Universities & 'lad culture': calling time on harassment

I grew up  thinking, because everyone else around me seemed to think or take as read, that what is now being called 'lad culture' was something we just had to accept. And while I was sometimes encouraged to be part of it, I felt that drinking to the point of illness and bullying relatively random bystanders didn't seem such a good thing to me. Though I have grown to understand that there's something about bonding with mates and telling stories about it afterwards which is the 'good' thing that appeals and holds it together over time. On the other hand, I suspect strongly that a lot of the claims not to recall events are no more than claims: it's a way to distance themselves from embarrassment and give mates a chance to 'admiringly' diss them.

Of course, another aspect of the lad thing is sexual. But given that there have been bawdy songs, jokes and banter that imply that women are merely breathing sex dolls with no real agency, then it seems likely that those who are encountered by the lad pack who don't fulfil that role are likely to be treated that way anyhow. And not everyone has the ability to hold their own verbally and attitudinally.
So given those sorts of 'facts on the ground', it probably is about time that we looked at lad culture.

One in four students (26 per cent) - and 37 per cent of women - had also suffered unwelcome sexual advances such as groping and touching, it added. Two thirds of respondents said they had been aware of students putting up with unwanted sexual comments, with just under one third bearing witness to verbal harassment because of a student’s gender. From: Universities must unite to beat 'lad culture' sexism on campus, claims NUS - News - Student - The Independent

There is another side:

the NUS looks set to undermine one of the best things about campus life: the chance to engage with fellow students and, in doing so, to grow and become a more rounded adult. This means experimenting, talking openly, making friends, sometimes being hedonistic. In trying to straitjacket students by regulating their behaviour through ‘zero tolerance’ policies, the NUS is doing the students it claims to represent a great disservice. from Spiked-online.

Though personally, I find that 'conclusion' (for it is the last paragraph of the article) a little disingenuous given that it does earlier acknowledge that it could lead to taking more seriously certain behaviours: "misbehaving students who ‘catcall or grope women students or undress themselves’ potentially facing disciplinary action, or even expulsion." In context it could almost seem that they are condoning groping or creating unpleasant harrassful environments for others. While it's true that sometimes talking openly can make things awkward and it is right for that to be the case. Sometimes talking openly is just plain bullying or wanton harassment with no mitigating public goods. Sometimes being hedonistic can also be done without abusing others, but when it is making sport of other people, that's a different matter. I don't think those things really contribute to growing and becoming more adult -unless they are challenged effectively. They are actually continuances and reconfigurations of rather childish and adolescent behaviours. By all means discuss them and test them, but something does need to be there to protect and safeguard the vulnerable from bullying.

Mindfulness and men and spirituality -or culturally masculine at least

I've been leading mindfulness and more general meditation for a while now; quite typically two or three times a week in the university I work with. Sometimes further afield. One of the things I had realised recently was that the groups' gender composition reminds me a bit of the churches I work with; more women than men. There are some men who come along but typically there are women only or only one or two men in the groups. And it turns out that in research on mindfulness, there are gendered differences which may be related to cultural gender constructions.

... stereotypically, women ruminate and men distract," Britton said. "So for people that tend to be willing to confront or expose themselves or turn toward the difficult, mindfulness is made for [improving] that. For people who have been largely turning their attention away from the difficult, to suddenly bring all their attention to their difficulties can be somewhat counterproductive. While facing one's difficulties and feeling one's emotions may seem to be universally beneficial, it does not take into account that there may be different cultural expectations for men and women around emotionality."

I'm interested in the further research and thoughts about how to identify the composing elements of mindfulness and to package them in a way that might be more accessible to men who actually do fit to some degree the cultural stereotypes of masculinity.

