Busting The Myths Of Mars And Venus (Down To Earth Book 1)

Book summary

"Busting the Myths of Mars and Venus" shatters the outdated stereotypes about gender roles with sharp clarity, backed by ten years of research across various fields. Veronica Schwarz combines humor, anecdotes, and striking illustrations to challenge these myths and offers practical strategies for improving the lives of everyone, regardless of gender.

Excerpt from Busting The Myths Of Mars And Venus

Chapter 1: : It Starts with You (Maid or Made)

From Birth to Booties

You probably don't remember the day you launched your unique self onto this planet. It's also unlikely you remember the first words you heard upon arrival. For most humans, it was a version of 'It's a girl!' or ‘It’s a boy’, In the local language, of course. There are babies who don’t fit into either category, but more on that later.

Depending on the society you were born into and in what circumstances, if you are female, your arrival caused anything from joy to disappointment, delight to despair.

And there you were, hopefully with you and your mother safe and sound. So, what happened next?

They cleaned you up a bit and dressed you. They “oohed” and “aahed” over you, and your mum got to hold you for a while, and everyone else had a turn too.

You maybe got a bit of peace when they stopped clucking over you. Not so long ago, if you were born in a hospital, one of the staff members would whisk you away. In that case, they may have put you in a crib, in a bright white room with a lot of other babies. There you could lie and sleep or cry depending on how you felt about it all.

Then the kid next to you pipes up, "Are you a girl or a boy?'

'I dunno,' you mutter sleepily.

'I'm a boy,' your neighbour confides.

'How do you tell?' you ask with interest.

He pulls back his blanket and points downward.

'Look,' he says, and pauses for effect, 'Blue booties.'

You soon discover pink is your code colour. Floods of it. It's a code to help the adults.

Other than checking out your “booties”, there’s not much difference between males and females at this stage, so – in Western Culture - we use colour codes like pink and blue. Then everyone can relax. Everything’s normal. Ambiguity is uncomfortable and even frightening. We accept and perpetuate things which are familiar. We often reject and even condemn the unfamiliar or different. The implications of this tendency for people, progress, knowledge, and growth are frightening, rightly so. They have slowed us down and hobbled us, all of us, for thousands of years.

Certainty is comforting and, as we shall see later, that need for certainty is built into our brains and expresses itself through Confirmation Bias. We actively look for confirmation of our beliefs and even fail to see contrary evidence when it is right under our noses. I’ll be mentioning this bias throughout the book because it is such a huge factor in our perception of differences between the sexes. We’ll particularly look at it more closely in Chapter 16: My Mind is Made Up.

This is one of the first experiences you had that ensured everyone knew you were a girl. Even if your parents didn't think you needed pink, almost everyone else did. Labels are an easy way of sorting people and, for everybody, the first label is your sex, boy or girl. Apart from the bits under the nappy, boys and girls look pretty much the same. What to do? Code pink. For boys, it’s blue. At least nowadays. There was a time not so long ago when pink coded boys and blue coded girls. Pink was considered too robust for girls, so nowtrcool blue was considered more appropriate. Despite this, there are researchers today now trying to prove that baby girls are “naturally” drawn to pink. The desire or need to prove inherent differences between the sexes is powerful, even to the point of ridiculous. If your parents managed to avoid the colour coding, your hairdo probably provided a clue.

Once you were colour-coded, everyone knew how to talk to you, and about you. They knew whether to say “he” or “she”, “his” or “hers”. They knew how to treat you and what to expect of you. They even knew what gifts to buy you even though you hadn’t expressed any likes or interests yet.

The neuroscientist Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain, shared an anecdote that helps demonstrate just how soon children can be exposed to gender stereotypes and the negativity towards the female.

