Here are some quotes from Brain Sex, the Real Difference between men
and women
By Anne Moir And David Jessel
They are equal only in their common membership of the species,
humankind. To maintain that they are the same in aptitude, skill or
behavior is to build a society based on a biological and scientific
lie.
The sexes are different because their brains are different. The brain,
the chief administrative and emotional organ of life, is differently
constructed in men and in women; it processes information in a
different way, which results in different perceptions, priorities and
behavior.
Until recently, behavior differences between the sexes have been
explained away by social conditioning - the expectations of parents,
whose own attitudes, in turn, reflect the expectations of society;
little boys are told that they shouldn't cry, and that the way to the
top depends on masculine assertion and aggression. Scant attention was
paid to the biological view that we may be what we are because of the
way we are made. Today, there is too much new biological evidence for
the sociological argument to prevail.
The biggest behavioral difference between men and women is the
natural, innate aggression of men, which explains to a large degree
their historical dominance of the species. Men didn't learn aggression
as one the tactics of the sex war. We do not teach our boy children to
be aggressive - indeed, we try vainly to unteach it. Even researchers
most hostile to the acknowledgement of sex differences agree that this
is a male feature, and one which cannot be explained away by social
conditioning.
There has seldom been a greater divide between what intelligent,
enlightened opinion presumes - that men and women have the same brain
- and what science knows - that they do not.
It cannot be stressed often enough that this book concerns itself
with the average man and the average woman.
The area where the biggest differences have been found lies in what
scientists call 'spatial ability'. That's being able to picture
things, their shape, position, geography and proportion, accurately in
the mind's eye - all skills that are crucial to the practical ability
to work with three-dimensional objects or drawings. One scientist who
has reviewed the extensive literature on the subject concludes, 'The
fact of the male's superiority in spatial ability is not in dispute'.
It is confirmed by literally hundreds of different scientific studies.
99 per cent of all patents applied for today are registered by men.
Scientists know that they walk on social eggshells when they venture
any theory about human behavior. But researchers into sex differences
are increasingly impatient with the polite attempt to find a social
explanation for these differences. As Camilla Benbow now says now says
of her studies showing male superiority in mathematically gifted
children, 'After 15 years looking for an environmental explanation and
getting zero results, I gave up.' She readily admitted to us her
belief that the difference in ability has a biological basis.
The differences are apparent in the very first hours after birth. It
has been shown that girl babies are much more interested than boys in
people and faces; the boys seem just as happy with an object dangled
in front of them.
Embryonic boy babies are exposed to a colossal dose of male hormone at
the critical time when their brains are beginning to take shape.
The brains of male and female mammals, from rodents to primates,
exhibiting hormonally mediated differences in neuro-transmitter
levels, neural connections, and cell and nuclear volume, strongly
suggests that similar sexual dimorphism of structure and function
exists human brains as well.
In women the functional division between the left and the right sides
of the brain is less clearly defined. Both the left and the right
sides of the female brain are involved in verbal and visual abilities.
Men's brains are more specialized.
The left side of the brain is almost exclusively set aside for the
control or verbal abilities, the right side for visual.
And the latest research had shown that the more connections people
have between the left and right hemispheres, the more articulate and
fluent they are. The finding provides a further explanation for
women's verbal dexterity. But could the corpus callosum provide the
answer to another mystery, could it provide a somewhat solution to the
secret of female intuition? Is the physical capacity of a woman to
connect and relate more pieces of information than a man explained not
by witchcraft, after all, but merely by superior switchgear? Since
women are in general better at recognizing the emotional nuances in
voice, gesture and facial expression, a whole range of sensory
information. They can deduce more from such information because they
have a greater capacity than men to integrate and cross-relate verbal
and visual information.
A woman may be less able to separate emotion from reason because of
the way the female brain is organized. The female brain has emotional
capacities on both sides of the brain, plus there is more information
exchanged between the two sides of the brain. The emotional side is
more integrated with the verbal side of the brain.
These discernible, measurable differences in behavior have been
imprinted long before external influences have had a chance to work.
They reflect a basic difference in the newborn brain which we already
know about - the superior male efficiency in spatial ability, the
greater female skill in speech.