Obviously, I'm wondering whether there may be factors in common with the churches' experience of gender engagement in worship and other activities. In my mind too arises another set of images: Muslim prayers where the situation is pretty much reversed; men pray in our quiet rooms, not so many women do. And I have got to wondering whether the 'forcible' engagement of men in prayer by tradition and scriptural interpretation actually acts as a kind of cultural bulwark to encourage men to be religious. I guess in asking that it seem obvious that the answer must be 'yes' (though there are nuances and caveats to be recognised). I'm also reflecting on my time as one of the conveners of an alternative worship group which was very much weighted towards men participating. Not deliberately, it was just something we noticed after a while. We wondered whether in that set up it was something about using technology and deploying hands-on activity as part of the liturgy which some was enabling of men in the cultured-masculinity of our society.

All of which has me interested to see how the further research works in terms of finding ways to engage men. It's a health and wellbeing issue for that research but I wonder whether there may be insights to be gained for the churches too.

The Transgendered Christ?

I happened to be rostered to preach and preside at Communion on St Matthew's day this year, a few days back It was one of those occasions when I found myself saying more than planned and learning on the spot. The readings were these following.
  Proverbs 3.13-18

  Matthew 9.9-13

 I had determined beforehand to speak about the Proverbs reading and the Matthew reading: making a link between the figure of Wisdom and the Logos of John's gospel, noting that the Proverbs reading was highlighting, in the context of it being chosen for St Matthew's day, the ideas that in following Christ we are accepting to be discipled to Wisdom. The more that I found myself saying was noting that the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs is female and that many of the church's early teachers and onward had seen Wisdom as what is incarnated in Christ and that there are similarities between the Logos of Greek philosophy and the Wisdom of Hebrew reflection. This I've known for a good while what was new for me was there and then realising that there is a kind of theological transgenderedness, then, about Christ. Incarnation of Wisdom, spoken of in very much female terms -being a feminine noun in Hebrew (and, it happens, Greek).

I just think that is very intriguing and deserves further reflection. Let's recall that it is not as strange as it may at first appear. According to Genesis 1, human beings are made in God's image "male and female", and "in Christ there is no ... male or female ..." [Gal.3:28]. And we are told in 1Cor.1:24 that Christ is the wisdom (yes, feminine "Sophia") of God. However, to state it as in the title is, I'll admit, provocative. But I think that we should ponder it further...

An interesting article which considers related matters discards the idea of God as genderless in favour of God as (in my summary term) 'genderful'. See here.

almanac

Delusions of gender -virtues, vices and Christian men

In her book  Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine took me back to something I had thought about a number of years back but had put aside. But seeing what she draws attention to about the way that our culture construes characteristics in some or many cases as being most appropriate to one or other gender, I have started to think that it is worth pursuing more wholeheartedly. Citing various research projects on gender and social/cultural perception, we read:

One gender was most commonly described as, among other adjectives, beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak and scared in the stories; the other gender as big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave and proud

And in another place:

 Social psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick pithily characterise the content of gender stereotypes as ‘bad but bold’ (with males being tough, competitive and assertive) versus ‘wonderful but weak’ (with females stereotyped as being gentle, kind and soft)

 These quotes draw our attention to characteristics of humans in society which relate to personality, character and how we value them as relating to virtue and vice.

My question arose first in the mid 1980's as a member of the peace movement and noting that the Greenham Common P.eace Camp -a women's protest- were articulating a lot of peace values as particularly 'feminine'. Now I don't think they were laying exclusive feminine claim to such virtuous habits as conciliation. I think they were saying that a set of helpful ways of thinking and behaving in the face of global militarisation and the threat of global annhilation tended, in our culture, to be associated with women and so women's concerns were/are vital to create social and political peace.

That alerted me to the way that many of the characteristics of peacemakers which were being identified as having particular resonance for women in wester contexts are also actually either Christian virtues or related strongly to them. Conversely, vices and related characteristics might often be things that are ostensibly valorised as 'masculine'.

What does that mean in relation to Christian values? Well, take Galatians 5:22-23. "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control." Impressionistically and using my own intuitions about connotations relating to masculinity and femininity in our society, I would associate those words with masculinity and femininity in the following way.

