that men and women are deeply different. At all. We are all human (boo!) and most of the so-called gender-specific emotional differences can as easily be explained by cultural forces, nationality, education and even religion.
Classic "male" emotions? Competitiveness, aggression, directness, ambition, drive, being opinionated-I have just described the attributes almost every scientist I know. Male or female. Classic "female" emotions? Caring, empathy, nurture, gentleness, tolerance, love of gossip-I have described attributes of most of my friends, male or female, and of many of the important men in my life. Human emotions they all are, and all of us have felt them all in some degree or the other at some point in our lives. Understanding all these emotions is easy once they are placed in the realm of our own experience. Why then mystify the feeler of the emotion by filing them away under a gender stereotype?
