What is the greatest divide between humans - more important than age, nationality, race, education or occupation? It is what the midwife calls out at a baby's first breath, "It's a girl" or "It's a boy". For most of us it would be unimaginable to suddenly turn into the opposite sex. That is what makes Boy Meets Girl (Tuesdays C4) fascinating. A group of ordinary young people take on the challenge of adopting the identity of the opposite gender. Can they get away with it? Can they become credible imitation men and women?
It is a pity this has been treated as a kind of game show where four men and four women are whittled down to four (two of each) finalists who have to spend a week in their home towns and see if they pass muster. The project itself is far too interesting to need any competitive element. Watching the men imagine themselves into women and vice versa tells us a great deal about gender - the stereotypes and some fundamental truths.
They are all taken through their paces by voice coaches, fashion experts and some of the people who help those undergoing sex-change operations to reinvent themselves as the opposite sex. There are the obvious transformations - men learning transvestite tricks for hiding their genitals, adopting breasts, and choosing women's clothes to suit their new characters. The women bind up their breasts, get stubble and coarse skin from the make-up artist, and learn to stride about like men.
The most astonishing thing we learn has nothing to do with how convincing they are (not very, they look distinctly odd), but what they think of the opposite sex. In their imitations we discover that the chasm between the genders is even wider than we thought. The women are utterly unable to evoke any kind of convincing male characters. They drink beer from a bottle, talk about girls stupidly and have no sympathetic qualities whatever. Manliness seems to mean behaving badly and inadequately, speaking stupidly with confidence and having very little to say.
The men pretending to be women vamp it up without meaning to. They seem to think women are endlessly provocative and terrifyingly powerful, highly ambitious and forceful. In the end they are like transvestites, nothing like ordinary women, a parody of imaginary extraordinary women from novels as if they have never met a real woman in their lives.
So that seems to be what the sexes think of one another and it is not a very edifying vision. One of the men is a married father of three, one of the women a married mother, so these are not natural haters of the opposite sex. But once asked to act the part, something of their true feelings seems to come through and those feeling left me dispirited about how little the sexes understand one another, or even really like one another.
Perhaps it is just that asked to perform and act out a role, they go for extremes. For research into gender stereotypes rather reassuringly suggests that most of us have a rich mix of characteristics traditionally associated with both sexes. Imagine a line: at the far male end is a small group of ultra-macho men, and at the opposite end is a small group of absurdly feminine women. But in the middle is the great majority of humankind and they share between them varying assortments of qualities that might be described as male or female - tough, brave, risk-taking and leadership qualities cross over with nurturing, sensitive, caring and collaborative traits.
Traditionally throughout history, society has grotesquely overexaggerated the gender difference, forcing all men to pretend they are nothing but macho, all women acquiescently feminine. The point about feminism is that it liberates both men and women from their throttling straightjackets and lets both sexes become rounded human beings, according to their own individuality. The evolutionary psychologists and neo-Darwinians are now trying to put us back into our boxes again by suggesting we are all predestined to preordained behaviour, just slave to our genes. But it is a dismal robotic vision of mankind. We are born free and it is only these crude ideas of how we should conform to gender type that have kept us in chains throughout most of time.
This series doesn't take us deeply enough into these themes. There are no serious thinkers about the nature of the gender question to guide us or the contestants. It will generate more energetic debate at home than appears on the screen, but it does lift the petticoat entertainingly on the whole question.
Copyright Radio Times, February 10th-16th 2001.