Those having fairly strong associations with western cultural constructions of femininity: love, peace, faithfulness, gentleness.
Those being fairly strongly on the masculine side in western cultural lore: generosity, self-control.
Those that could go either way: joy, patience, kindness.

Now, I recognise some possibility for contesting my division and I would welcome further conversation or even pointers to any research to throw light on the matter.
I would add a few further notes. 'Faithfulness' I've put with 'feminine' virtues mainly because I have a sense that in terms of romantic relationships, it is still somehow more 'expected' that infidelity would be the male's fault than the female, I judge. That said, I think that there is another strand of masculine culture where 'family guy' fidelity is important.

When we turn to Jesus' teaching, the matter becomes starker, I believe, particularly if we home in on the so-called 'Sermon on the Mount'.
It seems to me that the values Jesus articulates tend not to play as 'masculine' in our culture: turning the other cheek, meekness, even peace-making can very often be presented as "women's ways" whereas men assert, subdue, battle. Men who give ground for the sake of the common good, avoid battles or who don't retaliate ("let them get away with it") are easily portrayed and often taunted with being somehow less than fully 'men'. Phrases like 'man up', 'are you man enough?' and so forth tend to equate manliness (maleness) with being hard, being insensitive to the hurts (ones own or inflicted on others) or denying ones own empathetic responses.

So, we have a difficulty which may be related to the current gender imbalance in many of our churches where roughly 33% are male rather than something like 50%. The difficulty is that many Christian virtues are easy to frame as not being 'manly' or as being 'lady-like' rather than 'masculine'. It's probably a (major?) contributory factor to the gender imbalance. It may be why church men's groups seem to try too hard to do robust 'masculine' in the 'Tool Time' vein.

But if I'm right, then part of dealing with our lack of traction with our culture's men is not to encourage knuckle-dragging  among our menfolk but rather more to be challenging the cultural stereotypes around gender and as part of that finding ways to story the virtues of meekness, gentleness, turning the other cheek as credibly male, somehow: narratives showing men exercising such virtues in ways that are attractive, 'heroic' and not 'cowardly'. 

Challenging the stereotypes means making some common cause with feminism rather than denigrating it. And doing so allows the many men who in various ways don't fit or desire the masculine stereotypes to find that they can indeed express their own individuality and be free from the stultifying and narrow confines of 'manliness' to be real human beings.

Delusions of Gender

This is very helpful book. Cordelia Fine has made a clear riposte to ... well a quote will give an idea: "from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers" and in particular, as the title would hint, she's exposing the delusions of popular 'scientific' books on gender and neuroscience particularly using fMRI brain research. These books of the 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' ilk. Basically the book argues that the big hole in interpreting the brain-scan evidence and similar gender-related neuroscientific research is that so many of the popular gender-deluded popularisations fail to properly address the big issue: which came first? -the chicken of gender-related biological brain formation or the egg of gender-related culture which in turn forms the brain in gender-distinct ways. Fine makes the case for treating the latter hypothesis far more seriously. ("the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them")

The important thing to note, looking at research relating to brains and gender (either together or apart) is that one of the more assured results is that brains are 'plastic' that is they continue to change and to 're-wire' through our lives, so this gives a big question mark to the idea of biological determinism where the brain is concerned. The other thing that our attention is brought to (quite extensively) is research which shows how extensive is our ability to unconsciously take in and internalise clues and cues from our social environment and then have them informing attitudes and behaviours without us being really aware of where they've come from (so they 'feel' natural, somehow). Relatedly, much research shows how early the learning machines known as infants and young children take such things in.

She also shows how gender-marked is much of our daily life and language which would add to the unconscious incentive for young children to master the identity and social interactive behaviours that depend on gender. in other words, it is very likely that culture forms brains in regard to gender far more thoroughly and extensively than we are usually aware.

