Taking Sex Differences Seriously. By Steven E. Rhoads.
University of Virginia public
policy professor Steven E. Rhoads’ latest book purports to be a
meticulously researched and elegantly written, provocative and
groundbreaking exploration of the masculine and feminine. I found
Taking Sex Differences Seriously to be a solid though
unexceptional book that makes a number of interesting points. Career
women, we learn, have higher average testosterone levels. Rhoads
provides interesting detail on how modern university textbooks
ignore women who choose to focus on volunteer and/or homemaker
careers, ironically implying that the only careers acceptable for
women are those traditionally defined (presumably by the patriarchy)
as successful. Along similar lines, the author deftly points out the
absurdity of prescribing and proscribing activities for our children
based on our political wishes.
One feminist academic quoted by
the author candidly, delightfully admits that she likes dating men
who are “totally sexist” because they are comfortable with privilege
and power. Putting together some points in different sections of the
book, the happiest marriages are not egalitarian in either power or
roles, but rather are male dominant with female influence on
decisionmaking, and have women performing somewhat more of the
chores than is seen as fair by either spouse. Rhoads’
interesting explanation for the latter finding is essentially that
women enjoy being appreciated more than they value strict equality,
and men enjoy being able to sincerely appreciate their wives for
their role in the family.
Much of Rhoads’ book is not new.
Yet he does manage to inject some fresh perspectives and information
into each of his chapters, including those on fatherless families,
the sexual revolution, competition, Title IX, childraising, and day
care. Yet another fact we are not told until the author does so:
evidently a divorce reduces the life expectancy of a child of the
divorcing parents by no fewer than four years! Stepfather presence
leads to earlier sexual maturation by girls, as girls not counting
on a biological father’s support evidently adopt an opportunistic,
short-term mating strategy that leads them to provide earlier sexual
access to men. Regarding day care, I had never heard it said (again,
partly because these sorts of data are not widely publicized) that
the effects of non-maternal care are comparable in their level of
impact to growing up in poverty. (As mentioned below, however, I
question Rhoads’ tunnel vision regarding mothers; the author gives
fathers short shrift.) It was similarly new to me that day care
triples the odds that children will later be disobedient and
aggression. (Regarding this claim, however, I would have appreciated
further detail on the critical ages for placing children in day
care, how the data was developed, etc. This potentially critical
study only received one sentence in the book.)
As a reviewer who is now almost
a quarter-century removed from his undergraduate years, I was
interested by the discussion of the rarity of conventional dating
nowadays and its replacement by “hookups,” i.e., sexual encounters
with strangers or acquaintances without commitment and often without
any real affection. Rhoads is not afraid to counter prevailing
trends in proclaiming the desirability, where feasible, of marrying
in one’s early twenties, pointing out that such marriages actually
are more enduring than those occurring later in a couple’s
lifetimes. Surely the polls Rhoads cites are correct that the
feminist movement has made it both harder to balance job and family
and also harder for marriages to be successful. And certainly I find
it to be true of myself that no matter how good the relationship,
men need time to relax (although personally I’m not so good at that)
and pursue hobbies away from their partner.
Steven Rhoads is not my all-time
favorite author. He is, somewhat bizarrely, seemingly a fan of
The Rules. He seems to be wrong on some of his facts, most
noticeably his enthusiastic advocacy of the merits of motherhood
while seemingly entirely unaware of the substantial evidence in
favor of fathers’ sensitivity to even young children’s needs, not to
mention dads’ demonstrated capacities to raise happy, well-adjusted
children. I certainly haven’t found, either in my life or in the
lives of my friends who are fathers, that he is correct in focusing
exclusively on women’s allegedly “outsized love of their children.”
His book has a bit of a random aspect to it, examining various
issues, sometimes engagingly, sometimes with some fresh points or
analysis, though also often with a “déjà vu” sense that we have
heard it before, and every twenty pages or so popping in an often
seemingly gratuitous reference to “taking sex differences
seriously.”
In sum, Taking Sex
Differences Seriously is a good book that I recommend, but not
as enthusiastically as many of the other titles I have reviewed over
the years. I suppose it is a positive development that so many books
loosely aligned with the Everyman viewpoint are being
published that we readers are able to make these sorts of
distinctions! Maybe that is the most useful and most heartening
lesson of all.
J. Steven Svoboda ©2005
