The Nurture Assumption by Steven Pinker & Judith Rich Harris

Author:Steven Pinker & Judith Rich Harris [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

The urge to dominate their peers is detectable in human males at the tender age of two and a half. The greater aggressiveness of males—not just in humans but in almost all mammals—has been well documented.55 A stallion is more aggressive than a gelding (a castrated male horse), but it isn’t just having testicles that does it. The opposite-sex identical twin, while living as a girl, was “often the dominant one in the girls’ group” even though his testicles had been removed when he was seventeen months old. Girls who are born with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia—a hormonal malfunction that can cause partial masculinization of the brain and genitals of a female fetus—tend to be assertive children even though the hormonal condition is medically rectified after they are born.56

Most girls find out early in life that they don’t have much influence on boys. They start avoiding boys before the boys start avoiding them.57 They would rather play with other girls because girls listen. Boys always want to do things their way.

So the girls form their separate groups, where they can do what they want to do. That works pretty well until adolescence. Then the sexes get back together again, driven by forces that—sorry—are outside the scope of this book. In adolescence, other ways of splitting up become more salient: you have the athletic cliques, the academic cliques, the delinquent cliques, and the none-ofthe-aboves. Groups once again contain members of both genders. But on the whole they are run on the boys’ terms. In mixed-sex groups it is males who do more of the talking and more of the cracking of jokes. The females do more of the listening and more of the laughing.58

Downers

It has been alleged that girls’ self-esteem plummets in early adolescence. Although this is not always found, and when found it is a smaller effect than the newspaper stories may have led you to believe,59 I accept that it is true on average: for some girls, self-esteem does go down. What I don’t accept is that it is the fault of the parents or teachers, or of a nebulous force called “the culture.” It is due, I think, to the situation girls find themselves in at adolescence. By forming their own separate groups in childhood, they were able to avoid being dominated by boys. Then their biological clocks strike thirteen and suddenly they find themselves wanting to interact with a bunch of people who have been practicing the art of domination ever since they let go of Mommy’s hand. It was bad enough when these people—the boys—were the same size or, for a brief time, a bit smaller. Now, to top it off, they are rapidly getting bigger.

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