“[Four-year-olds’ can even classify different shapes, textures, and emotions (like angular, rough, and anger) as male and female. This is why the triangle-headed creatures from outer space mentioned earlier were categorized as male–all those angles. Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls. This is truly remarkable, when you think about it. Heaven knows, I’ve heard enough parents openly labeling certain toys, activities, behaviors, and personality traits as being for boys or girls. In one month alone, I heard people referring to coloring in a dinosaur, playing soccer, being noisy, and wanting to press elevator buttons as boy things. But you don’t often hear a parent exclaiming, ‘No, no, Jane! Angles are for boys, not girls. Take the curved one.’ Yet even before they reach school, children can go well beyond the surface of gender associations and make inferences about nothing less than male and female inner nature itself. They also seem to learn, uncomfortably young, that females are ‘other.’ When Barbara David asked four- and five-year-old children to choose items that would show a martian what human beings were like, the girls chose a mix of female and male objects (such as guns and dolls), whereas the boys chose almost only male items.”
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