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1、Why Boys Dont Play With DollsKatha Pollitt Pollitt, an award-winning poet, is also well known as a liberal essayist for The Nation. She contends that much of her writing argues for womens entitlement to full human rights, and this essay, Why Boys Dont Play with Dolls,” certainly was written in that

2、vein. She has a well-deserved reputation for dismantling bad arguments by exposing the faulty logic and poor use of evidence of many of todays cultural critics. This piece, first published in the New York Times Magazine, is too short for Pollitts usual detailed examination of evidence. It relies, in

3、stead, largely on her reputation as a careful researcher. So Pollitt may not expect to persuade hostile readers to change their minds on the basis of this one essay. But she does expect readers to recognize that what we take for common sense-in this case, the belief that there are innate differences

4、 between the sexes-might be ridiculous. Sex roles, she argues, are determined by culture. This piece, like many of her other essays, fights the backlash against feminism. you might begin analyzing this essay by considering Pollitts exhortation in the final two paragraphs._Its 28 years since the foun

5、ding of NOW (the National Organization for Women), and boys still like trucks and girls still like dolls. Increasingly, we are told that the source of these robust preferences must lie outside society-in prenatal hormonal influences, brain chemistry, genes-and that feminism has reached its natural l

6、imits. What else could possibly explain the love of preschool girls for party dresses or the desire of toddler boys to own more guns than Mark from Michigan.True, recent studies claim to show small cognitive differences between the sexes: he gets around by orienting himself in space, she does it by

7、remembering landmarks. Time will tell if any deserve the hoopla with which each is invariably greeted, over the protests of the researchers themselves. But even if the results hold up (and the history of such research is not encouraging), we dont need studies of sex-differentiated brain activity in

8、reading, say, to understand why boys and girls still seem so unalike.The feminist movement has done much for some women, and something for every woman, but it has hardly turned America into a playground free of sex roles. It hasnt even got women to stop dieting or men to stop interrupting them.Inste

9、ad of looking at kids to prove that differences in behavior by sex are innate, we can look at the ways we raise kids as an index to how unfinished the feminist revolution really is, and how tentatively it is embraced even by adults who fully expect their daughters to enter previously male-dominated

10、professions and their sons to change diapers.Im at a childrens birthday party. Im sorry, one mom silently mouths to the mother of the birthday girl, who has just torn open her present-Tropical Splash Barbie. Now, you can love Barbie or you can hate Barbie, and there are feminists in both camps. But

11、apologize for Barbie? Inflict Barbie, against your own convictions, on the child of a friend you know will be none too pleased?Every mother in that room had spent years becoming a person who had to be taken seriously, not least by herself. Even the most attractive, Im willing to bet, had suffered ov

12、er her bodys failure to fit the impossible American ideal. Given all that, it seems crazy to transmit Barbie to the next generation. Yet to reject her is to say that what Barbie representsbeing sexy, thin, stylishis unimportant, which is obviously not true, and children know its not true.Womens look

13、s matter terribly in this society, and so Barbie, however ambivalently, must be passed along. After all, there are worse toys. The Cut and Style Barbie styling head, for example, a grotesque object intended to encourage hair play. The grown-ups who give that probably apologize, too.How happy would m

14、ost parents be to have a child who flouted sex conventions? I know a lot of women, feminists, who complain in a comical, eyeball-rolling way about their sons passion for sports: the ruined weekends, obnoxious coaches, macho values. But they would not think of discouraging their sons from participati

15、ng in this activity they find so foolish. Or do they? Their husbands are sports fans, too, and they like their husbands a lot.Could it be that even sports-resistant moms see athletics as part of manliness? That if their sons wanted to spend the weekend writing up their diaries, or reading, or baking

16、, theyd find it disturbing? Too antisocial? Too lonely? Too gay?Theories of innate differences in behavior are appealing. They let parents off the hook-no small recommendation in a culture that holds moms, and sometimes even dads, responsible for their childrens every misstep on the road to bliss an

17、d success.They allow grown-ups to take the path of least resistance to the dominant culture, which always requires less psychic effort, even if it means more actual work: just ask the working mother who comes home exhausted and nonetheless finds it easier to pick up her sons socks than make him do i

18、t himself. They let families buy for their children, without too much guilt, the unbelievably sexist junk that the kids, who have been watching commercials since birth, understandably crave.But the thing the theories do most of all is tell adults that the adult worldin which moms and dads still play

19、 by many of the old rules even as they question and fidget and chafe against themis the way its supposed to be. A girl with a doll and a boy with a truck explain why men are from Mars and women are from Venus, why wives do housework and husbands just dont understand.The paradox is that the world of

20、rigid and hierarchal sex roles evoked by determinist theories is already passing away. Three-year olds may indeed insist that doctors are male and nurses female, even if their own mother is a physician. Six-year-olds know better. These days, something like half of all medical students are female, an

21、d male applications to nursing school are inching upward. When tomorrows 3-year-olds play doctor, whos to say how theyll assign the roles?With sex roles, as in every area of life, people aspire to what is possible and conform to what is necessary. But these are not fixed, especially today. Biologica

22、l determinism may reassure some adults about their present, but it is feminism, the ideology of flexible and converging sex roles, that fits our childrens future. And the kids, somehow, know this.Thats why, if you look carefully, youll find that for every kid who fits a stereotype, theres another wh

23、os breaking one down. Sometimes its the same kid-the boy who skateboards and takes cooking in his after-school program; the girl who collects stuffed animals and A-pluses in science.Feminists are often accused of imposing their agenda on children. Isnt that what adults always do, consciously and unc

24、onsciously? Kids arent born religious, or polite, or kind, or able to remember where they put their sneakers. Inculcating these behaviors, and the values behind them, is a tremendous amount of work, involving many adults. We dont have a choice, really, about whether we should give our children messa

25、ges about what it means to be male and female-theyre bombarded with them from morning till night.The question, as always, is what do we want those messages to be?Pollitt, Katha, Why Boys Dont Play With Dolls. The Seagull Reader: Essays. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 186-190.