The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future

More Praise for Frank Browning

"The Fate of Gender is a valuable addition to the debate on whether genders are multiplying, morphing, mutating, or disappearing entirely. Frank Browning presents a wide-ranging review of the current complexities of gender and sexuality. Engagingly written, this book is an excellent catch-up on what gender is all about today." —Judith Lorber, professor emerita, Graduate School and Brooklyn College, CUNY, and author of Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change

Does sex have a future? Well, yes. But everything else is up for grabs. An insightful, important book. —Rita Mae Brown, author of Rubyfruit Jungle

"Frank Browning is a voracious social, cultural, and political observer. He ranges across continents and venues, stopping to inspect circumstances and examples, in this instance relentlessly moving toward an understanding of what gender is coming to mean. Browning makes it perfectly clear that gender these days is not a settled thing, if it ever really was. A persuasive evidence of intellect is the ability to take disparate examples and fashion them into an entirely unexpected but coherent whole. The Fate of Gender is a stunning example." —David Hawpe, former editor, The Courier-Journal (Louisville)

This is an extraordinary book. From the moment of our conception, sex and gender rule our lives. Browning, with incisiveness, insight, and wit, takes us on this journey, combining the latest relevant research with personal stories and his own explorations. He uses the research to highlight the personal, and acknowledges what is rarely said: that sex and gender are a muddle and mystery and we bravely soldier on ’til the end. —Lynn Meyer, founder, Women’s Emergency Network

An important book … that never sidesteps troubling questions. —The New York Times Book Review on The Culture of Desire

Absolutely cutting-edge—a portrait of modern sexual politics [that] should be required reading. —Armistead Maupin on The Culture of Desire

Browning challenges us to consider what each of us is willing to risk to live life more fully. —San Francisco Examiner on The Culture of Desire

[Browning] presents an international and historical overview of homosexuality that is refreshingly broad-minded. —The Washington Post Book World on A Queer Geography

Hidden history revealed. —Studs Terkel on The American Way of Crime

For Neil Chudgar, without whom this book could not have happened

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part I: Gender Visions

  1:   Simple Justice or Gender Chaos?

  2:   From Homemakers to Nation Builders

Part II: Nature, Nurture, and Society

  3:   Science and Society

  4:   Who Is Woman?

  5:   Show Us What You’re Made Of

  6:   Gender War

Part III: Family Values: New Realities, New Complexities

  7:   Start at the Very Beginning …

  8:   Bringing Up Baby

  9:   Parents and Storks

10:   Rebuild the Hearth and Humanize the Firm?

Part IV: Fluidities

11:   Transitions

12:   That Can’t Be Sex

13:   Is the Clitoris a Sex Organ?

14:   Sexual Capital in Shanghai

Part V: Gender and Being

15:   Gender and the Techno Mind

16:   Bodies and Brains

17:   Gender and Resilience

Epilogue: The Fate of Gender

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

New Year’s 2017 brought Texas, the United States’ second largest state, into the front rank of territories declaring war against what had seemed to be a graceful and irresistible movement toward gender openness and sexual self-determination in America. Under the legislation, school children would be required to use only the bathrooms that matched their birth gender. Similar restrictions would apply to all public institutions. At the same time, the legislature in Wisconsin, historically a seat of progressive thought, continues to attack the University of Wisconsin, one of the nation’s premier universities, for offering courses that examine gender, masculinity, and homosexuality. A half dozen other states had already begun similar campaigns to restrict or ban classes concerning gender issues and sexuality. Laws and official regulations protecting gender and sexual minorities enacted during the eight years of the Obama administration were high on the target list of the new Congress taking office in 2017, as were policies protecting racial and ethnic minorities.

