The writer is a teaching fellow in the writing and communication stream, department of humanities and social sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences
The experiment involved a few toddlers and a few adult volunteers. The experimenters swapped the clothes of girl toddlers with the male toddlers and vice versa. Then, each child was placed amongst toys. The adult volunteers, unaware of the swapping, were then called in to play with these toddlers.
The experimenters watched the volunteers choose pink-coloured toys for girls. No confidence building toys were chosen. More soft toys and dolls were selected for playing for the female toddlers. They even handled the girls with more care as opposed to boys — as if they were fragile!
On the other hand, the volunteers handed plastic robots, cars and more spatial awareness toys to the boy-clothed clad girl toddlers. They were made to ride toy horses and were handled a little more roughly.
After it was disclosed that the girls were in fact boys and vice versa, the adult volunteers gasped with surprise. They all acknowledged it was subconsciously done since these stereotypes had been ingrained in their minds. The key question that one is encouraged to ask here: is it nature or nurture, which propagates these stereotypes? Undoubtedly, our society nurtures these conformities of gendered identities of masculinities and femininities.
The day a child is born with the biological sex assigned because of the genitalia it is born with, society attributes gender-labelling the baby either a boy or a girl. However, gender is a complex phenomenon. It is defined as a social and legal status and a set of expectations from society, about behaviours, characteristics and thoughts. Each culture has standards about the way people should behave based on their gender.
Gender is essentially about how you are expected to act because you fall under a specific sex categorisation. The moment a baby is born, parents and society at large automatically attribute to it a whole string of all the specificities related to their particular gender. A baby boy mostly has to wear blue-coloured clothes and pink for the baby girl. A boy has to be brought up in a more rough and tough environment, indulge in more athletic and sporty activities, and in the realm of academics are alleged to excel at math.
Contrastingly, a girl-child has to be brought up in a more timid manner and should be involved in more arty activities or indulge more in acquiring culinary skills. Academically, they are mostly presumed to be less capable of grasping mathematical concepts.
Though time and again each gender has broken these stereotypes, parents according to their cultural confines nurture their child for a specific gender. It is cemented so deeply that even a slight unconventionality to the gender expectation is considered rebellious or free-spiritedness.
Since the nurturing is done with utmost precision, it is not a revelation for each sex to fill the mould of the expected gender. The end product is predominantly a manifestation of a typical man or a woman. Boy will grow up to be a man associated with adjectives of superiority, toughness, strength, valour, breadwinner, etc. On the other hand, a girl should be an epitome of beauty, timid, an excellent chef. She should possess all the qualities of a homemaker and most importantly be submissive! Also, she is presumably fickle-minded, cannot take her own decisions and only a male member of the family should do this arduous task of decision-making for her.
Even in the most educated homes, the bedtime stories a little girl is told are always fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, etc. Each having a damsel in distress that needs a knight in shining armour to be rescued.
It is about time that parents instead of nurturing boys or girls, male or female, man or woman should nurture conscientious human beings. Expose each newborn to all the colours of life and let them choose for themselves.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 13th, 2017.
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