Читать книгу Raising Girls: Why girls are different – and how to help them grow up happy and confident - Gisela Preuschoff - Страница 11

So there are distinct, biologically determined differences between boys and girls. These are strengthened or weakened by their parents’ behaviour and the whole environment around them. It is intriguing to know that in experiments, people faced with a group of infants clothed in yellow jumpsuits could not tell whether the babies were boys or girls. Even though they said they could! As soon as they learned what sex a child was, however, they reacted to girls differently from boys.

One mother recorded in her diary – which deals with the first three years of her daughter’s life (she was born at the start of the 1980s) – that one of her girlfriends said, on seeing the newborn baby girl, ‘Katie will be able to twist men around her little finger.’ And the mother herself was sure that ‘to have a right to exist in this world of men, a woman must look good’.

Is this still true these days?

The pressure to be fashionable and beautiful has never been as great as it is today, and girls suffer more than boys if they don’t conform. I shall return to this later. Almost everyone notices that parents dress and groom their little daughters particularly carefully, and how a girl’s ‘natural’ predisposition to smarten herself up is welcomed and reinforced by adults.

Female researchers have observed that parents look after their small daughters more tenderly than their small sons. This may have to do with the widespread illusion that ‘men’ must be toughened up, or that they are not as sensitive in the first place. As we saw, males are less physically sensitive than females,⁴ but how did this biological fact become extended to include emotional sensitivity?