For many, probably a majority of Americans, the groundswell of rage and resentment concerning gender issues, articulated during and after the 2016 electoral campaigns, came as a shock—as it did to tens of millions of ordinary citizens in Europe and Japan. The key assumption in this book is that despite pockets of fundamentalist religious backlash, liberal attitudes toward gender and sexual diversity have won the day. A score of social values surveys and pinpoint studies seemed to confirm the same openness of attitudes in most of America. After all, the highly regarded Pew Research Center has consistently shown support for same-sex marriage as 55 percent of the population against 37 percent opposed, while 57 percent of Americans support a woman’s right to abortion against 39 percent who declare themselves pro-life. Similarly, a 2015 Pew survey of major developed nations, including the United States, found that nine in ten residents regard gender equality as extremely important, second only to religious freedom. And a survey of 887 major U.S. employers released in January 2017 showed that 98 percent of the companies had added gender identity to their nondiscrimination policies, while 74 percent had added health care coverage for their transgender employees. Major population centers have not changed their outlook, as evidenced, for example, by Procter & Gamble’s deodorant ad campaign entitled There’s No Wrong Way to Be a Woman, featuring a transgender woman.

How then could all these researchers and journalists and corporate campaigns have been so confused in light now of unprecedented campaigns and legislation that directly aim to eliminate gender discussions and research from public schools and universities, while imposing harsh restrictions on the rights and behavior of people based on their gender identification? No less than America’s leading family magazine, National Geographic, attempted to address the gender conundrum in its January 2017 edition, placing a transgender girl, born a boy, on its cover. The issue featuring nine-year-old Avery Jackson of Kansas City arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes just before Christmas, the most family-oriented holiday of the year. Gender progressives were delirious with delight. Cultural conservatives exploded with rage; a tweeter using the handle Dirty Harry (recall the 1971 Clint Eastwood ultraviolent police thriller of the same name) lashed out immediately: National Geographic is trying to brainwash young people into thinking this kind of degeneracy is normal. Cancellations flooded into the Geographic’s offices along with mountains of praise. Editor Susan Goldberg wrote to subscribers: Today … beliefs about gender are shifting rapidly and radically. That’s why we’re exploring the subject this month, looking at it through the lens of science, social systems, and civilizations throughout history.

The Geographic’s writers, who visited every continent, were not exclusively interested in today’s hot-button interest in transgender people: they were concerned, as is this book, essentially with what it means to be masculine or feminine—terms that biological and neurological scientists have long understood to be far broader and more complex than possession of a penis or a vagina, sperm or ova. Science, however, does not comfort people who draw their most intimate core values from religion, tradition, or direct personal experience. Despite America’s preeminent role in pushing the frontiers of biological science forward, nearly a third of all American adults still reject categorically the incontrovertible evidence that humans and apes evolved from an earlier humanoid species, just as half of Americans dismiss years of clear scientific evidence that global warming and the melting of the north pole are the result of human activity.

Science is cold comfort to millions who are both poorly educated and deeply distressed by the increasingly diverse forms of human existence and behavior that now saturate the Internet and are no further away than a few clicks on a handheld. Ancient cultures of transsexuality and matriarchal community life are as distressing to conservative Christians in North Carolina and Texas as they are to murderous jihadists in Somalia—and efforts to purify their cultures are hardly new. These frequently racist, homophobic, and xenophobic purification campaigns arrive nearly always when profound cultural transition is already well under way, led by elites in distant cities where traditional beliefs and behaviors are frequently denigrated or dismissed as retrograde or deplorable. Indeed the hate campaigns are deplorable. Yet those who hold those traditional views are also usually on the withering end of the horn of plenty: their health care is worse, their incomes are lower, their job prospects are disappearing while urban-based high-tech jobs are booming and desk-based service posts are being taken over by women. The same is true across the occidental world from Sicily to Cicero. Those shifts in the domain of gender and work, not surprisingly, have only intensified the sense of loss and rage being experienced by the militant minority. In response, that minority has unleashed unprecedented expressions of hate speech and a mounting toll of physical attack, documented daily in major newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media.

