of having to accept and take re- sponsibility for his own acts. But lets look at the infant AFTER birth and not before.

There are a lot of potentials available to humans that are not available to chimpanzees and they are available to all humans at birth. Unfortunately, we tend as adults to impute to newborn babies those characteristics which we observe in other adults both male and female. Thus, learning that someones infant is a male, we are likely to handle the baby differently and com- ment about how strong he is, or that he is a "real boy" (whatever that is), or how handsome he is. On the other hand a female baby brings out comments especially from women (because they are female too) like, “isn't she ador- able", or "she is so pretty", "what lovely blue eyes she has” and the like. If the girl baby is picked up it is handled much more tenderly and carefully than is the boy. It has been shown ex- perimentally that regardless of the actual sex of the infant if strangers are asked to watch the baby for a minute or to hold it or to otherwise interact with it, that their behavior toward the baby is determined by whether the mother (or the experimenter) mentions the gender (boy or girl) in making the request or in- troducing the child. Like, "would you be so kind as to look after my LITTLE GIRL for a moment while I do so and so.” Or, "Henry here, is asleep now but if he wakes up just hand him his rattle". The experimental subject then talks to and treats the first child as a girl and the latter as a boy even though in actuality the first is a male and the second a female.

The point of the above experi- ment is to show that knowledge of an infants sex whether through verbal information or from observing the pink or blue layette leads others to treat him the way they believe boys or girls ought to be treated. So from the very beginning mothers treat boy and girl babies differ- ently and fathers as soon as they get close to the child start mak- ing the infant into a son or a daughter as the case may be. And this goes on more or less for the rest of their life as we all know from personal experience and as we all do to babies with whom we come into contact whether our own children or others.

Now what is the source of these ideas? Everybody in a given society has a pretty clear idea of what kind of activities, clothing, jobs, behavior, accomplishments, etc. are considered appropriate and desireable for people who are born with penises, and which are appropriate for those with vaginas. These ideas vary from culture to culture but the con- cepts of the appropriate life styles for the two sexes esist in all cultures. Thus no matter what race or nationality a baby is born into, the presence of a penis or a vagina at birth his or her future course is, in effect, predetermin- ed and parents, teacher, peers and society in general continu- ously guides the individual along that path showing and teaching what he or she needs to know and pulling him or her back onto the path if they appear to stray too far afield. At least a strong attempt is made to keep the child on the right path. The ac- cusation of being a "sissy" is one of the common ways of keeping

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boys on the straight and narrow path to manhood and masculin- ity.

But as I indicated all human babies are born with the same social potentials. I am not refer- ring to the anatomical and phys- iological differences between males and females but rather to the psychological and behavioral possibilities that exist in human life and which make up the soci- ological environment we are all immersed in. But in the process of growing up parents, teachers and society not only emphasize those characteristics (out of the whole realm of potentials that they consider appropriate for us) but actively discourage and actu- ally punish us for displaying some of the other potentials that society considers inappro- priate of our sex and presumed destiny. Thus boys grow up en- couraged and rewarded for mani- festing all those patterns consid- ered in his society to be appro- priately masculine and at the same time is discouraged, deri- ded, and even punished for man- ifesting those other parts of his own total human potential that are judged to be inappropriate (read feminine). Looked at from another point of view men are masculine by default as much as by intention. That is, if you start out with 100 potential patterns and you remove or prohibit the use of 50 of them the individual has no choice but to build a life the best he can with the 50 that are left. As an analogy, if a baby can be considered to be born with a deck of cards in his hands he has 52 possible cards to play, 26 black and 26 red. Now if someone says in effect, "wait a minute, you have a penis so you can't play any red cards" he is