Why Gender Matters, Second Edition: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax M. D. Ph.d

Author:Leonard Sax M. D. Ph.d. [D., Leonard Sax M. Ph.d.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0451497775
Amazon: 0451497775
Publisher: Harmony
Published: 2017-08-29T06:00:00+00:00

When I was writing the first edition of this book, back in 2003 and 2004, I had a bit of a shock as I read the work of Jerome Kagan, Patricia Cayo Sexton, and others who described the anomalous male. I realized that I was reading about…me. I was an anomalous male. As a child, I drew pictures of stationary people and stationary dogs, rather than scenes of action. I taught myself to do macramé. I didn’t like to hit other people. I attended a sleep-away summer music camp—Interlochen, near Traverse City, Michigan—for three summers at ages eleven, twelve, and thirteen. By the end of my third summer at Interlochen, I knew many Gilbert and Sullivan operetta songs by heart. I had lots of friends in elementary school—mostly girls. In middle school the mean boys started calling me “Len the Fem.” I was precocious in English and creative writing. I was a loner in high school: one of my favorite songs was Paul Simon’s “I Am a Rock.” My mother divorced my father three months after I was born and she never remarried, so there was no adult male in the household.

Many years later, when my patient told me about her son Martin and his desire not to miss his summer music camp, I knew exactly how he felt. And as a clinician, I also understood Martin’s mother’s wish to push Martin out of the shell he was constructing for himself.

Sexton believed that anomalous males are made, not born. She wrote that these boys’ problems come “from overprotective parents and can best be remedied through association with a normal adult male.”13 Later in this chapter, we will consider new evidence that Sexton may have been wrong. The differences between the anomalous male and gender-typical males may be genetically programmed, at least in part. Nevertheless, I have seen in my own clinical experience how these boys can become more comfortable with typical male activities if they get a little push from their parents—or from themselves.14 And as a result, new horizons open up.

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