Word: genderism
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...full explanation for this gender gap, however, is undoubtedly more complicated than that. Long-term data from an Israeli study, for example, indicate that the life-lengthening powers of marriage have increased over time--but again, mostly for men. Over nearly two decades, the study found, married men widened the already significant difference in cancer-death incidence between themselves and unmarried men by 25%; married women gained absolutely zero ground over their unmarried peers. Why this subtle somatic sexism? "This is a gross generalization, but women are really the mental- and physical-health housekeepers for a marriage," says psychologist Janice...
...teachers headaches, but they teach boys and girls a lot. The games, after all, are about pursuit and emotional arousal, two critical elements of sex. "There are a lot of erotic forms of play," says Barrie Thorne, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School. "It can be titillating, and it may involve sexual meaning, but it comes and goes...
More enduring--for a while at least-- is the gender segregation that begins at this age. Boys and girls who once played in mixed groups at school begin to drift apart into single-sex camps, drawing social boundaries that will stay in place for years. In her 1986 study that is still cited today, Thorne looked at 802 elementary-school students from California and Massachusetts to determine just what goes on behind these gender fortifications and why they're established in the first place...
...surprise, both groups spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the opposite sex, but they do it in very different ways. Boys experiment more with sexually explicit vocabulary and, later, sexual fantasies. Girls focus more heavily--but hardly exclusively--on romantic fantasies. The two-gender world they'll eventually re-enter will be a lot more complex than that, but for now, the boys are simply practicing being boys--albeit in a very rudimentary way--and the girls are practicing being girls. "Among the boys, for example, there's a lot of bragging talk," says Thorne...
When puberty hits, the wall between the worlds begins to crumble--a bit. Surging hormones make the opposite sex irresistible, but the rapprochement happens collectively, with single-gender groups beginning to merge into co-ed social circles within which individual boys and girls can flirt and experiment. Generally, kids who pair off with a love interest and begin dating will hold onto a return ticket to the mixed-gender group. Jennifer Connolly, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, studied 174 high school students in grades nine to 11 and found that when things go awry with couples, the kids...