Rather than see human fluidity of gender and identity as a liberating phenomena, these outraged and self-perceived abandoned citizens have found a megaphone among cynical and opportunistic political spokesmen, who always see powerful opportunity in waves of popular fear. Fear and rage, however, seldom triumph when faced with irresistible forces of economics, demography, and the will to human freedom and development. Those combined forces all point in the same gender direction, illustrated eloquently in a recent New York Times report of a roundtable of union workers in Michigan, where one middle-aged man made the point very plain: If the little lady doesn’t get paid the same as I do, I need to get overtime and there’s no OT anymore. The rest of the men there heartily agreed. Be it Olympic athletes turning into fashion models, high school girls triumphing as burly soccer stars, or men learning to push baby strollers while their wives take over corporate management departments, the world we are entering will not merely tolerate reconfiguring conventional roles of masculinity and femininity: it will demand the rethinking of gender.

Introduction

To a New World of Genders

Next to cutting and hanging tobacco, tomato canning (my current activity as I write these introductory notes) was about the most unpleasant summer work I remember from my childhood in Kentucky. Late August and the outdoor temperature always burned past ninety matched by a humidity even higher. Indoors the kettles of boiling water pushed it over one hundred. Sweat dripped from every pore. Canned the same day they were picked from muddy, prickly vines, the fresh tomatoes were first washed, then skinned by plunging them briefly into the boiling water, then packed into quart jars before being lowered in a rack into the pressure canner, a sealed stovetop container that if not properly closed could explode, permanently scarring anyone who happened to be nearby. Tempers in the kitchen were seldom lower than the temperature.

Canning in my childhood was women’s work, like mopping and laundering and bathing the baby. Today, canning is a nearly forgotten art. Of the few people who do still can, most I know these days are men. Very few women have either the time or the inclination to undergo this annual punitive exercise no matter how much better the end result may taste when compared to tins of flavorless red stuff sold on supermarket shelves. Men, however, seem to find it a fascinating test of their culinary skills and a demonstration of how flexibly fluid they can show themselves to be in today’s gender-diffuse times, when the lead breadwinners in half the households in America are women and baby bathing and diaper changing are about equally divided. None of which was really imaginable during my early adolescence at the peak of Beatles and Rolling Stones fame a generation ago. Males in rural Georgia or Kansas or Virginia or Ohio would in those days have been banned from the poker club or shunned at the pickup basketball court had their fingernails betrayed the traces of peach and tomato flesh.

I was lucky, I suppose, to have grown up in Kentucky, officially a border state, a locution that derives from the Civil War when slaveholding sons bayonetted their Yankee cousins on the battlefields. But Kentucky’s border mentality extended much farther into the psyches of men and women, boys and girls I grew up with. To be passionately both and neither and ready to talk about it across the table over a shot of bourbon was, if not a norm, an ideal—just as the Baptist preachers would hedge their Sabbath rules by coming to buy our apples on Sundays promising to return on Monday to pay the IOU they had left. Race remains a ragged and volatile piece of the border fabric, but in odd ways, gender borders were always more porous—even if the men kept far away from the house during canning time. Older men—men in the 1960s when I was fifteen—regularly called young guys honey. Any family with six or more children most always had one who was well he’s just Uncle Jack (or Aunt Frances), meaning everyone early on understood that that one wouldn’t marry or carry on the line (which, we will see later, is a natural statistical distribution in large families); out of a dozen cousins one normally would be the florist or take up nursing, or among the girls one would handle the tractor and the hay baler more expertly than any of her brothers. So long as they declared nothing about their privacies and embarrassed no one at Thanksgiving dinner, they were welcome and even encouraged to shred some conventional gender borderlines. The perennial bachelors could even bake cakes—at least sturdy chocolate if never fluffy angel cakes.

Today all of these roles and behaviors that once defined what and how men and women could be and do seem terribly antiquated, detritus on the cultural battlefield of what has for the last half century been labeled the gender revolution. The term itself—gender—would have baffled most everyone in the first years after World War II when legions of women known collectively as Rosie the Riveter returned to the kitchen after running tobacco farms and serving in wartime factories building tanks and B-52 bombers. While the boys had shipped away to Dunquerque and Yokohama, expediency transferred women onto the shop floor to replace them, even as they kept canning beans and tomatoes by night. No one then saw it as a gender revolution. It wouldn’t be until the late 1950s that the term itself began to seep into academic discourse, not least concerning many of those women who had discovered that they liked working for their own out-of-house independence. Even early frontline feminists like Betty Friedan or the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir made sparse distinction between sex and gender. Beauvoir’s most famous book, remember, was entitled Le deuxième sexe (and in English translation The Second Sex). Only with the arrival of the Baby Boom generation did activists, sociologists, and philosophers, most notably the Berkeley theoretician Judith Butler and her followers, begin to separate the two terms. Sex referred to biology and, to a larger degree, to nature. Gender came to be seen as learned social behavior distinguishing male and female roles—or nurture. Women canned. Men harvested. (At least in America, though those roles were always much muddier in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.)