Boys want to explore areas, spaces and things because their brain bias
predisposes them to these aspects of the environment. Girls like to
talk and to listen because that is what their brains are better
designed to do.
Even in the Israeli kibbutz, where deliberate attempts have been made
to play down the differences between boys and girls, and where the
engineered society proclaims a virtual interchangeability of the
sexes, it was found that in all age groups, while girls cooperated,
shared and acted affectionately, boys engaged in more acts of conflict
such as seizing other children's toys.
The manifestation of masculine behavior in otherwise fully female
women is a much-debated subject. There are, however, clinical findings
which point the way to a possible explanation. Most of them concern
women who have been exposed to an abnormal level of male hormone in
the womb during the critical period of brain development.
The pursuit of power is overwhelmingly and universally a male trait.
On the math part of tests, boys do significantly better, and the
success ratio of boys to girls increases with the level of difficulty.
On a score of 420+ out of a possible 800, boys beat girls 1.5 : 1. At
500+, the ratio is more than 2 : 1. At 600+ it is over 4 : 1. At the
highest range, of 700+ the ratio is 13 : 1.
Greater freedom of expression has led to a greater awareness of our
differences.. how long will it be before we revert to type, how long
before those same magazines are talking of the New Romanticism - 'At
Last, We Can be Feminine Again' - or running features on the 'Return
of the Macho'?
Diversity is a biological fact, while equality is a political,
ethical, and social precept.
Liberation condemns the sexual double standard - why should sex
outside of marriage be 'all right' for men, all wrong for women? The
standards are indeed double, in that an extra-marital affair does mean
different things, and has a different level of importance, for men and
women. 'It didn't mean anything', mutters the man, when his
indiscretion is revealed - and it almost certainly didn't. He says
that he loves her just as much as ever, and he probably does. But the
wife sees his affair as an assault on what is to her most precious -
intimacy and fidelity. If she were to embark on an affair, you can
bet that is would 'mean' a lot to her. She cannot forgive him; for she
cannot even understand him. Their brains and their hormones have made
them strangers to one another.
The difference between the attitude and proficiency of men and women
as parents again reflects those basic differences of the brain. In
this most intimate of relationships, between parent and child, it is
the mother rather than the father who is more alert to the nuance and
the non-verbal hint, more naturally responsive to a baby's needs.
The Israeli kibbutz was not designed specifically to abolish the
Jewish mother. But in these forcing-houses of social engineering,
girls and boys grew up with virtually interchangeable roles. Children
were reared communally, and the household duties of cooking and
laundry were a community, rather than a family responsibility. The
expectation was that, with the passing of several neutral generations,
sexual differentiation would evaporate, and sexist stereotyping would
become a memory as remote as slavery is to the newest generation of
America's blacks.
But that is not what happened. Three of four generations later, the
children of the kibbutz are still clinging to their traditional
roles..again looking at the experience of the Israeli kibbutzim.
Social engineers worked hard to iron out classic gender stereotypes at
an early age: 'All children are dressed in the same work-clothes..
there is no sex difference in the style of haircut' Even so.. The boys
went on to study physics and become engineers, the girls to study
sociology and become teachers. It is telling proof of what we now know
- that the minds of men and women are different, that ultimately boys
and men live in a world of things and space, girls and women in a
world of people and relationships.
Just as there are physical dissimilarities between males and females
(size, body shape, skeleton, teeth, age of puberty, etc.) there are
equally dramatic differences in brain functioning.
There is solid and consistent evidence from scientists all over the
world that a biochemical influence in the womb determines and directs
the structure and function or our brains. Through the influence of the
hormones the brain cells 'acquire a "set".. highly resistant to change
after birth'. Male hormone organizes the developing brain into a male
pattern which leads to male behavior. Absence of the male hormone
means that the brain persists in a female pattern, resulting in a
female pattern of behavior. This organization of the brain into a male
or female neural network is permanent; it can only be modified by
altering the hormonal milieu of the womb.
We can hope for an end to the slogans, for slogans do not change
facts, and an end to the sterile pursuit of artificial equality; an
abandonment of the arduous and unnatural process of denial and ,
instead, the enjoyment of our natural selves; the greening of a new
relationship between men and women; a celebration of the difference.