The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon

Author:Gina Rippon [Rippon, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473548978
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Not those bloody monkeys again

Newborns can’t reach or grasp for anything. They are hostage to the toys that their caregivers give them. These caregivers will probably have their own ideas as to what is appropriate for their tiny charges, even if it is just to ensure that it is the toy that was given by whoever is about to visit.

We know that the apparent preference shown by newborn boys for mobiles and girls for faces has been generally refuted and never replicated. Gerianne Alexander from UCLA measured eye gaze time and frequency in 4–5-month-olds looking at dolls and trucks, with the frequency measure suggesting a girl preference for dolls.58 But as we saw above, there is already evidence of gender differences in babies’ toyed environment from as young as five months, so it is hard to extract a definitive answer to the question about whether toy preference is present from birth. Throw some older siblings into the mix, together with more or less gender-aware grandparents or childminders, and it is hard to see just how you might get proof of this assertion. The idea, of course, is that newborn infants supposedly offer a chance to look at pre-socialisation behaviour, though those gender reveal parties would suggest these babies are not entering a world without expectations.

But there is (again, supposedly) another way of finding out what toys might be chosen by ‘unsocialised’ individuals. In my experience, whenever the ‘innateness’ of children’s toy preference is debated, at some point someone will say: ‘But what about the monkeys?’ This is because a compelling ‘monkey myth’, accompanied, in some cases, by a convincing little video clip, has entered the public consciousness as proof that toy preferences are not socially constructed but are really biologically based. I once appeared on a Sky News breakfast programme following up a claim that a shortage of carers could be ‘cured’ by getting boys to play with dolls.59 They asked me to do a sound check just when the presenter announced in my earpiece that they would be showing this monkey clip prior to my appearance. So somewhere in the archives of Sky News is a recording of my exasperated, and apparently clearly audible, tones exclaiming: ‘Not those bloody monkeys again!’

Various versions of this video show male monkeys eagerly grabbing wheeled toys, almost appearing to ‘brmm-brmm’ them along the ground like little boys with toy trucks, whereas their female counterparts can be seen cradling doll-like toys. As, it is claimed, monkeys can’t possibly have been exposed to gender socialisation processes, this ‘clear-cut’ gender divide is proof that toy preference is a reflection of some kind of biological bias, a ‘natural’ expression of gender-based predispositions either to ‘manipulate’ or ‘cradle’, with a whole raft of downstream consequences for lifestyle choices and future careers.

There are two oft-quoted studies in this effort to disentangle ‘nature’ from ‘nurture’. One of these is by Professor Melissa Hines, now director of the Gender Development Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.60 Together with Gerianne Alexander, she studied toy preference in vervet monkeys.

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