When I was a twelve-year-old visiting one of my spinster aunts in the city, she took it upon herself to educate me in proper male comportment: I was always to stand up and offer my seat on a public bus when a lady entered, always to hold the door for a lady, always to pass the plate at Thanksgiving dinner first to the ladies at the table. Generally I still do those actions though frequently young women on crowded subways stand up to make room for me when I enter. These are gestures of politeness, of course, but as many angry feminists argued at the height of the women’s movement in the early 1970s, they are also enacted statements about power and who holds it. A much younger woman who cedes her place to me now both pleases me and reminds me that I have become less vigorous, less forceful, or simply less than those people who are thirty years younger than I. To offer your arm to a girlfriend similarly indicated protection as well as a public demonstration of affection, but at the same time the gesture served—and still serves—as a statement of ownership: She is mine; don’t touch. Now when in major American and European cities young men similarly link their arms, that too is a performance—an act intended to declare both affection between the two and pride in their affection—whereas two women linking arms indicates nothing more than friendship. Physical gestures far more subtle than these fill volumes of anthropological history—from Romans who quietly signaled their availability to one another by lightly scratching their heads with a middle finger to portions of New Guinea where pointed lips are still more often used than pointed fingers to signal directions. Smart phones and near universal Internet access, even in the remote forests of New Guinea, may have mixed and blended these steadily evolving forms of bodily gesture, but gestures do remain. Likely they will always remain with us as powerful signals of power, attachment, and personhood, regardless of how we accept or challenge gender conventions. Moreover, these essential gender expressions, whether they signal forms of personal relations or indicate structures of authority and submission in a symphony orchestra, call us to reconsider still further what we believe is natural in the greater realm of Nature.

As late as the postwar era, only the most radical of feminists (among them Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger) dared dissent from the assumption that men by nature are better suited to run universities or direct orchestras, just as most Americans and Europeans accepted that women by nature were better equipped to nurture and raise children. In France, the schools that Americans and Nordic peoples call kindergarten are still called école maternelle, plainly if not consciously indicating that women are naturally the best keepers of the young. Fundamentalist religious leaders, whether they are French Catholics or Kentucky evangelicals, insist more loudly than ever that these gender roles are simply natural enactments established by the deity and his prophets on earth. So it is that the march of the gender revolution has reached far more deeply and far more broadly into nearly every element of human behavior and society.

Liberal-minded citizens of the West express shock at the renewed declarations by Salafist and other Islamist scholars who do not merely defend the subordination of women to men but also justify the flogging or outright enslavement of any woman whom they judge to be an infidel. As much as mainstream Muslim doctrine rejects the Salafist arguments, and as much as mainstream Christians now denounce them, it is wise to remember that little more than a century ago much more conventional Christianity continued to defend enslavement. If Southern Baptists were the most notorious apologists for slavery before and even after the Civil War, the Catholic Church, the world’s largest Christian sect, continued to defend enslavement until nearly the dawn of the twentieth century, and even afterward it enforced a sort of near slavery on unmarried pregnant young women in its infamous Magdalene laundries. Easily forgotten as well, women in America did not win the right to vote until 1920 while in France, that other supposed bastion of liberty, women only won the franchise in 1944 at the end of the Nazi occupation—a mere twenty years before I entered university.

Wartime’s reliance on Rosie the Riveters and the subsequent social upheavals of the 1960s had certainly loosened the reins of masculine control that had long blocked gender equity and had regimented individual expressions about how men and women could comport themselves in public—the clothes they could wear, the songs they could sing, the jobs they could hold, the mates with whom they could bed, even down to how they could raise their children or even decide whether and how to bring a child into the world. Both the Civil Rights and the anti–Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s were critical and often contradictory antecedents to what became the feminist movement of the 1970s and the slightly later gender-bending campaigns for gay and lesbian rights.