It was the birth of her second daughter in 1986. – the night that a footballer named Gary Lineker scored a hat trick against Poland in the men’s Football World Cup. There were nine babies born in the ward that day, Gina Rippon recalls. Eight of them were called Gary. She remembers chatting to one of the other mums when they heard a loud din approaching. It was a nurse bringing their two screaming babies. The nurse handed her neighbour a “blue-wrapped Gary” with approval – he had “a cracking pair of lungs”. Rippon’s own daughter (making exactly the same sound) was passed over with an audible tutting. “She’s the noisiest of the lot – not very ladylike,” the nurse told her.

“And so, at 10 minutes old, my tiny daughter had a very early experience of how gendered our world is,” Rippon says.

But let’s check out what probably happened to you and those around you in order to keep everyone else happy and comfortable while you were growing up.

You live in what we believe to be one of the most progressive times for women, at least in most Western cultures. Many laws that once kept women constrained in what they were permitted to do, have been changed. Much of this has happened within my lifetime. But laws are not enough. Laws can be ignored or surreptitiously got around. Attitudes, expectations, customs, culture, religion and the need to conform and the need to be loved, all play a powerful part in a child’s development. And in families and communities, attitudes and customs frequently remain unchanged. Through adult attitudes and the teachings of religion, children are moulded and taught to obey customs created hundreds to thousands of years ago.

These teachings and customs are passed down from generation to generation. They are reinforced through child-raising, peer pressure, social expectations, media representations, religious edicts, and that primal need to conform.

For most of us, there is the need to belong to and be part of a group, to conform, to fit in and to avoid rejection, to know who we are and where we belong. We watch and learn from parents, grandparents, friends, kindergarten, school, movies, TV. We are surrounded by images, guidance, and insistence on how we should behave, dress, talk, play, and work. And most of us do conform to expectations of our social class, our religion, our ethnic origin, our parents’ belief and requirements. The one universal pressure is to conform to “gender” expectations.

As you grew up, you may have noticed that beliefs about girls and boys, men and women, their treatment by others, and expectations of them, are quite different. Many of the beliefs about the two sexes have been proved wrong, but most people still continue to believe them.

Newspapers and magazines will give lots of space to research findings that claim to find differences between the sexes, particularly if they show that men, on average, are superior. Researchers themselves have commented on the fact that when their research proves any of these theories of gender difference to be wrong, the story is either not reported or buried in a tiny paragraph at the back of the newspaper.

For women, the focus is on appearance and attractiveness. The word “attractiveness” is the key here. It points to our designated major purpose, to “attract” a male. Most but not all people want to “attract” a mate, but in the male/female relationship, men are still expected to do the “choosing”, to take the lead in the mating game. Women may manipulate it, but it must be subtle. There are women and men who want to change this and many other gendered behaviours, but while laws and lip service have changed, for many the reality is still rigid, and appropriate behaviour is maintained through ridicule or disapproval. In some cases, through punishment.

While men have many other goals in life as well, the heterosexual woman’s goal is to be “chosen” by a man. We tell little girls they can be anything they want, but society makes that difficult. We burden females with the expectation that they will care for the children, the sick, the elderly and provide the home services that make everyday family life run smoothly. We expect women to continue to give birth and raise children to replace the population. We tell women and girls they can do and be anything but fail to value what they already do and fail to provide adequate childcare or support to help with the feminine “carer” role, or encouragement to males to step up and do their share. And the final insult is that the underlying critical judgement of the woman without a man or children is always just beneath the surface. “Childless” or “barren” are derogatory terms for such a woman.

This is a sure-fire way of ensuring women keep having babies with the bonus of giving men access to consensual sex with women. Win-win: the species continues, and heterosexuality is protected.

“But,” you may say, “Girls can be anything they want.” Perhaps, while performing two-thirds of the world’s work, much of it unpaid and unrecognised, performing with superhuman energy and strength and maintaining the patience to put up with the unfairness of it all. Hold that thought. We’ll check it out in Chapter 3: Are We There Yet?

