Deep Secrets

"In a Different Voice [Gilligan’s previous book] brought women’s voices into what was then called the human conversation, thus making the point that women are humans. My research with girls then highlighted girls’ resistance to losing basic human capacities. Both voice and the desire to live in relationships inhere in our human nature, yet girls felt pressured to silence themselves in order to be loved and valued. In Deep Secrets, Niobe Way adds a crucial, final piece to this puzzle, showing a comparable resistance among adolescent boys who also face pressures to sacrifice parts of their humanity. Based on 20 years of research with adolescent boys, Deep Secrets reveals that boys also know the value of close friendships. They say this directly to Way and her research team – a high school junior says that without a best friend to tell your secrets to “you would go wacko”. Others speak of feeling crazy, becoming angry, lonely or depressed. The boys in Way’s studies, diverse in ethnicity and social class, talk openly about their love for their best friends and value the emotional closeness of these friendships. They resist a masculinity that equates emotional intimacy and vulnerability with being a girl or being gay. Yet by the end of high school, these same boys speak of no longer having a best friend and losing their trust in their male peers. They equate becoming a man with being independent and emotionally stoic. Way attributes this shift to the set of assumptions about gender that have kept us from seeing boys accurately, and she points to our cultural equation of emotional vulnerability with being gay and girlish. In many ways, her findings parallel the research on women and girls. As girls will come to hear an honest voice as “stupid” and women will describe doing what they want to do, as opposed to doing what others want them to do, as “selfish”, so boys will hear an emotionally open voice as “babyish” and men will separate their sense of themselves from human qualities regarded as feminine. Lise Eliot’s work puts in place another piece of this puzzle. She demonstrates that a lot of what is claimed to differentiate boys from girls is not accurate, according to neuroscience data. Mothers of boys, and I’m the mother of three boys, know that little boys are emotionally effusive and perceptive. But then they’re taught that feelings of sadness, tenderness, vulnerability or hurt are not masculine. They hear “boys don’t cry”, whereas girls are allowed to show more of their feelings, at least until adolescence. The idea that girls are emotional and boys are not is a myth; it’s just not true. The truth is that boys and girls are humans, meaning by nature they are empathic and vulnerable, astute at reading the human world around them, including the culture or cultures in which they are living, the gender stereotypes and expectations. The new understanding of human nature now spreading through the human sciences leads primatologist Frans de Waal in his recent book The Age of Empathy to call for “a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature”, on the grounds that these assumptions have been skewed by the emphasis on competition and aggression. De Waal’s research, along with that of Sarah Hrdy, Michael Tomasello, and others, provides extensive evidence of the empathic nature of primates, including humans, and scientists more generally now speak of “emotional intelligence”, the “relational self” and the “feeling brain” – concepts that undo the old gender binaries that linked emotions, relationships, and feelings with women, and intelligence, the self, and the rationality of the brain with men."