Razib Khan of Discover Blogs says

An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear vary, but 10% is a low bound.

Read the quote in context here.

Khan quotes another biologist, Marlene Zuk, on how enormous people imagine cuckoldry to be

When asked to estimate the frequency of misassigned paternity in the general population, most people hazard a guess of 10%, 20% or even 30%, with the last number coming from a class of biology undergraduates in a South Carolina university that I polled last year. I pointed out that this would mean that nearly 20 people in the class of 60-some students had lived their lives calling the wrong man Dad, at least biologically. They just nodded cynically, undaunted.

Khan continues (emphasis mine)

What are the real numbers? Zuck asserts that they’re more in the 1-5% range, with 3.7% being a high-bound figure for one study. This varies by culture and socioeconomic group, and the segment of the population being surveyed. Studies which rely on a data set consisting of men who have requested paternity tests are strongly sample biased toward those who have a reason to have suspicions. ... And yet even in the cases of men who have suspicions only a minority have misattributed paternity.

Got that? The high figures you hear cited, generally instigated by bitter divorced men and other “men’s rights” activists, and abetted by tabloid cable shows, are heavily inflated because paternity tests are sought mainly by men who are already suspicious. And yet, as Khan points out, even when men imagine cause for suspicion the suspicions are usually unfounded.

Summary: The benefits of taking a gender-neutral approach to solving the problem of highly differential gender pressure on boys and girls are likely to be huge. So we ought to stop buying the same old gendered construction of gender construction.

So I was driving through rural Tennessee just now (I’m home on a very brief visit for an elderly relative’s funeral) and was listening to an NPR program on satellite radio.

The topic involved the beating death of a (Vermont?) college lacrosse player at the hands of her domestic partner. The host and three guests were all women with professional experience related to relationship abuse.

Without taking anything away (seriously!) from the nuanced, non-black-and-white-answer guests, or the somewhat less savvy host, all of whom I thought asked and answered questions pretty well, I would like to make a pitch for a more gender-neutral approach to the problem.

I don’t mean a “but men can be victims too” approach, although several of the guests made clear that sometimes happens. And I don’t mean a “gender blind” approach either because, sorry, even when you factor out stereotypical assumptions and biases by pretty much every measure of relationship violence the patterns of control and abuse are more likely to involve men shepherding, controlling, and injuring their partners than women.

So. What do I mean by “gender neutral” then?

Two items have been on my mind lately, and the discussion helped bring it to a head.

First of all, the host and two of the guests spoke confidently only about problems with “ever younger sexualization of girls.” In her concurrence the third guest, a judge, carefully agreed there’s a problem with increasingly sexualized youth.

And that’s the first important point where gender neutrality seems important. Yes, girls are increasingly sexualized at increasingly younger age (“anyone remember those rhinestone “hottie” and “tease” thong undies for pre-teens? I think they sold them at J.C. Pennies!) What’s overlooked is that boys are being similarly sexualized. Just not as “hotties” or “teases.” Instead they’re being groomed to value themselves by conquests, by self-confidence, by “that’s what bitches want,” and even, more prosaically, “girls my age are doing it already, what should I be doing?”

In other words, while the nature of the sexualization is absolutely, 100%, incontrovertibly gendered, the sexualization itself is gender neutral: it’s happening equally to girls and boys. Failing to recognize this — failing to see that not all the influence is generated by older men grooming eternally more precocious girls but that boys are also sucked into the vortex and are influenced to identify as sexualized earlier.

Which leads me to the other point: I think pretty much everyone on the planet can recognize that girls are often (not always but yeah, pretty often) pressured into performing sexuality before they’re necessarily ready before their ready to be actually sexual. Again, those “hottie” thongs for 4th- or 5th-graders? Rest my case, m’kay?

What I think isn’t as well recognized is that boys are often pressured into performing sexuality before they’re ready to be sexual. In fact I think it’s not just poorly recognized, I think it’s pretty much fucking invisible!

And this is where I think gender neutrality comes in handy again. Because if you just assume, as society as culture does, that “already has a y-chromosome” equals “already ready for sex” then you’re going to interpret the behavior of boys as if a) they instinctively know exactly what they’re doing, b) they instinctively know exactly what they want, and c) they themselves see their (frankly predatory) behavior as predatory rather than as, say, defensive. Oh yes, and that therefore d) predatory boys behavior, being intentional, competent, and instinctive, is therefore immutable. And therefore, e) there’s no point trying to change male behavior – except possibly by supervision, restriction, and threats.