There are thriving industries trying to prove that not only are women and men extremely different, but that those differences are “natural”. As if religions maintaining the required place and behaviour expected from the female, was not enough, the prophets have been joined by the profit-makers. There are industries working overtime to convince you to buy their products and services that will help you demonstrate just how different from the opposite sex you are. Now that just shows how ridiculous this all is. If you need a product to make you a “natural” woman, doesn’t that indicate that the characteristic isn’t natural to begin with?

Being male and female like the other animals was not enough for humans. Oh no. We took the whole idea into our own hands and embellished the natural order that other animals experienced. Some animals who lived in herds or packs had developed dominance and subordination, often based on sex. Males are dominant over other males in some species usually based on physical strength. Males competing to gain the female’s favour is a common form of behaviour in many species. Females are dominant in other species. And some animals who live in pairs just get on with the sharing and caring. Male dominance over all females is not that common in the animal kingdom. It wasn’t usual in human societies either until very recently as we shall see in Chapter 2: The Story so Far (A Primal Dream).

Humans took it to a whole new level – as you’d probably expect given our large brains and opposable thumbs or whatever it is that makes us think we are the superior species. As the wonderful Robert Brault quipped:

Humans have been voted the most intelligent species on earth by all the animals who returned the survey.

But probably the most relevant development that gave us the concept and enforcement of inequality was the Cognitive Revolution. At a particular stage in human evolution, around 70,000 years ago, we developed the capacity to think of things that didn’t actually exist and to believe them to be real. We became capable of imagination. This enabled us to create stories, myths, gods, and religions. We believed them to be as real as the trees and grass.

This ability to create and believe things in our own minds added a new dimension to power and status, control and inequality, and we figured out ways to make ourselves believe this was all ordained by non-human powers that had to be obeyed – or else. We invented gods and religions. A grand plan that didn’t even need brute strength to maintain. We’ll also investigate this in Chapter 2: The Story So Far (A Primal Dream). But let’s get back to you.

Making the Difference

The first thing that we notice about anyone is what sex they are. Once the baby’s sex is assigned, that little person’s destiny is pretty much decided. Almost everyone starts to assume and look for the differences.

Societies assume that little boys will be more active, rougher, tougher, and adventurous, and later they will be good at Maths and Science and will grow into men who will be strong and in control, and good at sport and perhaps a bit aggressive and authoritative and take charge of things and be explorers and pilots and plumbers and doctors and lawyers and carpenters and prime ministers and presidents. Now, all those things are true of some men and boys some of the time. We probably all know men and boys who have some of those qualities. We also know others who do not.

On the other hand, we assume that little girls will be gentler, better behaved, more docile, sweet, and pleasing. Because they are girls, it’s assumed they will be less active, and not interested in, or good at, Maths and Science: Allergic to Algebra as one T-shirt available for girls proudly proclaims. They will grow into women who will take care of people. They’ll still get a job. Many of them will also have babies and look after the house and children and husband. They may need to get part-time or casual work, so it doesn’t interfere too much with looking after the house and children - and the husband if they are not single parents.

To fit in, women need to be feminine, to be likable and to be loved or desired by a man. Most of the requirements to fulfil this image are external. They involve your bodily appearance, looking pretty, being sweet, and, in Western civilization in the current era, being slim. Then there’s feminine behaviour to conform to: not being loud or “opinionated”, being pleasant, non-aggressive and slightly diffident, allcaring for other’s emotional and physical needs, and smiling. These are all part of the feminine job description. Never upstaging a man is also a subtle requirement. It makes everybody, particularly the man, feel very uncomfortable if a woman does this. The upshot of all this feminine preparation for “the male gaze” is the assumption of the inevitable rivalry of women. We’ll explore this in Chapter 12: Women are their own Worst Enemies (Let’s You and Her Fight.)