One of the other things this book does is to show how much of the popular gender-difference brain science is actually badly informed and/or running way ahead of the actual evidence which (when looked at more closely) is far less supportive of the men/women: Mars/Venus approach ("There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other"). And, where there are physiological differences between male and female brains, there is considerable overlap between the genders, meaning lots of men and women are actually pretty indistinguishable brainwise with only extreme outliers being clearly differentiated. Furthermore even where there are these statistical probabilities relating to (eg) brain size, the hypothesised effects of such differences as well as being inapplicable to very high proportions of the human population of both genders (because they are not 'outliers'), the effects of neuroplasticity seem well able to 'compensate' for whatever physical effects this might plausibly have -and that there is some evidence to suggest just such a thing happens.

The book goes through the most salient evidences in reasonable but not mind-numbing detail and is written with a lightness of touch and bigger-picture scope to keep a non-specialist engaged but with sufficient referencing to allow return to sources of research and primary interpretation.

I found it challenging to be shown just how much psychological priming and social framing goes on which feeds in to individuals unconsciously giving us quite extensive gender-scripting which we are barely aware of and which communicates to children in a myriad of subtle ways. None of the little primings are much in themselves, but so pervasive are they that every day they weave a tapestry of inference which builds a picture of difference which is based overwhelmingly on cultural attitudes rather than actual biology or innate psychology.

One of the other things that comes out of this book, though not a main strand, is also a bit of history about gender difference in western culture. This has the effect of supporting the main thesis by showing just how contingent some of the 'givens' about gender difference really are and just how viciously circular popular 'scientific' rationalisations about gender roles and biology and psychology have been and, by implication, are. For example: "Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions could be taught and must be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear."

In short, a must-read book for anyone concerned with debates on gender where science, particularly neuroscience, is being called to the bar.

I also found some interesting passages that raise a missional issue for Christians in relation to gender, but I'll pick those up in another post, hopefully in the next day or two.

Some quotes with notes ...
talking about the pervasiveness of unconscious cues for attitudes: "Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. Most likely, it picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society, media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don’t consciously endorse"
I found this interesting as it chimes with semiotics and connotative meanings.

On the same theme but relating it to our 'social outputs': "people socially ‘tune’ their self-evaluations to blend with the opinion of the self held by others. With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality"
And, of course, this is important to gender-based attitudes and behaviours: "we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking..."

And a lot of differences that we think we see between the sexes may actually be about attention and perception (including self-perception, upon which a lot of studies rely): "no gender difference was found for studies using unobtrusive physiological or facial/gestural measures as an index of empathy.) In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)"

There've been quite a lot of studies into priming and the way this affects reported attitudes and behaviours. For Example: "[it is] remarkably easy to adjust the shine of a career path for one sex. A few words to the effect that a Y chromosome will serve in your favour, or a sprucing up of the interior design, is all that it takes to bring about surprisingly substantial changes in career interest" and even more sharply: "one study found that women given a journal article to read that claimed that men are better at maths because of innate, biological and genetic differences performed worse on a GRE-like maths test than women shown an essay saying that men’s greater effort underlies their superior performance" And slightly more generally (and with an educationalist implication): "Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability – whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed – makes a difference to your behaviour, persistence and performance. Students who see ability as fixed – a gift – are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, ‘are stories about gifts – about who has them and who doesn’t."

And intriguing are studies that show that we often judge performance by who performs (and their characteristics) rather than their actual performance: "insights from the experiences of people who have lived on both sides of the gender divide offer an intriguing glimpse into the possibility that a person’s talents in the workplace are easier to recognise when that person is male"

Sometimes it is experimental design that is not well-enough thought-through and Fine passes on some instances when this has been addressed: "when the researchers divided up their stimuli in a different way – comparing amount of play with animate toys (the dog and the doll) with object toys (the pan, ball, car, and book) – they found no differences between the sexes"

And there is -outrageously- quite some doubt related to the interpretation of brain-imaging. I had to read this several times, it's written tongue-in-cheek: "some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon – which, by the way, ‘was not alive at the time of scanning’ – was ‘asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’ Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish’s brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during ‘rest’. The researchers conclude not that this particular region of the brain is involved in postmortem piscine empathising, but that the kind of statistical thresholds commonly used in neuroimaging studies (including Witelson’s emotion-matching study) are inadequate because they allow too many spurious results through the net"



Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences eBook: Cordelia Fine: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

We have to negotiate a new "masculinity"

Now before anything else, I in tandem with this article referred to in the title-link, would strongly recognise the way that women are still bedevilled by glass ceilings and being disproportionately involved with childcare and domestic labour and being sexually victimised and exploited.

