The Extra Rib & Other Myths

This book tackles delicate issues along the difficult learning path regarding gender. It seeks to trace from childhood, family, and prevailing social conditioning how a person's very self-identity and attitudes toward gender issues can be shaped and marked throughout one's entire life. Some of the consequences described in the book are what might be described as the resulting inner demons or beasties and bogeymen that lurk within the inner soul and are a source both of confusion to the victim and something that tends to be locked safely yet restrictively away from others. Thus, the two key symbols of this work-the private island to which one might retreat in relationships, especially with a partner or spouse and the secret buried box of things about oneself and one's attitudes that one might be reluctant to share with that partner.

Alan J. Yates was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, but moved to Canada in his late teens to pursue a career in journalism and broadcasting that would span more than three decades, most of it with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He pursued an academic career in parallel, earning an MA and PhD in communications from McGill University and later taught communications at the University of Ottawa, where he focused on the mass media, their characteristics, and their effects. Now retired, Alan lives in Ottawa with his wife, Carla Curran, who was, until recently, the director of book publishing policy and programs at the Federal Department of Canadian Heritage. He has two children, Valerie and Neil, and two grandchildren, Ida and Findlay, from his first marriage to the late Ida Panzini.