Not a moment to be lost then. The lessons begin as soon as you arrive. What you learn will stick better if they get you when you’re young. Until the age of six, our minds have no filters. We believe what we receive. The Jesuits, way back in the 1500s, knew this when they said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. Aristotle said it even before the Jesuits, about 2,400 years ago. The beliefs we learn before the age of seven are embedded in our minds. They resist all logic and any efforts to shift them. Depressing really.

Like training young elephants. Baby elephants are tethered to a stake when they are young and small. They pull against the tether, but they cannot break free. As they grow bigger and stronger, they give up trying and, by the time they are strong enough to pull the stake right out of the ground, they still believe they cannot. The same tether they were tied to as babies, still holds them in place despite their enormous strength as adults.

Similarly, with us. We could break free and risk the consequences, but most of us don’t even know we have been tethered. As the great German writer, Goethe, put it:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Every culture is created by the people who once lived in it. Our cultures, yours and mine, are based on the needs, the fears and the beliefs of people who lived more than a thousand years ago and, in many cases, two to three thousand years ago. Their knowledge and understanding of the world around them were only just evolving when they began to create their imagined world full of rules and requirements, fears, and conformity. It’s quite remarkable that we base our modern societies and our lives on their rules. But that’s what most of us do. The good news is that, since people created societies and cultures, people can change them. This means those of us living today scan change societies and cultures to make them fairer and kinder, richer and happier. If we want to. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

First, we must “see” that “the way things are” is not set in cement or even written on tablets of stone. Sadly, parts of our own brains are lagging behind. Human brains are still operating in ways that kept us safe in the Stone Age. We react more strongly to fear and uncertainty than we do to reason and even reward. Our brains also look for things that confirm what we currently believe. We fear, deride, or fail to notice things that contradict those beliefs.

We need to “see” that much of our potential is hidden from our view. Our enormous potential for growth, and contribution to our societies are, for most of us, kept hidden beyond the horizon of our cultural limitations. The possibilities opened up by a wide range of experiences, joy, learning, and understanding, are hidden from us, both male and female. In many cultures, they are even forbidden to us.

As the cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz put it:

Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world.

As author and entrepreneur Tim Ferris put it, the common-sense rules of the “real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions. And yet they seem so right and reasonable.

These constraints apply to groups of people to varying degrees. The result is gross inequality which is currently worsening around the planet. These inequalities are not related to anything that individuals have personally done. They are almost totally the product of the randomness of birth into different circumstances, particularly to which sex you are assigned and what colour your skin is.

Almost 500 years ago, the great German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, noted that his mother’s intellect was not inferior to his, but their lives and circumstances were as different as night and day. He made the perceptive observation that the difference between the fate of the sexes is not in the heavens but in the earthly construction of gender as a function of culture. It was not his mother’s nature that made her ignorant but the lack of opportunity for intellectual growth, learning and development of potential. Her gender ensured her fate was as fixed as the stars. Today, 500 years on, we are still fighting to have that fact recognised with more than lip service. It’s also worth noting that, in 1615, this famous man set aside his career, risking condemnation himself, to spend six years defending his elderly widowed mother against charges of witchcraft. Imprisoned and chained to the floor of a cell, Katarina Kepler did not burn at the stake like the many thousands of women and men in Europe who did. At the end of those six years, her son’s rational and well-argued case won her freedom. A rare event. Sadly, she died six months after being released. You can read her story in Ulinka Rublack’s book The Astronomer and the Witch.

As Kepler observed, it’s patently obvious that not all males are cleverer, more intelligent, or more competent than all women, but cultures are structured as if that were the case.

Almost all cultures on earth are now hierarchical. Power, status, wealth, privilege, and respect are mainly allocated to designated groups. Individuals are given specific privileges, or deprived of them, generally on the basis of group membership rather than individual merit.

The most basic grouping of humans is that of sex, female and male. No matter what other group you also belong to, rated by skin colour, religion, caste, or social class, males are almost universally granted higher status than females within every other group.

How did it happen? Let’s check out the story so far.