That said, the writing is on the wall for once-unquestioned definitions of masculinity in terms of how we understand it in wider cultural milieus. And this article tries to point up some of the challenge.

The general impression of millions of men as essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind, adds up. This is hardly new – quite rightly, Rosin goes back to Susan Faludi's trailblazing 1999 book Stiffed. But in the last 15 years or so, the problem seems to have got even worse, and it seems incontestably true that millions of men have "lost the architecture of manliness but … not replaced it with any new ones".The end of men? Cardboard man is dead. Now let's redefine masculinity | John Harris

 Unfortunately we've not got much of a handle on alternative narratives except the for the clearly unhelpful Peter Pan reactions.

if you're the average halfway educated white male, what have you got to hang on to, besides what looks like textbook overcompensation? An affected interest in that great theatre of tissue-thin masculinity, football? Some vague, porn-informed idea that you can transplant the comical power relations glimpsed online into the bedroom, and demonstrate who's boss? Or just my own generation's large-scale retreat into a kind of blank infantilism, whereby even grownup dads wear saggy shorts they bought in Fat Face, fidget with their phones, and talk loudly about how much they had to drink last night? Men, writes Rosin, "could move more quickly into new roles open to them … nurse, teacher, full-time father." They could, but they usually don't.

I'd want to bring to the discussion the observation that a 'customer-service culture' requires a fuller ability with attributes traditionally associated with traditional definitions of femininity: empathy, attention to the needs of others and similar. Now note that I use words like 'associated' and 'traditional definitions'. There are very few genuine differences between men and women that are hard-and-fast. There are statistical likelihoods, but even these may be more due to culture than biochemical hard-wiring. (For more see Delusions of Gender). Men are quite capable of learning to do all this stuff -as many demonstrate- even where they have shown little interest or apparent aptitude before. The only thing stopping them/us is laddishness and similar dysadaptations of cultural repertoire.

So the real issue is about us negotiating a new cultural settlement. And this can only really happen by men thinking about this together and with women, trying things out and not accepting sexist responses.

I'm wondering what Christian men have to bring to the table. In some cases a restatement of the attitudes that are now a problem: certain traditional 'readings' of scripture or complementarianism, it seems to me, are simply attempting to fix an unsustainable and ulitimately unjust and personhood-diminishing set of gender stereotypes. at best this may help some men (and perhaps some women) to hold on until something new appears.

Let me say what I think that Christian men might be bringing to the big cultural negotiation, at our best. We follow someone who taught that being great is about serving others (including women and children), who showed leadership in promoting good for those around him and in setting them free to be fuller people with more expansive opportunities. It seems to me that however we define (cultural) masculinity, it has to work within a set of parameters which  embed service and the common good, the welfare of others. In fact, I can't see how that differs from femininity. This is counter cultural in terms of old definitions. But we have to question traditional masculinities which would problematise turning the other cheek or walking an extra mile as being 'unmanly'.

The real difficulty with masculinity is that there is no universally accepted/approved version any longer, leaving some men in crisis, trying to live out of models which seem ridiculous to many and which tend to lead to diminishing outcomes and failure in life strategies. Paradoxically, we have to ask; are we 'man enough' to change and to do the right thing. Are we 'man enough' to reject laddishness, yobbishness and emotional-stuntedness? We have to be 'man enough' to be be comfortable in our own gendered skins and not to be fazed by the fact that many times who we are does not fit the stereotypes. We have to be 'man enough' to affirm others who are unstereotypical in their self-presentation of masculinity.

