Bless You, Times Select

19 thoughts on Bless You, Times Select

1. Great to know that my behavior is controlled by gender roles! I guess this means I’ve got to get some chips-n-beer, sit my ass down on the couch, and watch the football game next Sunday.

   But wait! I hate watching football. It bores me to tears. Plus I don’t have a teevee in my living room.

   But I don’t get a choice, do I? Can’t do what I want, can I? Gender says, either I gotta watch football like all the other Peno-Americans, or else I gotta get a scalpel and cut the damn thing off, and you know I ain’t doing that. And likewise, you ladies have got to get in the kitchen and cook me a casserole.

2. Yes! Let’s return to the roles laid down for us by evolution!
   First, we stop living in houses, driving cars, wearing clothes, and reading the New York Times. Then we start the hunter-gathering and infanticides.

   To make myself even happier, I’m going to follow an even older evolutionary role, and be a fish!

   *swims off blissfully*

3. And now for something completely off-topic:

   zuzu, did you read Dear Prudence last week? With the letter from the guy who can’t understand why his virgin wife didn’t turn into a sexbot when he put the magic ring on her finger? Thought you might be interested since you wrote about involuntary virginity a few weeks ago. Check out the comments from the Fray, but not while you’re eating.

4. Hmmm, I can’t see an e-mail or contact link on the main page, so I’ll just leave this here for you to check out:

   Slimming photos with HP digital cameras

   It’s a new feature that will automatically anorexify people in your pictures. Check out the Flash slideshow at the top of the page. Notice how all the subjects are women. Notice how none of the women particularly need a slimming effect. Interesting.

5. According to these snap judgements based on some basic chemical differences (none of which can’t be overriden by a eating a chocolate bar), men can’t really be trusted in positions of responsibility. After all, that aggressive dose of testosterone makes it so their barely fit to take out into public, much less allowed to play with weapons or making any real decisions.

   I will accept our female ‘need’ to socialize, as soon as the guys walk into a cage and shut the door behind themselves.

6. Excute me, ‘they’re barely…”

7. Chris–That’s totally fucked up.

8. Here is another application of the same logic:

   David Brooks opines that differences in addict and non-addict brain chemistry mean that humans are happier with addiction “that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.” Unfortunately, he writes, “some straight-edgers still argue that talking about biological differences between the abusers and non-abusers is akin to talking about biological differences between the races.”

   There are differences in the propositions for sure, but essentually they are the same argument and equally inane. The best part is that he compares it to racial differences, and demonstrates his ignorance that studies have shown there is greater genetic diversity within a racial group then there is between racial groups.

   The next time this historian and social critic wades into the area of biology, genetics and brain chemistry, I would recommend he wear some sort of intellectual arm floaties. His hot air filled head is not enough to keep himself afloat.

9. What malfunction in brain chemsitry causes somebody to dress like this, though?

10. Conservatives get away with a huge lie about feminists and biological differences. Nobody says that there aren’t biological differences between the sexes. Pregnancy is obviously one, and there are obviously physical differences as well. There’s a reason why women can win the Iditarod Sled Dog race but the world record in the women’s 100 meters is more than 7/10ths of a second slower than the world record in the men’s 100.

    The point has always been that society is too quick to assume that any differences between the genders in any particular situation are due to biological differences. Different sex roles? Must be biological! Women are nurturing and cooperative, men are competitive? Must be the genes!

    In fact, many differences that were assumed to be biological (or in women’s “essential nature”) have turned out to be completely or mostly products of socialization. And given that the result of assuming biological gender differences is almost invariably policies that discriminate against women (by taking them out of the “competitive” male enterprises that lead to material success), it’s a very good idea to treat claims of essentialism with quite a lot of skepticism.

    Now where in that description (which is the standard feminist argument against gender essentialism, accepted by just about all feminists except “difference feminists”) is any claim that there are no biological differences between the sexes?

11. So I sez to David Brooks, I sez, “David, there’s a hole in your wall.”

    Over the past several weeks, I’ve found I can change the conversation at any social gathering by mentioning Louann Brizendine’s book, “The Female Brain.” Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the founder of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco. She’s written a breezy — maybe too breezy — summary of hundreds of studies on the neurological differences between men and women.

    All human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

    By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

    Later, girls are much more likely to use sentences that begin with “Let’s …” while playing: Let’s do this or Let’s do that. They are more likely to take turns. Brizendine argues that of course culture and environment powerfully shape behavior, but brain structure and chemistry incline girls to pursue certain goals: “To forge connection, to create community, and to organize and orchestrate a girl’s world so that she’s at the center of it.”

    During adolescence, the female brain is washed in estrogen. Female teenagers, in general, experience an intense desire for social connection, which releases near-orgasmic rushes of oxytocin in the brain. They are, on average, more sensitive to stress (by age 15, girls are twice as likely to suffer from depression). The male brain, meanwhile, is producing 10 times more testosterone than the female brain, meaning the male sex drive is, on average, much greater.

