Gender - by Darylynn Starr Rank
October, 2006

Women and men are different. 

Men and women are the same.

What do you think?

We live in a world that is often referred to as post-feminist.  The feminist wave of the 70s and 80s is over, they say.   Feminism was a contentious issue during that time, but it’s no less contentious now in this ultra-modern 21st century.  Often the contentious topic is some upside-down media version of what the issue is about. 

One of my all time favourite misinterpretations of what feminism was really about was the idea that men and women were the same.  Boys and girls, too.  It didn’t matter if you were for it or against it.  This idea was an important one.  Feminists think there is no difference between the genders, they’d say.  We’re all the same, that’s what feminism means, they’d say. 

Nope.

Of course there are differences.  All sorts.  And no feminist I ever knew thought differently.  (Gloria Steinham once said that she’d never met a single feminist who even faintly resembled the media version of what a feminist is.)  But it’s an idea that people still fight over.  Having equal rights and opportunities was transformed into a debate about whether the differences really exist.

Now unfortunately when you say there are differences, you have to be careful.  It’s easy to go too far.  One of my favourite examples of imposing the wrong identity, right from the start, was a party held by two of my close friends.  My husband was playing with their daughter, who was about one at the time.  He was playing their favourite game: tossing her up into the air and catching her. She was laughing and giggling the entire time.  Couldn’t have been happier.

Several people gathered to watch.  They smiled and laughed along, commenting how much fun he was having.  The baby, that is.  My friend, the mother of the child, quickly corrected them that the child was a she.  Their expressions changed almost instantly!  “Oh, be careful,” they said.  “Don’t hurt her,” they said.

Tossing and catching was plenty of fun so long as the baby was a he.  But she was a girl, so it wasn’t.

But on the other side of the coin there are indeed all sorts of real differences.  Brain differences, motor differences.  The research goes on and on.  But at least as important, as illustrated above, are the social and cultural differences in how males and females are treated, in the expectations the world puts on them, on the demands.  As well as on the interpretations of their behaviour.

A hilarious example of this is research that shows that females have better peripheral vision than males.  The idea is that the men had to hunt in the savannahs, so their straight-ahead focus is better.  Women had to stay home and protect the kids and the caves – but this needs eyes in back of the head.  Well, you know how we women get annoyed at the guys for staring at other women? And how supposedly women don’t ogle other men?  Well, the study showed women do it just as much as men, but because of our peripheral vision we’re more subtle about it.  We don’t have to turn our heads to look!

The point is we’re different in all sorts of ways.  The other point is we’re the same.  It’s all a matter of figuring out which is which.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

Back to Article Index