Ironically, too, I suspect that part of helping us to negotiate through into a new world of male and female, could be learning from and with gay and transgender people. They are potentially part of the solution and a God-given gift to us all to help us understand culture, nature and nurture in gender and relationships.

Marriage, sexuality and the CofE

Mark Vernon has written a very helpful piece responding to the new CofE report on marriage (engendered by the recent debates around marriage equality). The piece is here: Where's the good news? - Philosophy and Life:
In it Dr Vernon outlines the main thesis and critques it ...

...that marriage is a 'creation ordinance', defined as between a man and a woman, as apparently implied in Genesis. This is either making the norm the rule or reducing the rich myths of Genesis to a formula. If it's the former, it's simply a category error. If it's the latter, it's an appallingly reductive reading of scripture that strips it of life.  ...  The idea that Genesis sanctions the nuclear family is, actually, a modern idea: I believe it can be traced to John Locke's 1690 Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. Then, a legal definition of marriage was required because before, committed relationships had gained their social sanction by being made before God. Also, before then, families rarely looked like Adam and Eve under the fig tree because people died too often: hodgepodge families seem far more likely to have been the norm.

The first point in the quote above is what I too recently came to understand: that the 'traditional' Evangelical scriptural argument is a category error -making the norm a rule (as I try to say here and note that Steve Chalke realised).

It's important to be reminded that this argument is essentially a modern one, though I think that we should note that marriage liturgies for a long time have referenced Adam and Eve. It is important however to note the variation that has constituted marriages historically. Such accepted variation makes it hard to sustain an argument that traditional marriage is being defended: whose 'tradition' and why is it defended? We should also note that the Bible is replete with counter-examples to the Genesis ideal as latterly interpreted. If we avoid making the norm the rule, then scripture seems to 'sanction' a wide variety of patterns.

Multitasking? Not even women really do it

Actually this isn't new, If You Think You're Good At Multitasking, You Probably Aren't : "...scientists say that the better people think they are at multitasking, the worse they really are at juggling". A few years ago I saw some early research which seemed to indicate this. At that point I realised that 'multitasking' for most people is not really parallel processing but the ability to switch rapidly and relatively effectively between tasks. AND ... men can do that too.

The thing about that 'women multitask' thing is that men let women frame the discussion in terms of things that were important to women: men multitask (recognising that multitasking is just a way of talking about rapid attention shifting) all sorts of things they are interested in but don't really either notice they do it or have not realised that rapid-switching counts as multitasking. 'Women multitask' was a way for women to assert their dignity in working in the home, doing several things at once -over against men in the same domestic sphere who were trying not to do loads of things at once (heck, they were doing that at work).

Now I'm not saying there aren't all kinds of issues and problems with that -just trying to say how this little piece of battling between the sexes might have come about. Fact is, there are differences between the sexes (on average but often not in particular) but 'multitasking' so-called is not one of them.

Pink for boys

Well it could have been and at one point in western culture it was. This article is worth looking at not only if you're interested in the way that gender is marked culturally and want to get a sense of the evolution of some markers, but also to get a bit of an insight into how culture really is an ongoing 'big society' conversation involving artefacts, ideas, social dynamics (power, solidarity etc) and so on (as per my first lecture in Engaging Culture). So check it out: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

A nice example of the way that the flow of history 'randomly' reconfigures cultural meanings:
"Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change (to "pink for a girl"). Expectant parents learned the sex of their unborn baby and then went shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise. (“The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” Paoletti says.) The pink fad spread from sleepers and crib sheets to big-ticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys. Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when the next child was a boy." See? Artefacts, biology, connatation, economics ...

A licence for chauvinism

 This sounds, oh so plausible:

testosterone has been shown to be most effective as an excuse for social aggression rather than a cause of it. In another recent study participants performed more aggressively in a financial simulation game if they believed they had been given a shot of testosterone – even when they had been given a placebo – whereas those who had received testosterone unwittingly were in fact more likely to "play fair". "It's possible that people who are inclined towards selfish, aggressive or dominant behaviour would find it easier to rationalise their actions if they felt that they were under the spell of testosterone," says science writer Ed Yong, noting that the study suggests that "testosterone's negative stereotype" can give people a "licence to misbehave".

