NORMAL OR SOCIALIZATION?: A NATURE VS. NURTURE ARGUMENT

by Alexandra Morrissey


    The way in which women (and men) are socialized in our patriarchal society is inhumane. The dominant members took a twisted idea and made it appear straight. They made the systematic process of assigning behaviors and roles to people, according to gender, look natural. They not only made the process look natural, but insisted that the person (having been conditioned to "act" masculine or feminine), is naturally "masculine" or "feminine", and any deviation from this is abnormal. They even give a pleasant-sounding name to the process: "nurturing." My position on the nature/nuture argument of gender roles is that one is socialized to acquire or adopt masculine characteristics if one has a penis, and feminine characteristics if one has a vagina. Even hermaphrodites are forced into one category or the other.
    The socialization process begins at birth. I have never given birth but from what parents tell me and from what I've seen in films, the first thing that is said once an infant is born is "it's a girl!" or "it's a boyl" The exlamation of the newborn's sex is not a hoIrible thing in itself, but more often than not it leads to the life long process of gender typing. "It has been documented that males and females are handled differently as soon as they are born" (Morgan, 90). Along with this and other special gender treatments cited in research, we are telling the child that he or she is expected to behave like a girl or behave like a boy. Even if they don't, they will still be treated like one.
    Infants are born with a psychosexual neutrality. They have a biological sex organ but it is society that gives them a gender role accordingly. "Evidence of this comes from matched pairs of hermaphrodites. In each pair, the biological sex is identical, but one has been raised successfully as a male, one as a female. These individuals have adopted completely the gender identity ascribed to them regardless of whether they are biologically male, female, or ambiguous" (90). Also evident is the influence of society's gender roles on transexuals: "although biologic sex has developed consistently (in transexuals), a particular family syndrome is responsible for producing a consciousness of gender that is completely at odds with the biologic sex"(90). Gender roles and behavior are not inborn, they are learned through social behavior and expectations.
    Calling a person a girl, boy, or hermaphrodite is not negative. On the contrary, it is beneficial. For a person needs to identify with a certain sex in order to develop a positive identity. But healthy identity development also relies on the freedom to choose how one wants to act in certain situations and how one wants to conduct his or her life. "By the age of nine months (an infant) can differentiate genders. . . by the age of two, the child's awareness of its own gender (identity) can be fixed to such an extent that any attempt to alter it produces extreme psychological anguish " (90). Thus I conclude that children need a stable gender identity for a healthy psychological identity, but "it does not follow that gender must be either a masculine or a feminine gender" (90).
    Another example that gender roles are a product of socialization is found in Margaret Mead's research of three primitive societies that socialize differently than we do. In two cases the sexes act the same within the society, and in the third case, the sexual roles are reversed:

 Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes; Arapesh ideal is the mild, responsive man married to the mild, responsive woman; the Mundugumor ideal is the violent, aggressive man married to the violent, aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal, maning partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. (Mead 59)

 If masculine and feminine roles can be woven into the fabric of both sexes in these societies, on what basis can we say that sex roles must be polarized into sex categories? Why not instill the idea that we are all equally human?
    Some argue that if men and women were socialized in the same way there would be no individuality. I would argue that if we were equally socialized to express our individuality freely, there would be no stifling of the creativity that enriches our society and makes us all unique. Granted, I cannot predict the outcome of such a utopian society, but I doubt that it would be too unbearable on the basis that free expression would help, rather than hinder, one's development as well as the modes of entertainment and diversity of our society. Others will argue that the present situation is necessary for an effecient and cooperative society: 

Gender stereotypes, with all their many more or less arbitrary sex distinctions, provide the framework for that cooperation. . . .  Achieving even a minimum degree of cooperation depends on some kind of division of labor between the sexes, a sorting of behavior in sex, love, work and play. (Morgan 94)

But it is obvious to me that just the opposite is true. There would be cooperation among the sexes (including hermaphrodites) if we were socialized in the same manner. " . . .If many of the behaviors involved in work and play are nongenderized, cooperation would be greatly facilitated rather that undercut" (Morgan 94).
    Currently, we see that there is a dominant sex who want the oppressed sex to cooperate with the present situadon. When the oppressed rebel against it because their needs are not being met,they are said to be non-cooperative. With this in mind, it is easy to understand that our present socialization process is enforced solely for the benefit of the dominant sex. Humans are socially brainwashed and some buy into it, according to Sexual Signatures by Money and Tucker. In this work, Mary Jane Sherfey states: 

The suppression by cultural forces of women's inordinately high sexual drive and orgasmic capacity must have been an important prerequisite for the evolution of modern human sociedes and has continued, of necessity, to be a major preoccupation of pracdcally every situation. (94-95) 

She also claims that "the division of men and women through inhibiting and dominant-gender stereotypes has been shown to serve this purpose well" (95). While Sherfey admits women's sexuality is forced by society into repression, Freud labels this repression neurotic, putting women in a catch-22 position. Freud claims that women are either born with this abnormality or they are suscptible to it if they do not make a normal, successful transition into "femininity", which forces them to accept and adopt the "service of the feminine function" and requires them to be sexually repressed! The responsibility to be "normal in this patriarchal society is placed on the woman: If she is "crazy", it is her fault, not the fault of the oppressors and their insane societal expectations. "The sexual frigidity of women is a phenomenon that is still insufficiently understood," states Freud. "Sometimes it is psychogenic and in that case accessable to influence; but in other cases it suggests the hypothesis of its being constitutionally determined and even of there being a contributory anatomical factor" (50.) Freud also asserts that a woman is not completely fulfilled until she gives birth to a son:

. . .this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex. (51)

Here Freud is not only condoning our socialization process, but he is telling women that they are wrong not to be satisfied with it. For if a woman has a son and she is still not happy repressing her natural human qualities, she is sent to a Freudian psychologist to be "cured."
    The female of a species is the only one who can give birth to an offspring. This does not, however, require every female to give birth, nor every male to be a parent (although societal norms encourage this). There is ample room for social diversity as well as room for more than two disinct sexes. 

Human sexual reproduction requires two members of the species in order to insure fertilization. But acceptance of this fact does not commit one to acceptance of full human sexual dimorphism. Survival of the species requires merely that some members reproduce; it does not require on the individual level, that every member of the species to be either male or female. Nor, on the social level, does it require only two recognized genders. (Morgan 93)

There are societies which recognize three or more genders. "For example, the Navajo recognize a third sex, and intersex, whose status is quite different than that of either men or women in the culture" (94). They are allowed to perform tasks assigned to both men and women, they act as a sort of "marriage counselor" between men and women, and, among other things, they may choose a spouse of either sex. Multi-sexed societies have also been found in India, Syberia and east Africa. All the members of these cultures grow up with a gender identity. "These facts make it impossible to show that sexual dimorphism is necessary for human psychological development" (94). Not only is it not necessary to force a gender role on individuals, but as the Arapesh have proven, it is possible to have a healthy, efficient society while socializing the members with equal freedom and opportunity.




All excerpts from essays from the book: Philosophv and Women ed. Bishop,
    Sharon and Mary Weinzweig. Wadsworth Publishing Company; CA,
    1979.
Freud,Sigmund. Femininity. 50-51.
Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperment in Three Primitive Societies. 59.
Morgan, Kathryn. Sexuality as a Metaphysical Dimension. 90-95.