DELUSIONS OF GENDER

I would like all my feminist friends to read this book. (Actually, I’d like everyone to read this book, but I’m trying to be realistic.) As someone who believes gender is a social construct, it’s a little discouraging to reach childbearing age and hear from a million different people, friends and cultural pundits alike, “I used to think that, too, until I had a kid and realized differences between girls and boys are totally innate! I tried to raise my son/daughter gender-neutral and he turned everything into a gun/she turned everything into a doll!” Thank goodness for the wry, reasonable voice of Cordelia Fine, who in this book, subtitled How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, handily debunks the pervasive scientific myth that gender stereotypes are rooted in actual hard-wired differences between men’s and women’s brains. Instead, she demonstrates that those stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in human culture that they color every survey, psychological study, neurological experiment, and expert analysis, as well as our own thoughts and actions.

Good news: The human mind is incredibly adaptive! Bad news: It loves to adapt to society’s expectations, even against our conscious will. (For instance, women perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests after being told that women usually perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests—or even after simply being asked to check a box indicating their sex at the beginning of the test—than those given no gender cues.) In an environment so completely saturated with gender tropes, is it any wonder that one parent’s well-intentioned purchase of a toy fire truck for her daughter or a pink sweater for his son isn’t enough to reverse the barrage of traditional-gender-role messages from all other sources? After all, gender is the central signifier we use when identifying babies (as the rigid pink and blue dichotomy makes clear), and studies have shown that gender stereotyping begins even before birth (pregnant women who knew the sex of their babies characterized the strength and frequency of their kicks accordingly—calling the boys more “strong” and “athletic” and the girls more “calm” and “quiet”—even though fetal monitoring showed no difference). It should be no surprise, then, that small children quickly pick up on the fact that their gender seems to be of the utmost importance to the adults around them, minutely study the smallest clues as to how boys and girls are “supposed” to behave, and then do their best to conform. Gender differentiation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is usually a topic guaranteed to make me both righteously indignant and depressed, but those feelings were leavened by sheer glee at watching Fine so methodically demolish biased studies, pseudoscience, and the distorting sensationalism of the media in her measured, well-researched, yet incisively witty prose. Although the overall tone is serious, Fine’s frequent displays of sardonic humor and occasional sparkles of self-deprecating personal asides reminded me of Mary Roach, my all-time fave science writer. For instance:

When I tell parents that I’m writing a book about gender, the most common response I get is an anecdote about how they tried gender-neutral parenting, and it simply didn’t work. (The next most frequent reaction is a polite edging away.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Delusions of Gender and will definitely check out Fine’s earlier neuroscience title, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.

PEGASUS

I’ve been putting off writing about this because, honestly, I’m a bit embarrassed to have read a book called Pegasus. I mean, it sounds very My Little Pony, doesn’t it? Right from the first line:

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus. 

But this book is by Robin McKinley, author of The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, and many other YA classics I have loved since my preteen years, and she is messing with you with that first line, because the next sentence begins:

This had been a part of the treaty between the pegasi and the human invaders nearly a thousand years ago… 

In the world McKinley depicts, the pegasi are not cuddly, pastel Lisa-Frank-style winged horses, but intelligent beings with their own intricate civilization (including a semi-telepathic language, agriculture, history, and beautiful arts and crafts that they create with tiny proto-hands) who share their land with humans in exchange for protection against incursions of various monsters. The arrangement includes a system of binding ceremonies pairing royal/noble humans with royal/noble pegasi of the same age. This is intended to promote understanding between the races, yet even paired humans and pegasi can only communicate with each other via a rudimentary language of gestures, with the aid of a specially trained magician. (Humans and pegasi are also not allowed to touch, supposedly to protect the pegasi from being treated like common horses.) No one really questions this until 12-year-old princess Sylvi meets her pegasus, Ebon, and finds that they can talk easily. The unheard-of close friendship between Sylvi and Ebon rocks their respective societies to the core, with some hoping that it will lead to greater cross-cultural understanding while others maintain that it spells doom for the entire kingdom.

I really liked Pegasus, but I’ll be the first to say that it’s an odd book. Like another of my faves, Connie Willis, Robin McKinley is Not for Everyone. Her books are often long, she breaks many of the traditional rules about showing vs. telling with large passages of exposition and description and little dialogue, her stories hinge more on abstract/internal conflicts than traditional actiony plots, and she yanks you right into the worlds she creates, leaving you to gradually figure out their rules later. Pegasus in particular could be considered very rambling and slow-moving, although I found it fascinating and prefer to think of it as expecting a healthy level of intelligence on the part of its readers. I can definitely see why some people were frustrated with it, particularly because (again like Connie Willis, with Blackout and All Clear) it ends with a jarring surprise cliffhanger. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it a cliffhanger—it’s an ending of sorts, just not a happy or satisfying one—but most people are referring to it that way, and at least Willis included a mention of her planned sequel at the end of the first book, whereas I had to track down McKinley’s blog to learn that there would indeed be a Pegasus 2. The funny thing is that as I reached the last sentence and realized the book was going to end on a major downer with everything unresolved, even as I suspected this must mean there would be a sequel, I was totally willing to believe that this still might be a standalone book, and that McKinley was just trying to do something wildly experimental, albeit severely depressing. I certainly didn’t get as enraged as many of the Internet reviewers; I just thought, “Huh. That’s weird, and if that’s really the ending it’s kind of a bold choice.”

So, like Willis’s Blackout, this is really one huge book split into two volumes, which pissed off a lot of people but which I enjoyed, even though I can’t really render a final verdict on it until I read the next one. I definitely loved the characters, especially Sylvi and her badass mother, liked the concept, and adored the comfortable, lived-in way McKinley always writes—her fantasy is not high-flown, but very realistic, rooted in little everyday details, giving you a sense of what it would really feel like to inhabit that world. Also, although I haven’t reread The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in years (time to remedy that, I think!), I suspect that McKinley dropped some clues in Pegasus that might tie it in with the world of those books, which would be awesome.