This post stems from the same source as the last one, but it's going in a very different direction. As I (tried to and intially failed) linked in the last update, I just finished reading Carol Gilligan's
In a Different Voice. The bit about Greek myth was basically an aside in the book, and had no real relevance to the overall topic, of male vs. female psychological development. Gilligan's book was published in 1983 and was groundbreaking at the time. It's a relatively slim tome, clocking in at just under 200 pages, including bibliography and notes. Her basic premise is that girls and boys develop very different psychologies from their youngest age, and that their ways of thinking continue to diverge during development, especially around the time of puberty. This continues as adults (as anyone reading this who is a man or woman realizes) and often seems almost intractible. Men see issues in one way, women see them in another, and it's sometimes impossible to understand the other person since they're coming from such a different POV.
This isn't just a male/female issue, of course. It's true for almost any basic belief system, whether atheists vs. religious, religious vs. other religious, liberal vs. conservative, sports fan vs. non-sports fan, or pretty much anything. Just as a quick example; I spent years during my teens thinking that other people who liked "wimpy" music would like the hard, heavy metal stuff I liked if they just heard it. I heard bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and others, at the height of the grunge-style "slow, then fast and heavy, then slow and brooding" music, and loved the hard/fast parts, and yawned through the slow and brooding, "Billy Corgan sings a lullabye" parts. I wanted the whole songs to be hard and fast, or at least heavy, and kept thinking that people who heard these grunge songs would surely like the hard part and then get into music that was like that all the time.
Needless to say, they didn't, and my tastes have evolved over time as well. The point though, is that from my POV, people who didn't like the kind of music I did just hadn't heard it properly, or needed to be introduced. I figured the hard and soft stuff on the radio would work like a gateway drug and lure them in, and of course it did nothing of the kind. They'd heard hard music, and they didn't like it, except in very limited doses, such as during the chorus of a Linkin' Park song.
That wasn't the best metaphor in the history of metaphors, but to return to Gilligan's book, she delves into this issue from a psychological angle. I won't summarize her entire book (that would be like, work) but her conclusions essentially boil down to boys evaluating ethical issues as though they were math problems to be solved right then and there, and girls considering them from a framework of relationships that extend over time. This evolves to adults seeing issues in similar fashion. Men define issues in terms of separation and individuality and non-interference, and women look at them as connected to others, and try to solve problems so they don't harm or abandon others.
Obviously not every person fits neatly into this description, and not every problem can be boiled down so neatly, but overall I thought Gilligan's analysis was pretty incisive. The first 50 pages or so, at least. The last 2/3 of the book is a lot more tedious, with many detailed analyses of how individual case studies (women) deal with ethical issues such as abortion and love and family concerns. I enjoyed the start more since her conclusions were broadly applied and there was a constant male/female comparison.
Anyway, while thinking the book over, I ventured to Amazon.com to
check out the reader reviews, and found them enlightening. They're largely positive and generally insightful, but it's the negative reviews that are the most interesting. As usual. A few people complain that Gilligan didn't do proper statistical analysis or publish her categorized findings, which may be true, but I think is largely irrelevant. She didn't survey 5000 people and tabulate their replies into forms and boxes and charts. She talked to individuals and analyzed what they said, then applied those conclusions to society writ large. Gilligan can certainly be criticized for overgeneralizing and extrapolating too much from a limited sample size, and a few reviewers do, but to make her sound like
some kind of John Lott, busily inventing stats and falsifying results (
and sock puppeting) to make a pre-determined point, is a very misleading critique. She doesn't post any stats to falsify!
The other negative reviews mostly come from defensive males reacting to an issue, and not the book itself, and I found their POV fascinating, in that it essentially nutshells every sweeping generalization Gilligan made about the male psyche in her book.
This one, by Bob, is the best example:
...Furthur, the subjects presented in this work do not respond to the ethical problems presented to them, but rather seek to change the conditions of those problems. In given a situation where one's loved one is ill and he does not have the money to buy the medicine without which she will die he must chose if he will steal the medicine. The subjects in this study seek to change the conditions of the test; well, gee, if the person with the medicine REALLY understood how sick she was maybe he would give it or perhaps a fundraiser could be held. If these were viable options than there would be no ethicial problem. Eventually, one must face the black and white choice. I would assume that some men also thought of these possibilities but, given the conditions of the test, understood that they were not options ( perhaps already having been attempted). The responses that Gilligan relies on in her study seem to say nothing about how to respond to ethical challenges as much as how to avoid them or put them off as long as possible. Had she attacked the validity of the test as unrealistic, biased, whatever, perhaps her work would have had more impact.
...I have great respect for woman and to not denigrate the way that they look at the world, however, I think that an analysis of them on such paltry evidence weakens her argument and that of all those who came after that use her as a source.
