I was conducting a classroom observation in an excellent kindergarten where the children were being offered apple cider that their teacher had brought for a special treat. A child came to the table where I sat alone and sat down. She looked skeptically at the cider, as if she had never seen any before, took a cautious sip, loudly proclaimed it "gross," exclaimed that she couldn't drink it, and was calmly instructed to pour it down the sink. Two girls, who seemed friendly to her, joined her at the table. Then another girl came and sat down who seemed not to be part of the group. The girl who had been disgusted by the cider now proclaimed it "sooooo good!" to the outsider girl, who drank her cup of cider to the bottom. As she was drinking it, the first girl whispered conspicuously to one friend, who whispered even more conspicuously to the next. They were obviously bonding around the first girl's having tricked the outsider girl into drinking the "gross" liquid. One of the two girls who had joined the third seemed awkward about it, putting on an exaggerated affectation, as if to say, "I know I'm acting a part, this isn't really me." The outsider girl knew that they were talking about her, and even claimed to know what they were saying, but when challenged to tell it, was unable to. She seemed to be trying to bluff her way into some measure of emotional adequacy in response to being put down by her peers. As it happens, the three girls were African-American and the outsider girl was white, but this observation isn't mainly about racism, which was a secondary factor here. Rather, it was about seeing woman's culture in action, so powerfully, so hurtfully, and at such an early age. Afterward, when I related this incident to the teacher and her aide (both women), and to other women, all responded with pained expressions and nodding heads; they knew, from their own experiences, how vicious women's culture can be. At another school, an elementary grade girl with a learning disability and social problems was alienating a group of girls she'd gone to school with for several years, while a new girl to the school quickly succeeded in joining the group (these girls were all white). The new girl was now invited to parties and sleepovers while the one with social problems was increasingly left out. The mother of the unpopular girl responded by planning a special holiday party to which she invited all the girls in the group but the new one. What interests me in these two examples is not only the attempt of a would-be dominant female to bond others to her (or her daughter) by excluding an "outsider," as an illustration of the more pathological workings of women's culture, but the similarity of behavior in a kindergarten student, on the one hand, and an adult in early middle age in the other. Structurally, the two females are behaving in almost exactly the same manner. Men's culture has come in for a lot of criticism, and rightfully so, for its emphasis on power relationships in which someone has to be up and someone else has to be down. Obedience to authority, a trait that is supposedly also typical of men, has been extensively criticized, often for good cause, until it's almost taboo in some quarters. There is no doubt that much of what boys learn about being boys bedevils them as men, becomes pathological and spreads out to affect the people around them. The interesting point here is the assumption that women's culture was inherently healthier, more mature, because it lacked obvious parallels to the pathologies in men's culture. It now appears that the supposed lack of parallel pathologies was not because they weren't there, but because none of the most visible and vocal, the most ardent and zealous commentators recognized them. To have recognized the pathologies of women's culture, and acknowledged that they were just as bad, in their own way, as those of men's culture, would have revealed the passion of the ardent as misplaced, and undermined the convictions of the zealous. The problem about most campaigns to change cultures is that education gets mixed up with indoctrination, consciousness-"raising" with conditioning. Perhaps such swings of the social pendulum eventually result in progress, but surely information and observation together make a better way forward. We could simply hearken to one who knows. Denise Hale, described in Vanity Fair (November, 1998) as a former refugee who became the wife of a San Francisco magnate with whom she "practically invented the A-list," the list of top people socially, is quoted as saying: "Remember one thing. It's not the money that controls Group A. It's the women." Authority is not found only in men's culture, and it doesn't only work in obvious ways. Some of the experts who have become known for saying we shouldn't unthinkingly obey authorities have themselves become authorities; their followers are unthinkingly obeying them when they automatically disobey others. Superficialities such as skin color (as with the kindergarten girls) or attending the same school (as in the case of the elementary school girls and the mother) are among the most psychologically primitive bases for establishing group identity, analogous to brute strength in men's culture. Psychologically primitive male groups establish in-group and between-group dominance based on brute strength and willingness to use it ruthlessly. Psychologically primitive female groups establish in-group and between-group dominance based on superficial distinctions about who is "in" and who is "out." In both types of group, dominance is established by a primitive will to power in the dominating person acting upon dependency among his or her subordinates, which causes them to render their perceptions and common sense inactive, temporarily or permanently. The effects of such psychological primitivity are destructive. In the Balkans, men who murder families and destroy communities because of religion or ethnicity are driven on by women who sing songs about protecting or restoring a mythical cultural purity, and the men who brutally enforced segregation in the South were trying to protect their social position, which was threatened by upwardly mobile African-Americans, no doubt in part to satisfy the social aspirations of their current or future wives (for a consideration of the psychological dynamics of group violence, see "The Psychology of Social Movements," by Hadley Cantril, published by Wiley, New York, 1963.). Yet there is an evolutionary potential even in primitive mental processes, if they can be acted upon by wisdom. Men's urge toward physical dominance, acted upon by wisdom, becomes transformed into the acknowledged precedence of the most perceptive and competent. Women's urge toward control of who is in and who is out of the group, acted upon by wisdom, becomes society based on shared insights and mutual capacity for relationship. This is, in fact, what is working its way out in human social evolution, as it takes place within the context of an emerging global culture which is changing in unanticipated ways with unprecedented speed, making everyone interdependent on everyone else and confronting us all with the potential for human-engineered global disasters. It is the primitive state of our cultures that is the problem. We all suffer the consequences of primitive women's culture and primitive men's culture, and we will all continue to, until we all grow up. |