A Half-Baked Theory on Sex Differences

I’m sure much research has been done into the games infants play, but perhaps the observations of Betty Fonteno are as valid as any.

Mrs. Fonteno writes that she recently spent five 24-hour days baby-sitting her twin 16-month-old grandchildren--a girl and a boy--and she is convinced by that experience that boys and girls instinctively favor different toys.

“In a room scattered with toys they might fight over a plastic telephone or some musical toy, but by and large it was Natalie who picked up a doll to cuddle and Andrew who picked up a ball for a game of catch--although I never could catch his wild throws.”

I believe feminist doctrine holds that girls’ preference for dolls and boys’ for balls are the result of adult indoctrination, just as baby girls are made to wear pink booties and boys blue. If the infants were left to their instincts, they insist, girls might very well prefer toy machine guns and boys dolls.

Lacking any scientific data, I would probably agree that there is a difference between the interests of boys and girls that can not be accounted for by social influences.

I do recall that some years ago attorney Gloria Allred sued a local drug store chain because it divided its Christmas toy racks into sections for boys and girls; I believe the stores desisted.

Mrs. Fonteno says she also found, in reading children’s books to her charges, that sexual stereotypes were not only avoided but actually reversed. She said she was reading a book about little penguins that skied, ice-skated and built snow castles and came home to find that “ father penguin had baked a pie that he had waiting for them.”

This offended Mrs. Fonteno’s sense of the way things are. “Among all my friends and relatives I can only think of one man who now and then bakes a wild berry pie for his fishing buddies in Canada. . . .

“Neither my husband nor my four sons-in-law bake pies. I can’t say for certain that none of them have ever baked a pie, except for my husband. I can say with absolute certainty that my husband of almost 42 years has never baked a pie.

“Tell me, Mr. Smith, not counting frozen pies, but from scratch, have you or any of your male friends or relatives ever baked a pie? I feel certain that pie baking is most often done by women. And there are endless tasks that by their nature fall primarily to women, or men, for that matter.”

I confess that I have never baked a pie. Don’t forget that 10 million American soldiers fought World War II to make the world safe for Mom’s apple pie. I doubt that many of those boys came home to bake their own.

But I doubt that many women bake pies “from scratch” anymore. My wife used to bake pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving, but I can’t remember that she’s done that since the 1950s. Since I don’t eat pie, she doesn’t even bake frozen pies.

Meanwhile, I have a charming aside in the controversial question of how to deal with the generic his , as in “Will everyone put on his hat.” Every time I argue that no substitute for his/her is good prose, I am assailed by feminists who argue, rightly, that it is execrable to include women in his .

The true complexity of this dilemma is illustrated by Marjorie R. Spear, a former member of the Claremont City Council. “Was I a councilman? Was I a councilwoman?”

She sends a page from the Claremont Municipal Code with a rule that evidently mooted the question: “ Gender : The masculine gender includes the feminine and neuter.”

Mrs. Spear observes: “The concept of a neuter council member was mind-boggling, especially in Claremont. To various protests, the author of the code pointed out that this section was taken literally from the California code.

“There it was! The state of California in its infinite wisdom had proclaimed, indeed even enacted, the definition.”

Finally Mrs. Spear became mayor. “The dilemma was somewhat resolved by my being addressed as Madame Mayor, although an occasional constituent would begin a letter of complaint with ‘Madame Mayor, Sir.’ ”

There was one consolation: “During those eight years on the council I was called many things but never ‘it.’ ”