The ethical problem he refers to is a classic one in psychology. Gilligan presents it to numerous boys and girls of various ages, as well as to men and women. The problem is a simple one: Heinz has a sick wife. She needs medicine that he can't afford or she'll die. The druggist refuses to lower his price. Should Heinz steal the medicine?
The question doesn't have a right or wrong answer; it's an ethical dilemma, and the key is how people answer it. The boys Gilligan cites usually work on it like a math problem. How much does it cost, can Heinz earn the money, will he get caught if he steals it, etc. The girls, as Bob alludes to, see it in an entirely different way. They see the problem not as a financial or criminal matter, but as one of caring and empathy. They want Heinz to make the druggist understand how important the drug is to his wife, and feel that if the druggist can only be made to understand, surely he'll agree to a compromise. The girls also consider what will happen to the wife if Heinz steals it and gets caught and sent to prison, what the knowledge that he's stolen will do to their long term relationship, etc.
As Bob says, they change the equation... but that's the whole point! Of course they change the question around, and that's where the insight into the female vs. male psyche comes in. What Bob (and many other men, I suspect) fail to understand is that women see the issue in a fundamentally different light, with different values and priorities. Boys see the question as black and white and something to resolve right then and there. Girls see it as one step in a long journey, with past issues affecting this one, and this one sure to impact the future.
I can't begin to count how many discussions I've had with Malaya that boiled down to this. She had a problem or concern, she voiced it to me, and my automatic thought was, "What advice can I offer that will solve this?" I'd try, she wouldn't take to my proposed solution, so I'd try another solution, and she wouldn't like that one either and would get frustrated and feel that I wasn't listening to her. I would also feel frustrated since she wasn't valuing my solutions, and I didn't know what she wanted from me, since my replies were how I'd deal with the issue, and she had no use for them. It's not in tractible, but it's tough, since it's not just that the woman wants the man "to listen." She wants him to understand and empthasize, but when the man frames the entire issue in such a different way, how can he?
An interesting exercise would be to reframe Gilligan's ethical scenario into a women-centric POV, and then pose it to boys and girls. I suspect the results would be reversed, with the girls answering it outright, and the boys reframing it or essentially cutting the Gordian knot as they went straight for a solution. Just for the hell of it...
Heinz has a wife who is sick and needs medicine to live. They can't afford the medicine, and the druggist won't listen when Heinz explains why he needs it. What should Heinz do?
That's not very good, but it kind of gets the point across. Girls would probably (I'm hypothesizing dangerously here, I realize) answer that Heinz needed to make the druggist understand the gravity of the situation, while boys would say Heinz should steal the drug. But by Bob's definition, the boys wouldn't be answering the question, since the option to steal wasn't included in the dilemma.
I'm hardly scratching the surface of Gilligan's work, since there are lots of other issues and ethical dilemmas, and the reasons behind our male/female mindsets are plumbed, and the mental changes during puberty are examined, and questions are posed to adults as well as children, and the male tendency to see violence in situations is discussed, etc. But I'm not covering the entire book here, I'm just talking about one aspect of it and condensing a lot of what Gilligan says and reveals in other related questions. I just wanted to quote Bob's review since it so perfectly encapsulates the male mind. Not only does he not "get" the female replies in the book, he discounts them since they don't fit into the matrix of his thoughts. Better yet, he then includes an, "I have great respect for women..." section in his review, reminiscent of the
de rigueur "I have plenty of black/gay/whatever friends" introduction that prefaces every condemnation from a self-oblivious racist/homophobe/whatever. He's not a misogynist, but he's clearly a sexist, in an unconscious, "I respect women even though they usually disagree with me and are therefore wrong." sort of way.
The girls in Gilligan's book didn't answer the question in the way Bob thought they should, so they're wrong and invalid. This is chunk-of-gold rich, since a major theme of Gilligan's entire book is that historically speaking, psychological evaluations of girls and women, going all the way back to Freud and continuing on through the work of numerous other (male) psychoanalyists, are flawed since the models were designed from observation of boys or men, and then applied to women. Which is, of course, exactly what Bob's doing as he evaluates the female replies to the ethical question Gilligan cites. His review could (almost) be read as very dry satire, skewering himself by functioning as a palimpsest, with the incomprehending male on the surface and the subversive counter-meaning beneath.
But it's not.
It is, however, a valuable lesson to the rest of us, male or female. This is why people argue about issues. (I speak of arguments by intelligent people in good faith; not drunken screaming matches.) It's not that the events in dispute are so polarizing; it's that the people in the argument see them from such radically different points of view. If my black is your white, not only is agreement impossible, even a basic understanding of your POV is unlikely.
Labels: gender issues, psychology