    Brizendine then describes waves of hormonal activity as women age. Female brains vary with the seasons of life much more than male brains. During menopause, for example, estrogen levels drop. Personalities can change as some women derive less pleasure from nurturing and more from independence. Women initiate 65 percent of divorces after age 50.

    These sorts of stark sex differences were once highly controversial, and not fit for polite conversation. And some feminists still argue that talking about biological differences between the sexes is akin to talking about biological differences between the races. But Brizendine’s feminist bona fides are unquestionable. And in my mostly liberal urban circle — and among this book’s reviewers — almost everybody takes big biological differences as a matter of course.

    Without too much debate or even awareness, there has been a gigantic shift in how people think human behavior is formed.

    Consider all the theories put forward to explain personality. Freud argued that early family experiences relating to defecation and genital stimulation created unconscious states that influenced behavior through life. In the 1950’s, the common view was that humans begin as nearly blank slates and that behavior is learned through stimulus and response. Over the ages, thinkers have argued that humans are divided between passion and reason, or between the angelic and the demonic.

    But now the prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.

    Now, it is generally believed, our behavior is powerfully influenced by genes and hormones. Our temperaments are shaped by whether we happened to be born with the right mix of chemicals.

    Consciousness has come to be seen as this relatively weak driver, riding atop an organ, the brain, it scarcely understands. When we read that male voles with longer vasopressin genes are more likely to remain monogamous, it seems plausible that so fundamental a quality could be tied to some discrete bit of biology.

    This shift in how we see human behavior is bound to have huge effects. Freudianism encouraged people to think about destroying inhibitions. This new understanding both validates ancient stereotypes about the sexes, and fuzzes up moral judgments about human responsibility (biology inclines individuals toward certain virtues and vices).

    Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

    Shit, how’d that happen? Well I guess someone will just have to rip into him.

    Female teenagers, in general, experience an intense desire for social connection, which releases near-orgasmic rushes of oxytocin in the brain.

    By the way, that sounds awesome. And more like Brooks’ fantasy than any scientific reality. Any of the ladies here recall walking around in a “near-orgasmic” state throughout high school?

12. Near suicidal – sure. Near orgasmic?

    (Excuse me while I gasp for breath between howls of laughter.)

    In many ways I’m a hermit by preference. Too much human contact without breaks has me climbing the walls every time. So I guess I’m not properly female or something?

    *Checks Cesearean scar* Yep. Functioning female body. Methinks it’s David Brook’s brain that’s missing a few data points. Or perhaps just necessary synapses.

13. Not to blow my own horn, but when “The Female Brain” was reviewed in an Australian newspaper I got right on my soapbox over on Sisterhood and Solidarity

    “I knew I was in for it when I read the front-page banner “Why Women Think Differently”. Differently to whom? Why, the unstated male norm, of course. See, there’s the normal brain and the female brain. Women are different, and men are, well, they just are.”

    There is also a feminist science blogger who I have just spent ten minutes searching my links for who wrote recently on how evolutionary explanations for gender roles are bunk. SOmeone here might know who I mean? She’s a professor and writes about women and science.

14. Too bad Brooks can’t follow his own advice.

    Women are better at communication skills. Men are better at spacial relationships and math.

    So Brooks is in the wrong profession. He’s fighting his male brain and doing female work–attempting to communicate. He should just admit his gender deficiency and get on to more rewarding work hunting or rearranging furniture.

15. Erm – I hate to poke at the obvious here, but how does Brooks account for cross-gender identified people?

    Using his reasoning (such as it is), gender identity and gender role are ultimately driven by some biological necessity. Or don’t transgender/transsexual people exist in his fevered little imagination?

16. Those explanations are probably even more unsavory and risibly unscientific. I assume we’re too exceptional to matter, just like antisocial women and nurturing men.

17. I seem to have discovered, via Google, a David Brooks and Louann Brizendine debunking gold mine in the form of Mark Liberman’s Language Log. Mark mostly critiques the claims relating to language and linguistic development, but more than once he takes a hot-sounding sentence, follows the footnotes, and looks up the citations–only to discover that the papers cited have little to nothing to do with the claim. In some cases, the papers cited are relevant but actually fail to support or even contradict the claim. Read the link to find out about the fetal brain development David discusses in his column. (Short version: no one actually knows what the gendered differences in fetal neural development are.)

    Mark is very nice about the whole thing, but if all the cites are of that quality, it, uh, doesn’t bode well for the book’s credibility. If you read through the other cites, you may learn how one particular claim is apparently an urban legend that originates from James Dobson of Focus on the Family!

    Incidentally, Mark also goes over a book cited by David during the “boy educational crisis” that suffers from the same problems: papers that don’t say what the author says they say. What’s going on here?!

    (Note: I have not read the book, nor have I looked up the citations myself. I am trusting Mark that the content he discusses is accurate. Given that content, though, I agree with his analysis.)

18. I second Dominika’s recommendation of Mark Liberman’s Language Log.

    Regarding David Brooks? No one sucks power’s cock longer and better than David Brooks.

19. I found the blog I was looking for – Doctor Science! How could I forget?

    And Dominka, thanks for that great link.

Comments are currently closed.