Yet all these public social movements and the raucous, joyous effervescence that surrounded them drew not only on two centuries of post-Enlightenment movements for personal freedom. They also drew deeply on broad public education about science and health, which contributed to sturdier bodies for men and women, greater longevity, deeper understanding of how our bodies function—and most importantly on a radical social vision aimed on ensuring individual, personal autonomy over our own bodies. Toward that latter end nothing counted more than the long campaign first articulated by Margaret Sanger for women to control their own fertility—and their own freedom from forced procreation. The very first oral birth control pill, Enovid, won FDA approval in 1960, following on a decade of research initially funded by Sanger—who had been sentenced to jail a half century earlier for promoting contraception. The pill represented a light-year leap not only in freeing sexually active women from the risk of becoming pregnant: It broke the nature-nurture wall that for millennia had united erotic pleasure with reproduction. Sex, all the global monotheisms had taught (and official Vatican liturgy still teaches), serves only one function: procreation, creating babies. All non-erotic pleasure equals a form of sin. Once erotic pleasure was safely isolated—or mostly isolated—from reproduction, all kinds of barriers began to break down, exactly as all the popes, imams, and orthodox rabbis had warned. Women became biologically free to act on the political and philosophical feminist arguments that Beauvoir and Friedan had advanced. Work agendas need not be blocked by babies. And indeed the age of when women experienced their initial pregnancies began steadily moving upward. Ownership of one’s own body became a real possibility, as the authors of the real bible of sexual liberty, Our Bodies, Ourselves, argued in passionate detail when the book first appeared in 1971. It has sold more than four million copies in twenty-nine languages and has been continually updated and revised to reflect changing medical knowledge and social perspectives.

But as much as the pill and Our Bodies, Ourselves originally aimed to free women from what its authors saw as the tyranny of male-enforced pregnancy, the reverberations echoed across the entire erotic and behavioral landscape, altering almost overnight how college boys and girls behaved between the sheets. As behavior changed, so too changed the language of sex and sexuality, the openness with which sex could be discussed and portrayed in everything from comic books to rock concerts. Hippie encampments that were hardly more than starlight bordellos spread from California to Iowa to Vermont. Saving it for marriage became an ongoing joke once pregnancy disappeared as a risk. Indeed the fissures in the institution of marriage itself grew into cracks and crevasses until by the mid-1970s a minority of brides took to the bridal sheets as virgins.

Little surprise: Once the sanctions and persecutions for heterosexual sex began to collapse, so exploded as well the liberation campaigns for a steadily expanding array of other erotic expression. The older, quiet suit-and-tie Mattachine advocates who had fought to decriminalize homosexual acts flowered into fierce on- and off-campus demonstraters for gay liberation, for bisexuality, for transsexuality. Once the idea that each individual owned his or her own body and the risk of burning in Hell for committing sodomy went away, the human body in all its tortures and treasures became an open turf for discovery and debate. Why should women who didn’t hunger for the erotic caress of male hands and genitals not find their pleasures elsewhere: alone, with other women, with toys or cucumbers or not at all? And why should men who desired other men’s bodies and longed for the taste of other men’s fluids not pursue them? Or for those whose erotic motors revered equally clitoris and penis not kiss both with equal passion carrying no thought of procreation?

Soon enough came that not insignificant slash of humanity who saw and felt themselves lodged in bodies that did not match their spirits, as people who were not exactly male, not exactly female. If pretty women off the ranch could wear Wranglers and Levis, why shouldn’t square-shouldered males who loved silk wear skirts? And indeed more and more did and do, responding to their hormonal impulses, to their neo-Freudian conscious and unconscious impulses, and to an irrepressible fashion industry that has paid brilliant attention to both, leading us to the ever more fluid sense of sex and gender that has become the hallmark of our current era, in which molecular neuroscientists identify intersexuality and transsexuality not as aberrance or perversion but simply as merely further evidence of nature’s diversity.

