Member-only story
Brothers and Sisters
Sibling dynamics and the formulation of identity.
M y world doesn’t have all that many women in it. I have a brother. I went to an all boys’ school. I have a husband. Almost all my friends are male. All but one of my cousins is male. I am an uncle of nephews. And it has sometimes been said I hero worship my dad.
What does this say about my attitude to women?
And would I be different if I’d grown up in a household with more women in it?
It is sometimes said men who have sisters understand women better than their sister-less counterparts.
All that first hand proximity, it is sometimes said, means better communication skills, better awareness of how to coexist with women, better knowledge of how women see the world. It means, apparently, a heightened awareness of the social implications of being a woman.
Perhaps. And it makes for good copy for the dating columns which offer advice about how to snag the “perfect guy”.
But there’s something unhelpfully reductive about the formulation, surely. Do men and women really see the world in very different ways?
Is it really that simple?
A boy with three sisters will live in a very different household from a boy with three brothers…
