Cultural Differences and the Socialization of Gender

One of the topics that really stood out to me while reading the assignment that was due yesterday, was how different cultures view gender and sex. I found some of these differences to be very troubling and strange, but I know that that is only because they are not “normal” practices in our society. One of the practices that I am referring to is on page 50, and it deals with children in the Dominican Republic. It says that “it is common for males to be born with undescended testes and an underdeveloped penis” (Wood 50). The boys are then treated like girls and wear dresses until their bodies are fully developed, when they are then treated like males. My group had an interesting discussion about this yesterday, dealing with the potential psychological damage that could be done to the child. Adolescence is confusing enough as it is, and this cultural practice seems like it would just add to the confusion of figuring out who you are and where your place is in society.

My next thought came to me after watching a video on Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in sociology today. If you are not familiar with this experiment, Zimbardo conducted a simulation of how prisoners and their guards interact by placing about 20 volunteer male college students (with perfect mental health and perfect mental health history) in the basement of a psychology building and turning it into a mock prison. The students were randomly assigned either the roles of guards or the roles of prisoners, and the experiment was set to run in two weeks duration. By the second day of the simulation, all of the students began to assume their new roles and identities. Some of the guards became sadistic, placing their prisoners in an isolation cell (which was actually a dark storage closet) for hours at a time, and several of the prisoners became rebellious and resisted the guards’ control. The experiment ended up being cut short after 6 days because Zimbardo realized that what he had done was completely unethical and that the prisoners were enduring extreme psychological and emotional abuse from the guards.

While I was watching this video, I kept thinking about gender differences and whether the experiment would have had a different outcome, had Zimbardo conducted it with women rather than men. Wood argues that the genders are socialized differently and that women have a maternal and protective instinct (Wood 54). If this experiment had been conducted with women, do you think that women would have used their maternal instinct to protect their fellow prisoners from the emotional abuse? Or, would they have taken on the roles that they were assigned, like the men in the actual simulation did?