Battle of the Sexes, circa 1963

I first became aware of gender differences when I was about six or seven. I had a brother just seventeen months younger than me (he turns 61 in just a few days), so I knew about the physical differences between boys and girls. But in terms of sexism and role-playing, it didn’t really strike me until about the time my brother started school. In fact, his indoctrination into sexism taught me as well.

My brother and me, back before gender differences mattered

We’d played together for as long as I could remember. Often, my brother was the only companion I had. I went to preschool and then to grade school, and I played with friends there. But I didn’t have many friends in our neighborhoods. When our family lived in Corvallis, Oregon, during my preschool years, our house was near a busy street. I wasn’t permitted to cross it on my own to play with a girl who lived on the other side, so she and I rarely played together. We moved back to Richland, Washington, when I was five and a half, but our family soon moved to a house on a block-long street where only one other child lived—a boy a little younger than my brother.

When my brother and I played, we sometimes played house. Sometimes I was the father and he was the mother—after all, he was shorter than I was, so of course he could be the mother. Sometimes we played with soldiers. Sometimes we colored. Sometimes we played board games or card games.

We sometimes argued over what to do, but our arguments didn’t revolve around “boys’ games” or “girls’ games.” The arguments merely reflected our boredom of the moment and what we should do next.

One day shortly after my brother had started school—so it was in about 1962 or ’63—the boy down the street came over to play. My brother and I had been playing happily together that afternoon. We had his little toy soldiers spread out all over the basement rec room floor—he and I were waging some battle or other, both of us representing the blue soldiers, with the gray soldiers as the enemy. We had our battle strategy all worked out. I was happy to include the neighbor boy in our fun when he joined us.

But within minutes, the two boys decided I couldn’t play with them. It didn’t matter that I was older and bigger than they were. I was a girl, and they announced that I could not play this boys’ game.

It was decidedly unfair, but my only recourse was to complain to my mother. If my brother had been alone, I might have used my physical superiority to win the day, but I couldn’t do that with a non-family member present.

“Just let the boys play,” she told me. “Why don’t you read a book?”

Even my own mother didn’t support me in my quest for justice. What could I do but go read my book?

I realized over time that whenever there are three children involved in a situation, two of them will probably gang up on the third. In fact, just a few months later, when my brother was playing with the neighbor kid again, a third boy—a friend of our family’s who was older than my brother—came to play as well. My brother and his older friend promptly ganged up on the neighbor kid, who soon left for his house.

Kids are tribal and turn on each other easily. William Golding in Lord of the Flies had that part right. And sometimes, they turn on each other for stupid reasons. Like sexism.

It’s a pity some kids never grow up.

When have others ganged up against you? Or when have you ganged up against someone else?