 Just as the myths about alcohol use legitimise all sorts of 'abandoned' behaviour which really have practically nothing to do with alcohol's effects (remember those studies with 'placebo' alcohol) and nearly everything to do with the desires and inhibitions of the drinker. In both of these cases we need to do an exposure job and not let people get away with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/17/goldman-sachs-sexism-case

Between the lines

I'm coming to think that this issue is earnestly important for Christians to get a handle on. I think that it challenges some over-easy hermeneutics and ethical positions relating to gender and sexualitye. Third Way Magazine - Between the lines: "f God is as obsessed as the church about gender, why is one in every 2,500 people born with physical characteristics of both sexes?"
Unfortunately for the casual reader, it's not yet open to view unless you subscribe to the print mag -but then, they do need to make the money to keep commissioning such articles! I think that it is quite a nice theological reflection in the sense that it starts with an experience, explores the background and analytical issues and it relates these to properly identified theological matters which then begin to sketch out action trajectories. I'm hoping to be able to make it available to students in due course to help think about theological and ethical reflection.

God Beyond Gender
Reflections on Theology & Gender
Sex and Gender: A Theological and Scientific Inquiry

Prayer and forgiveness, gender and guilt.

Intuitively and in experience, I guess, we know this already, but as often, it is reassuring to find research that bears it out: "results showed that those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on." Blessing those who persecute us and praying for our enemies does useful things to us let aside any interaction with God. The next piece of research, however, might indicate that women may need to do it more, not because they are more vengeful but because men are less likely to feel guilty, perhaps, and so more likely, I guess, to act irritatingly and with disregard for the feelings of others. The article is here, and here's a snippet of the report commenting on the interesting thing for me because I'd not really considered that there were several forms of guilt:

The most common forms of guilt are related to situations where we cause harm to others. Stemming from this, it is normal that this arouses feelings of empathy for the people we may have harmed, which tend to turn into feelings of guilt when we recognise that we are responsible for their suffering... The anxious-aggressive kind of guilt is more common in people who have been raised in a more blame-imposing environment, and who are governed by stricter rules about behaviour in general and aggression in particular. "It seems obvious that this component will be more intense among women, and especially in older women,"

Now we should note that this, therefore, has a great deal to do with socialisation and so is not making claims for innate gender differences.
Note the role of empathy, though, in both these studies.
Prayer increases forgiveness:

Police warn of rise in violence by women

The headline tells only part of the story in this article, Police warn of rise in violence by women | UK news | The Observer: the most important bit is arguably this.
"the number of crimes committed by girls aged 10 to 17 in England and Wales has gone up by 25 per cent in three years to 59,000, Youth Justice Board figures show. But critics say the increase is down to the police dealing with violent women more formally. Susan Batchelor, of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, said 'Traditionally young women have been much more informally socially controlled than young men, and we may be seeing some changes.'"
So the reports of a few years back indicating that testosterone seemed to be the biggest crime-related factor, may have been skewed by the social attitudes of police to offenders. Though, there are also issues to do with gender equality also making a difference on how crime is committed by different groups. A downside, though an interesting indicator of just how much is hormones and how much is social construction...

'Transsexuality gene' ?

This article in the New Scientist may have important ramifications for some areas of debate about gender, 'Transsexuality gene' boosts male hormones: "A gene variant has been identified that appears to be associated with female-to-male transsexuality ... While such complex behaviour is likely the result of multiple genes, environmental and cultural factors, the researchers say the discovery suggests that transsexuality does have a genetic component.". I do hope the accumulation of this kind of evidence helps to decouple (if you'll pardon the expression) transgenderedness from other gender issues. It is becoming quite clear that this is a condition with roots in pre-birth hormone effects on the brain, our moral responses really do need to start from that point.

Boys And Girls Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological

Hmmm. Very interesting.