The cultural right wing was quickly proved correct in its analysis of all the risks that came with the liberation of the erotic from the reproductive, even if their program was bankrupt in its morality. As we felt free to couple and behave as we wished, the traditional bonds of reproductive law quickly unraveled. Gay bars and cafés, lesbian sewing circles, and raucous Pride marches not only swept across the urban landscape; within less than a generation, gay men had mostly shed their fearful, limp-wristed stereotypes to become CEOs and founders of global corporations, notable among them Apple CEO Tim Cook and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, while the bull dyke profile gave way to Google’s Megan Smith (named chief technology officer of the United States in 2014) or Genentech’s Nancy Vitale. The ever-expanding LGBTQ alphabet tag had by the 1980s become nearly as common as, sometimes more so than, earlier hyphenated ethnic heritage and pride. By the time a dozen states had enacted same-sex marriage laws in the first decade of the millennium, all of them finally certified by a majority Supreme Court in 2015, gender battles had steadily displaced the simplistic notion of a male-female binary with an ever-expanding perception that all individuals exist on a shifting spectrum of gender, sexuality, and personal identity. David Bowie, Boy George, Michael Jackson, Brittany Howard, Grace Jones, even the legendary Nina Simone. By voice and profile they all questioned the gender tag they had been popularly assigned and awakened parallel senses of fluidity in their fans and listeners. The ultra-glam star Lady Gaga, who came on the scene in 2005, once explained, I love Grace Jones and David Bowie because they both played with gender and what sexy means. Or as a married Brooklyn carpenter friend who performs occasionally at the Imperial Court of New York as Kay Sera—the Boy as Cute as the Girl Next Door—once put it to me, My line is simple: Straight in the sheets, Queer in the streets.

While the politicized feminist movement focused its energy on gender equity, the cultural movements that grew from sexual liberation—from Freud to Lady Gaga—unleashed a still more disturbing (to both conservatives and leftists) campaign for gender fluidity, and both would find their legal foundation in what came to be known as Title IX, a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972 that expanded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against women.

Title IX was directed at ensuring that women have equal rights to federally funded education. Its most immediate effects were on expanding college enrollment and on opening athletic programs to female students who had long been ignored or outright excluded. But Title IX reached much farther, declaring that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of gender, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Indiana senator Birch Bayh, the author of Title IX, defended the act against an alliance of Southern Dixiecrats and northern Republicans who, like today’s opponents of gay marriage, viewed it as a war against God and Nature. We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, Bayh said on the Senate floor, [who] go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex’ and it is time to change our operating assumptions.

Title IX did in fact change many of the most common stereotypes about women’s place in modern American society. Suddenly school and university admission policies had to change. At the end of World War II barely 38 percent of college students were women. By 1988 54 percent were women, and by 2010 women made up 56 percent of public university students—and now women are 33 percent more likely than men to graduate college. Across the developed world men now trail women in university enrollment 48 percent to 52 percent. The roots of Title IX, of course, were long and tangled. The law in effect resurrected the gender equity reforms that had been championed by the first women’s rights movement born at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848; later the abolitionist Susan B. Anthony led the first serious movement for women’s voting rights, after which the suffrage movement expanded with Margaret Sanger, who was sentenced to a New York workhouse in 1917 for advocating birth control and distributing contraceptive materials. If Sanger and her allies won the right to vote, another half century would pass before women’s physical autonomy would win any serious attention. The failure of the states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution further blunted the political movement for gender equity. Women’s pay in the professions still remains a third behind men’s pay in equivalent job categories, even as women like Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, Ginni Rometty at IBM, and Marilyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin have famously risen to run some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