Remember here that I’m really clearly not saying the behavior is gender neutral, it’s way generally not. Instead I’m saying that pressure to behave in gendered ways is gender neutral (it happens to boys and girls of all persuasions.) And I’m saying that the best analysis is gender neutral as a result of effort not to buy into gender-biased assumptions.

In the face of gender-biased analysis items a-e, above are taken as fixed. And consequently you see almost all discourse in the terms I heard tonight: how do we warn girls? How do we train girls to recognize abuse? How do we recognize girls who are abused? All of which, obviously, is itself highly gendered. And all of which, I think, we’re (finally) less willing to tolerate when it comes to questions of sexual assault. (For instance we’re no longer talking only in terms of what women can do to avoid assault. Nor, thank goodness, are we assuming if a girl is assaulted there must have been something she could have done to avoid it.)

A gender neutral approach, one that I think is finally seeping in to the issue of sexual assault, is…

Not just checking in on boys. Not just intervening with boys. Even though thouse are good ideas. But also instructing boys. Also reassuring boys. Also warning boys. About the sexualization that’s happening to them. About the risks of feeling pressure not just to respond but to act before they’re ready. Of the patterns of pressured behavior that can first shade and then plunge into abusiveness.

Because it seems to me it’s doing a great disservice, not just to boys but to everybody to write them off as unalterably malevolent, whether or not its imagined to be intentional or impulsive malevolence.

I’m trying to think of a comparable example and one of them would be the whole “purity ball” abstinence-fetish business where the purity instructions for boys are… all about girl’s purity — “you wouldn’t want your sister…” or “how would you feel about some other boy touching your future bride…” all with no, zero, none regard for the possibility that “purity” could be anything besides a euphemism for “untouched pussy” or that “not ready” could be anything but a euphemism for “keep her pristine for her purchaser,” or that “protect from emotional harm” could mean anything more than “kept naive enough to imagine picking out the wedding dress is the last choice she’ll ever need to make… or be allowed to.”

Never mind that boys don’t automatically know what to do any more than girls do. Never mind that boys actually seem to start being “ready” a year or two after girls their ages are. Never mind that boys have their own emotional needs, their own crushes, their own naive assumptions, their own internal and external experiences of peer pressure.

And here’s the point: it’s a gendered assumption that only girls are vulnerable to sexualization just as it’s a gendered assumption that boys are immune to it. It’s a gendered assumption that only girls are responsive to mitigation of gendered construction. And when we’re able to start assessing boys with a gender-neutral eye I have a feeling the social benefits will be exponential rather than incremental.

We ought to start trying it.

Pulling together several themes from the last couple of days, here’s in interesting post from last month by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper about a mediated sexual assault on rapper Lil Wayne when he was 11 years old. She’s quoting from a movie about him where he’s telling a protégé nicknamed “Twist” about an incident his own mentor, nicknamed “Baby,” instigated. (Emphasis hers.)

Wayne tells Twist that Baby, Wayne’s father figure, was one of the men encouraging the woman to perform oral sex on him. “I’m a do you like Baby and them did me,” Wayne informs him.

After the documentary was filmed, Lil’ Wayne spoke about his childhood sexual assault again, in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Kimmel goaded Wayne into talking about “losing his virginity” at the age of 11. Then, Kimmel—along with, oddly, Charlie Gibson, who was also a guest on the show that night—teamed up to tease Wayne over the incident, which they presented as an impressive display of Wayne’s manhood. Except that this time, Wayne was no longer up for joking about the matter, and he finally explained to Kimmel that the experience was a negative one. It was also revealed that the woman who was being encouraged to “suck little Wayne’s little dick” was 14 years old.

After the Kimmel segment aired, Cara at the Curvature wrote an excellent piece about the cultural tendency to respond to sexual assaults against males by recasting the assault as a positive sexual experience for the victim…

She said it here.

Quick note, Cara’s post at the Curvature really is a great one, as is a post from Sociological Images that inspired her.