"If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood -- a still unresolved question -- it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men.
Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: 'Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there's a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street.'
Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information."

Is this why men don't ask for directions? Worry about being told loads of stuff they don't need to know ...? Actually, I found this example worrying: I'm hopeless direction-giver because I tend to give more info than needed. In my case because I'm unsure what others may find significant or noteworthy ... which makes me female-brained?
Boys And Girls Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological:

Men Have A Harder Time Forgiving Than Women Do

How interesting a piece of research is this? Men Have A Harder Time Forgiving Than Women Do:

"Men have a harder time forgiving than women do, according to Case Western Reserve University psychologist Julie Juola Exline. But that can change if men develop empathy toward an offender by seeing they may also be capable of similar actions. Then the gender gap closes, and men become less vengeful."

So much in that little bit: the place of empathy in forgiving, the implications for theological reflection on atonement and forgiveness (including on gender constructions and Deity), gender itself ... Not to mention that it seems to validate Jesus' approach about recalling our own sins and being forgiven as a help in forgiving (the parable of the unmerciful servant is a major example).
To explain a bit more

people of both genders are more forgiving when they see themselves as capable of committing a similar action to the offender's; it tends to make the offense seem smaller. Seeing capability also increases empathic understanding of the offense and causes people to feel more similar to the offenders. Each of these factors, in turn, predicts more forgiving attitudes.
"Offenses are easier to forgive to the extent that they seem small and understandable and when we see ourselves as similar or close to the offender,

It certainly seems to forground empathy and self-knowing humility as key building blocks to the ability to forgive.

s/t/he/y

In a nice taking-apart of a bit of grammar-marmery, Geoffrey Pullum in this article: Language Log: Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof gets a lovely counter example in, which I must hold in reserve for one of my colleagues.

it is claimed that purported sex-neutral he ('a student who lost his textbook') 'has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.' White's claim seems to me quite untrue. Consider how weird this sounds:
Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?
Why would it sound so weird if forms of the pronoun he could be sex-neutral? They can't. He is purely masculine in reference. The claim that it can be sex-neutral is not in accord with the facts.

In fact, I'd be surprised if the majority of English speakers didn't use 'their' at that point, like Shakespeare did (e.g. A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend ). And Pullum links to examples of the latter and also of a very full listing of Jane Austen's usages of the same.

PS Nice post on the same topic at A Billion Monkeys Can't be Wrong And a follow-up at Language Log.

Men want lobotomised women

That's the conclusion of one woman having participated in speed dating as a lawyer and as a florist.
"Everything my mother has ever told me about men is true. They didn't care that the florist couldn't recognise a chair. They liked it. The feminist revolution didn't pierce their hearts; it only made it into human resources. If you want to be loved, just scoop out your brain and act like a child. After 40 years of feminism we shouldn't really burn our bras. We should burn our men. Love may be dissembled but statistics never lie. Reader, let me tell you: men want me - and you - to be lobotomised."
I think that this plays into my concern about feminism: it effectively turned women into extra men for the workforce. It didn't challenge chauvinist values, merely gave women the right to hold them too. So no profound challenge about sexuality, as shown eg by pornography, but merely an acceptance that masculine promiscuity was to be extended to women.
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Men want us lobotomised:

Desmond Morris on women running things

I'm offering this with no comment because I'm still thinking about it but think that I'd like to be able to find it again sometime. "women ran society, men were in the hunting ground. The sad thing for women is that, over a period of time, the hunting grounds became the city centres, and so instead of being on the periphery, men were now in the centre of the cities running things. The cities were the hunting grounds, although now the hunting was metaphorical. Urbanisation favoured the male."

Stephen Moss on Desmond Morris, the man who wrote the groundbreaking book The Naked Ape | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books:

Men, women and talkativeness...

People take note of this recent research: "Contrary to the prediction, men were more talkative ... than were women. As expected, men used more assertive speech, whereas women used more affiliative speech"
A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Adults' Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech -- Leaper and Ayres 11 (4): 328 -- Personality and Social Psychology Review: