Book Review of "Dangerous Children": Chapter 1

"Dangerous Children" is an e-book still being written (when she has the time) by feminist scholar Gaia Charis. I feel that the book, as much has been written so far, has a lot to add to the gender debate, though I also have plenty of reservations.

The first chapter, of course, sets the stage for the rest of the book. In it, she writes

As humanity edges its way into the 21st century the world it holds custody of is clearly in a mess. Our environment is in meltdown, the global economy is a fiscal black hole and social structures everywhere and at every level are riven with inequalities so great that conflict is constant. The time is right for accountability.

When companies founder we look to the top to see what has gone wrong. So who's been running Earth plc? The answer is not very pc. The answer is men.

Little nit to pick here - yes, technically she's correct that most of the people in charge are men, but I think it deserves to be added that 1) women get to vote, too, and they vote for conservatives about as often as men do, and 2) when women are in charge, they don't seem to act significantly differently than men do - i.e., they perform about the same on public welfare issues, vote in favor of war about as often, and so on. Admittedly, women do have a slight tendency to lean toward the left, but it deserves to be stated that this effect isn't especially pronounced. So, while gender equity is undoubtedly a worthy goal to aim for, it's not really clear that it would change very much.

In theory, she says, gender and sex are not necessarily identical; but in practice, there's an incredibly strong association between the two. Women, being generally feminine, receive "the allocation of pro-emotional and pro-social capacities", whereas masculinity requires the "valorisation of their anti-social counterparts, evidenced at every level from the virtual violence of video to the actuality of global warfare."

But that's not all, for she adds that

There is an adage attributed to women which says that men never grow up. There is more than a grain of truth in this. The masculine paradigm is not programmed for maturity and this is the template for living that males inherit. [...] The feminine paradigm is not principally defined by the same bipolar taboo. In a world where dominance has always conferred the power to define, the feminine has been the repository of what men have decided they are not, or do not wish to be. The feminine has thus always been defined by what has been allotted to it rather than by the prohibition of what it must never be.

Obviously, I'm going to have a couple problems with this. First, she seems to be making the same kind of error that male psychologists made before women were allowed to enter the field: they all took a look at women's development and concluded that they were all stunted. They weren't, but men and women tend to use different strategies for forming relationships and building their ethical systems, and so the masculine researchers looked at women and just didn't find something they recognized. It wasn't until women entered the field that they were able to explain to the men all that was really going on (which is one really good reason to have at least some gender equity in a profession).

Secondly, as researchers of femininity have found, there are actually quite a few problems that women can run into by having to be too feminine, and researchers of masculinity have also found that there are some profoundly pro-social aspects to masculinity. To give some examples, the focus that most (I should probably add "white, middle-class") women have on "niceness" can prevent them from allocating enough time for themselves, which can lead to burnout, lack of personal development, and other issues. Masculinity, on the other hand, has a lot of focus on teamwork, healthful competitiveness, playing according to agreed-upon rules, and so forth. That's not to suggest, of course, that femininity has nothing helpful in its own right, but the most generally healthy individuals tend to be the ones that can successfully make use of both their masculine and their feminine sides as the situation calls. Both are valuable.

Next, my own perspective on gender roles is that there is probably a lot less of men deciding what women's role ought to be than most feminists seem to believe. Originally, most gender roles seem to me to be a result of the importance of property, whether that's land, resources, or various items that take a lot of work to produce: the more important property is, the more profitable it is to steal it from someone, which just wouldn't be an issue if property itself had virtually no meaning. So, you get a rise in militarism, as more people try harder to protect their things, and to take the things of others. In an ancient society, this generally requires gender roles to be established, since it doesn't make much sense for the women to be fighting in hand-to-hand combat while the men stay home and try to breastfeed. Very quickly, practical rules like these tend to become established within a culture, and passed down generation to generation until there's some very strong outside force that requires things to change. This explains fairly cleanly, I think, why "primitive" societies, most specifically ones without a strong sense of personal property, tend to have fairly egalitarian attitudes; why women's role is considered to be the domestic, and men's the political and military; why gender roles can be seen in pretty much the same configurations across nearly every human society; why athleticism and emotional restraint is considered masculine, whereas women are perceived to be more emotional and physically weak; and so on.