Anyway, Hess concludes with

When sexual assault against males is excused as a joke or even held up as a badge of honor, that doesn’t just work to erase victims after the fact. This attitude directly causes sexual assaults. Twist is told he needs to have sex whether he wants to or not, just like Wayne did before him.

Yikes!

Here’s a handful of ideas we probably need to spend a little more time thinking about… and encouraging others to think about as well.

• sexual assault on male victims is not well-understood, and consequently not taken seriously
• male sexual awakening begins considerably later than most people seem to assume
• gendered allegations that it’s “natural” for boys to already be ready for sex are incorrect, and therefore if a boy ends up in a sexual situation at age 11 (as in Wayne’s case) or even 4 (as in mine) the presumption is that “he’s just getting an early start” is also (deeply) incorrect.
• Pressure to become precociously sexual has consequences on boys or, more subtly but no less incorrect…

• if the consequences for boys look different than the consequences for girls then they are thought to be of no consequences at all

and finally

• if boys are pressured and/or feel pressured to be precocious — either by their elders, other boys, or by girls who may already be beginning to feel sexual — they may try to fake their degree of knowledge and interest and may try to rely on social scripts from… less than ideal sources

Something else to consider: as adults it sure seems like a lot of us have a general sense of amnesia and/or avoidance of memories of that part our lives. Nevertheless it seems to be a pretty formative period where a huge number of general social assumptions are put into practice. Those of us with children, at least, and really I think everyone who plans to live among peers who are even slightly younger than we are need to reassess our own experiences and, where possible, see if we can provide more structure for children in, especially, their very early adolescence.

Photo “Figleaf and Son – 1997”
by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!)
Chrisj of At My Soiree, taking to task yet another rendition of the you can run but you can’t hide from the genetics of gendered behavior points anecdotal evidence produced by Kay Hymowitz to support her contention that women are just “naturally” driven to choose children over career. After addressing an anecdote about journalist Hanna Rosin Chrisj turns to a second anecdote.

The other story is by Katie Roiphe who describes an “‘addiction to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work.”

Read the quote in context here.

Not to put too fine a point on it but by the end of my first (sleepless) night with my infant son (and, later, daughter) I was indifferent to work as well. I wanted to inhale him, to hold him when he slept, to carry him against my heart or on my back or shoulders. Work can be worlds of fun, and you can’t really do without the paychecks or invoices, and because I worked from home I found ways to fit it in. But for all the challenges and rewards of work there’s nothing like having a new human being in your hands, one who trusts you and needs you and squeaks and drools and blows out his or her diaper and wakes you up and wears you out and… eventually… lights up like sudden dawn when they catch your eye with theirs.

Maybe it runs in the family because when I mentioned it to my father he said he’d felt the same way with each of his children.

The difference, he said, is that whatever he felt he did what he was told and believed he was supposed to do: go back to work, be a breadwinner, and leave the child rearing to my mom.

He also told me, one day, when he was visiting and we were at a playground, that looking around at some of the other dads with their children he felt terribly sad that he hadn’t had more time… and that we couldn’t know how lucky we were in our generation to get to be a part of the family and not just the supply boat.

So here’s the deal on gender and evolutionary psychology: I don’t know, maybe they can prove that the incredible bonding I felt, and the bonding my father says he deeply missed, is a different bonding pathway than women have. Maybe so, though I’m more inclined to think any actual, innate difference might just be one of degree.

And who am I to imagine how Hannah Rosin or Katie Roiphie or Kay Hymowitz… or anyone else, woman or man, feels about their infants? All I can say, though, is that the connection and desire to be there that I felt for my children went right through me, to the point where early on I’d hear the sound of her breath in the wind in the trees and the rhythm of his sighs when I was sharpening a knife and then all I’d want to do was make a cradle for them in the crook of my arm and hold them.

If evolutionary psychology says no, that can’t be innate because of my Y chromosome then, well, fine, so much the harder for them. Because the other explanation for such a powerful, overwhelming bond would be… social or experiential conditioning. Which they’d then have to factor out in their further estimations of selected gender differences. When they can persuasively say their methods have grown subtle enough to account for that I’ll be ready to listen.

Till then? My children will be home from school soon, and I don’t have much patience to wait.

While I only talked about one sentence the rest of ChrisJ’s post is pretty cool too. Go check it out.