Sex on the BrainThe Biological Differences
Between Men and Women
[review] [excerpt] [endlinks] [purchase]
Sex on the Brain
The Biological Differences
Between Men and Women
[review]
[excerpt]
[endlinks]
[purchase]
by
Viking, 1997
Reviewed by
The differences between men and women are obvious and subtle. They are as obvious as breasts and penises, and as subtle as variations in pinhead-sized nuclei deep in the temporal lobes of the brain.
The differences have been researched and debated, said to be ordained by the gods or by God and dismissed as merely the result of socialization.
Acknowledging the social debate swirling around the study of gender
differences, Deborah Blum in her new book, Sex on the Brain, writes without
an agenda, making sure even unpopular biological facts are included. As
much as she and other feminists might wish it otherwise, men
and women are different. And these differences are rooted in our brains,
not in our cultures.
Even in childhood, when girls are roughly the same size as boys, the two play differently. It may be stereotypical, but boys are drawn to weapons and girls to dolls. The preferences are apparent on Saturday morning TV toy commercials. Sandwiched in between the sugary cereals and the hyperactive cartoons are Barbie dolls for girls and Nerf ultra-dart guns for boys.
While one may argue that the ads are just another tool in the socialization process, even parents who try to raise their children as non-gender-specific as possible find, according to Blum - who saw her own efforts fail ? that little boys are not like little girls.
This realization occurred to the author one day as her toddler son
snarled like a dinosaur at her feet, doing his best to gnaw off her leg. In a
blinding flash of the obvious, she realized: This is not a girl thing - this
goes deeper than culture.
The author spends the next 283 pages of her book explaining the differences between the sexes and offering theories as to why they are different.
It is a question Blum does not and can not answer. It is a question biologists have not answered - yet.
Current theories, of course, suggest that the root of these differences
lies in the brain. Research efforts are concentrated on the hormonal
differences between the sexes and the influences hormones exert on brain
development and growth.
Both genders have the same hormones; they just have different concentrations of them. Normally men have more testosterone and women more estrogen. However, some researchers claim that testosterone levels in happily married men plummet, but rise in women in stressful job situations.
Another difference scientists have found is that men's brains are larger and shrink faster with age. Women's brains use more glucose, indicating greater metabolic activity.
At the cellular level, a distinct set of gender differences is found,
but researchers are clueless as to what these mean. And these differences
are only found on the microscale. If you take a brain out of its skull and
set it on the table, researchers can't tell a female brain from a male brain.
Again, Blum gives tantalizing hints at an answer, but no answer.
The behavioral research portions of the book deal mainly with the differences, obvious and subtle, between the genders. And while some of this information seems scurrilous, it does illustrate intriguing and not obvious differences between the sexes.
Women, for instance, have a more refined sense of smell. In one
experiment, female college students smelled dirty, sweaty T-shirts worn for
two weeks by men. They were then asked to rate the shirts according to
which scent was most attractive. Researchers found that women invariably
picked the shirt of a guy whose immune system differed most from hers. Such
a difference, it is suggested, would result in more genetically diverse
offspring if that man and woman mated. Oddly, and intriguingly, women using
birth-control pills consistently picked the "wrong" man, as indicated by
this immune system "test."
As children, girls react more strongly to other's distress. Boys are more emotionally insecure as children; girls as teenagers. Women read facial expressions better; men jockey for supremacy.
How and why these differences emerged is fancifully explained; it is clear that the study of behavioral evolution is hardly a hard science.
Women are better communicators, it is said, because in some prehistoric
polygamous society they stayed home and taught the young while men were out
picking fights and looking for women. Of course, as Blum points out, these
men were raised by women, so you would think the communication skills would
have rubbed off on them as children.
Another problem for the theories that make early man polygamous versus monogamous is that there are no records of domestic life. The brief historical record, logging only the last few thousand years, hints at a species that tries to be monogamous. Even in polygamous societies, the setup usually involves several wives for the rich and powerful males and monogamy for the rest of the society. Even in these cases, humans are not fractionally as polygamous as their ape cousins, the bonobos.
Humans, Blum credits anthropologists as saying, are mildly polygamous, but she prefers the phrase "ambiguously monogamous."
Blum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Monkey Wars, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a former science writer, writes evenhandedly and interestingly. Chances are her readers won't even notice the non-answers in this book enough to become frustrated by them because her words and anecdotes are entertaining even if the conclusions are as ambiguous as the immature discipline itself.
Throughout the book, Blum makes the important point that much of the
previous research into the biological differences of the sexes reflects
society's current view of the roles of men and women. Just as she and her
feminist sisters might not want to admit that there are biological
differences between the sexes, researchers of old used the differences they
found to justify social inequalities. (Simon LeVay pointed out the same
bias in research into the cause and "cure" for homosexuality in his book on
that subject.)
For instance, one hundred years ago, when bigger was better, it was "naturally" assumed that men were smarter than women simply because men had bigger brains. While not exactly imbecilic, women were, naturally, less intelligent and more childlike than men. That thinking reflects the Victorian idea of womanhood.
Now, in light of the societal changes of the past century, research seems to indicate that size doesn't matter; it's how you use your brain that counts.
Keena D. Lykins is an award-winning writer and editor.
In other words, nailing down a clear structural difference in the brain is fraught with complication, partly because the structures themselves are not always constant in this realm of the supersmall, and partly because scientists do not fully understand the relationship between function (the brain at work) and structure or morphology (the architecture within). It's even fair to ask what comes first: Does structure cause the brain to function in a certain way? Or does the way the brain functions cause it to build an appropriate structure?
The Monkey Wars - Deborah Blum concluded in her previous book that there were no easy answers surrounding the controversial use of primates in research.
"How to Tell Men From Women" - New York Times book review of Sex on the Brain, written by Ann Finkbeiner.
Differences in Brain Laterality Between Males and Females Produce Different Patterns of Perceptual Interference - an example of how the brains of men and women process information differently; study by Kyle R. Cave and Heather Davidson of the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University.What Is a Man? - responses to a graduate student's gender studies project in which university students were asked to give their definition of a man. Includes a link to the parallel paper "What Is a Woman?"
Institute For Research On Women And Gender - Stanford's institute is well known for supporting research on women's changing economic and social roles.
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