Or, on the other hand, gender roles are frequently the product of complex social interactions, like with the idea that women are inherently more pure and/or innocent than men: Christian belief strongly promotes an ideal of purity, one which the male rulers of feudal, Western societies just couldn't put into practice. So, as men did the dirty work of suppressing rebellions and slaying invaders and other such un-Christian behavior, women began to be idealized according to this Christian belief system due to their non-participation in the ugliness of feudal politics ("and so much the better that they're the ones who take care of the children!" they may have thought).

Undoubtedly there have been men in power who have abused that power, but in most situations it just doesn't seem very clear to me that this was the case, or why this or that particular virtue or behavior was considered "bad" and therefore feminine.

I'm going a bit too in-depth here, I think, but I'd still like to add that historically, there have tended to be a couple main camps in feminism that many people (including many feminists) haven't noticed, and that's that on the one hand, you have more gender-egalitarian-minded types who are primarily interested in establishing a balance between the genders, and loosening gender codes so that everyone can find their own niche, but on the other hand you've had a camp of thought that essentially worked within the traditional gender perspective, but that argued that femininity was a greater virtue than masculinity, that men had basically done everything wrong, and that now it was time to give women a turn. The author of this book seems to me to be more a member of the second camp.

Moving along, the author states that while masculinity is defined to a large degree by not being feminine, femininity has no such restriction, and as such can get the best of both worlds. I should like to point out here that this was not always the case; read enough old books, and you'll see that masculine behavior was considered very improper for women (still is, to some degree), and that being accused of being too masculine could definitely count as an insult to a woman. Both genders, originally, were defined by their not-being the opposite; it's only the past few decades that women have been permitted to participate in most masculine behaviors.

She argues, then, that more women in charge of business and politics would be better for societal health, in large part because of "their non-hierarchical, but very productive, management styles." Now, most women don't actually establish non-hierarchical relationships; rather, women are more likely to establish relationships "horizontally", on a closeness model, with the ones with the greatest intimacy held the closest; men tend to build relationships "vertically", in a sort of alpha-male model, with the most skilled or successful at the top. Both are hierarchies, however, with the lowest-ranked being at the outer rims, or the bottom rung, respectively. It also seems that an additional, I think complementary solution (along with bringing more women to management positions), is to loosen the bounds of masculinity so that men are more able to make use of their feminine sides.

Are men listening? In theory anyone can adopt a masculine mindset. In reality, it is the domain of maleness. If men cannot find the courage to adapt and redefine, to see the dreadful folly of their time-honoured rejection of all those qualities that they have deemed feminine and taboo and which make us fully human then the future is bleak for us all. If destruction proves preferable to the facing of fear then humanity’s dangerous children may take us all into the void with them.

Now, I'll agree that personal responsibility is important, but (maybe I'm being oversensitive here) I feel like her tone is a little... unsympathetic. Would it be fair to state that women just needed to take more responsibility for acting more masculine? - or would it be at least polite to make some reference to the sometimes extreme discrimination women faced in asserting their right to not be pigeonholed? Again, perhaps I'm being oversensitive, but I hear regularly (from feminists, who are almost always women) that men just need to take more responsibility, with very little mention of the real obstacles men face, whereas women's issues are all about discrimination, with very little mention being made of personal responsibility. Certainly, there's a little of both, for both sides?


All-in-all, the first chapter wasn't the strongest. There's a cognitive bias where people will find a solution to a problem, and immediately conclude that this solution will solve every problem. To give a colorful anecdote, in a study I read about on this phenomena, people would be handed a hammer and a screwdriver, and after successfully doing a few screws with the screwdriver, they'd try to hammer a couple nails with it before giving up and using the hammer, despite it being right there in front of them the whole time. I think this is a bias academics are especially prone to: Nietzsche knew that the will to power explained everything, Marx knew that all of human society could be explained by class struggle, the New Atheists frequently seem to think that religion is always the answer (or rather, the problem), and many feminists seem to believe that gender is at the root of everything. Gaia Charis also, I think, stumbles with this issue a little bit, but the book gets stronger later on, as she starts to focus more on the experiences of actual people, rather than the grand narration of her findings.

Link: Dangerous Children: Chapter 1