As much as the struggle for women’s equality has characterized the outward form of the gender story, our understanding of acceptable male behavior has also changed profoundly, not merely moving toward gender equity but opening the way toward gender fluidity. Women have clearly inched forward to dismantle the barriers to full human participation in the world, but so too have the rules regulating masculinity unwound. Much to the shock of my father’s generation, men have gradually moved toward behaviors and methods of expression that have been classically defined as feminine, from diaper changing to baking cookies to shifting more and more fluidly between standardized sexual roles. Prior to the twentieth century men were strictly constrained by acceptable work roles, by dress, by speech mannerisms, by which topics they could safely discuss in public or even among themselves, and, not least, by their physical comportment. Perhaps even more than the strictures imposed on respectable women, the constraints governing masculinity up until World War II were defined by public expectations of sobriety, rigor, and emotional restraint. Northern European and American intellectuals saw themselves as the Aryan descendants of classical Greek ideals. They and their fellow eugenicists argued from pulpit and podium that a well-formed physique reveals the interior character of civilized men and the notion of a civilized character was directly linked to national identity and race. Frailty, weakness, and deformation evidenced both genetic and moral inferiority—the basis upon which the science of eugenics sought to purify the future world of the lesser, weaker, more feminine races—including most notably Jews, Mohammedans, Africans, and Asians. Too close an association with any of these lesser species (or with the voluptuous form of the female—hence the near total exclusion of women from parliaments and the corridors of state) could only lead to masculine enfeeblement and national degeneration. Among the titans of the eugenics movement were no less than Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, George Bernard Shaw, and even Helen Keller. That linkage of manhood and nationalism, historian George Mosse argued in The Image of Man, met its apogee in the imagery, statuary, and politics of German nationalism, after which it found a new home in the triumphalism of mid-century America where science and technological innovation created supersized automobiles, intergalactic missiles, and the thermonuclear bomb that (for a time) seemed to guarantee America’s role as the world’s singular source of civilized power, now perhaps challenged by the bare-chested horseman, Vladimir Putin.

All of those masculine conceits were placed under threat, conscious or not, by the gender equity movement that provoked Betty Friedan to lead her collective children away from the ironing board and into the boardroom. In their wake came Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, disciplining the wayward Falkland Islands, followed a generation later by the world’s most powerful pantsuit-clad woman, Angela Merkel. In America the iconic Father Knows Best would be bested by the ultimate in gender fluidity shows, Transparent. At the same time it fell to a former mayor of hippie-homo San Francisco, Senator Diane Feinstein, to expose the systematic torture techniques that the men of the CIA had invented and refined along the shores of the Potomac. None of these outgrowths of the empowerment of women was spelled out directly by the feminist activists of the sixties and seventies, nor were those decades the sole progenitors of the chaotic gender world in which we now all live. There were, and remain, bitter conflicts between the original Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., and the Women’s Rights movement, just as deep divisions opened between some sectors of the women’s movement and many gay and lesbian activists. Many gay activists still cringe at linking arms with transsexual people. Yet the feminist movement undeniably helped remake a world where all these gender transformations became possible. Equal employment access, counseling for pregnant undergraduates, reshaping classroom and lab environments, striking back at sexual harassment (however feebly in macho fraternity houses), and acting forcefully to open engineering and high-tech training to women: All these were framed initially as issues of simple equality between the sexes. To the traditional pinstriped executive in his smoking room or to the laid-off line workers at U.S. Steel, or to the evangelical ministers in Alabama, Kentucky, and Arkansas, these arguments for equity constituted nothing less than a full-fledged assault on the natural order of the universe as designed by a singular and unmistakably male god leading to the current unwinding of strict masculine and feminine roles.

Upending the routines, rituals, and rules of gender has, as the cultural conservatives rightly predicted, led to radical transformations in how we as moderns lead our lives all around the world. The mission of this book is to track, explore, and interrogate those ongoing transformations: from rough-and-tumble kindergarten classes in Oslo to masturbation seminars in Shanghai, from same-sex rent-a-womb agencies in Los Angeles to transsexual parenting clubs in Salt Lake City, from high-tech women engineering teams in Silicon Valley to geriatric rebellions in Tokyo. Thanks to the endless and rarely censored explosion of smartphone talk and imagery, hardly anyone outside North Korea or Yemen is isolated from these cultural convulsions—including those who find the changes utterly blasphemous. Gay farm boys raise organic beef down the road from Holy Roller churches and men push baby strollers through Walmart aisles a few miles from my childhood farm in Kentucky—and no one notices,