In her new book, An Unconventional Family, Cornell psychology and women's studies professor Sandra Lipsitz Bem chronicles her efforts at forming a family and raising her children, Emily and Jeremy, in a "gender-liberated, anti-homophobic, and sex-positive way." When Sandra first met and later married her partner Daryl in 1965, she says what most attracted her to him was "the fact that he was male and I was female had not seemed to be part of our chemistry." Alternating daily child care responsibilities, the couple would put two pointy breast marks on a figure in the kitchen signifying "mommy's turn," and one pointy crotch mark for "daddy's turn." To maintain a strictly egalitarian household, Sandra even quashed some of Daryl's superior job offers.

To liberate the children from the tyranny of "the culture's sex-and-gender system," Bem writes, "we never allowed there to be a time... when they didn't know that some people had partners of their own sex and other people had partners of the other sex." The couple "censored" certain books and television programs that had inappropriate sexual messages, and even used white correcting fluid to change pronouns in books from male to female. Family members would often traipse around in the buff, and Sandra made a point of "putting tampons in and taking them out" in front of the children to demonstrate that women's menstrual blood was not "yucky." Children were encouraged to "experiment sexually" with members of either sex in the privacy of their bedrooms. When Jeremy showed signs of special adeptness at math, Sandra regarded it as a "nightmare. After all, mathematics is a field in which few American women have yet entered the highest levels, and that gender disparity could have easily made Jeremy even more disrespectful of women's intelligence."

The children, now in their twenties, have turned out surprisingly normal. Emily dates boys mostly, wears makeup, maintains a doll collection, and does not shave her body hair. Jeremy still occasionally wears a skirt, just as he wore barrettes to nursery school. He admits that it still bothers him that he is interested in "conventionally gendered" topics like "math and computer programming and physics." Rebuking his mother for her child-rearing practices in a later interview for the book, Jeremy says, "If you were doing it all over again, I would advise you to make it clearer to me that it's okay to have conventional desires as well as unconventional ones." Emily, for her part, complains that her mother made her feel "unnatural to be a girl." Sandra takes this to mean that she and her husband/partner must have been "much more gendered as parents than [we] had intended."

In conclusion, Bem mentions without any elaboration that she and Daryl "did split up about four years ago, and both of use became involved in relationships with people of our own sex." She describes their current relationship as "no longer close-coupled."

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