Delusions of Gender Read online

  Praise for A Mind of Its Own

  ‘We are all vain bigots, thanks to the foibles of the human brain, so argues Fine in her witty survey of psychology experiments … An ideal gift for anyone interested in psychology’ Focus

  ‘Clear, accessible writing makes her a science writer to watch.’ Metro

  ‘Filled with quotable stories and interactive ways of how our brain has a buoyant ego of its own and is not the objective tool we might like to believe’ Bookseller

  ‘A light and amusing introduction to the brain and how it works on our perceptions and actions’ Publishing News

  ‘Consistently well-written and meticulously researched … [Fine’s] touching vignettes about life with her young son and her rational but tender husband suggest the buried presence of someone who could in the future rewardingly illuminate the workings of the mind with the studied casualness of the gifted novelist.’ Alain de Botton, Sunday Times

  ‘In breezy demotic, Fine offers an entertaining tour of current thinking … [she] is especially fascinating on the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain.’ Telegraph

  ‘Fine, with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, slaps an Asbo on the hundred billion grey cells that – literally – have shifty, ruthless, self-serving minds of their own.’ The Times

  ‘Fine’s style is chirpy … [with] many affectionately amusing scenes.’ Guardian

  ‘Engaging, intelligent’ Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Fine’s flair for the humorous and anecdotal makes this a delightful read.’ Irish Times

  ‘Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘This is one of the most interesting and amusing accounts of how we think we think – I think.’ Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book. By the end you’ll realise that your brain can (and does) run rings around you.’ Helen Dunmore

  ‘Witty and informative’ Philip Pullman

  ‘Excellent … Fine’s very engaging and chatty style … will delight many readers … Fine has got it just right. Although she is an academic, she writes like a human being … All in all this short and enjoyable book is a must for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what their brain gets up to when they aren’t watching it. First class.’ Brian Clegg, popularscience.co.uk

  ‘A fun introduction to some of the factors that can distort our reasoning. I’d recommend it to anyone who is just getting interested in the topic, or as a gift for anyone you know who still thinks that their personal point of view is unprejudiced and reliable.’ Psychologist

  ‘Fine is that rare academic who’s also an excellent writer. Highly recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.’ Library Journal

  ‘Remarkably entertaining’ Los Angeles Times

  First published in the UK in 2010 by

  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.co.uk

  This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by Icon Books Ltd

  ISBN: 978-1-84831-396-5 (ePub format)

  ISBN: 978-1-84831-397-2 (Adobe ebook format)

  First published in the USA in 2010 by

  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York

  Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

  74–77 Great Russell Street,

  London WC1B 3DA or their agents

  Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

  by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

  Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

  Published in Australia in 2011

  by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500,

  83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

  Text copyright © 2010 Cordelia Fine

  The author has asserted her moral rights.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  For my mother

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Cordelia Fine is a Research Associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University, Australia, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her previous book, A Mind of Its Own (Icon, 2006) was hugely acclaimed and she was called ‘a science writer to watch’ by Metro.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for A Mind of Its Own

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Introduction

  * * *

  PART 1

  * * *

  ‘HALF-CHANGED WORLD’, HALF-CHANGED MINDS

  1. We Think, Therefore You Are

  2. Why You Should Cover Your Head with a Paper Bag if You Have a Secret You Don’t Want Your Wife to Find Out

  3. ‘Backwards and in High Heels’

  4. I Don’t Belong Here

  5. The Glass Workplace

  6. XX-clusion and XXX-clusion

  7. Gender Equality Begins (or Ends) at Home

  8. Gender Equality 2.0?

  * * *

  PART 2

  * * *

  NEUROSEXISM

  9. The ‘Fetal Fork’

  10. In ‘the Darkness of the Womb’ (and the First Few Hours in the Light)

  11. The Brain of a Boy in the Body of a Girl … or a Monkey?

  12. Sex and Premature Speculation

  13. What Does It All Mean, Anyway?

  14. Brain Scams

  15. The ‘Seductive Allure’ of Neuroscience

  16. Unravelling Hardwiring

  * * *

  PART 3

  * * *

  RECYCLING GENDER

  17. Preconceptions and Postconceptions

  18. Parenting with a Half-Changed Mind

  19. ‘Gender Detectives’

  20. Gender Education

  21. The Self-Socialising Child

  Epilogue: And S-t-r-e-t-c-h!

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are.

  —John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)

  INTRODUCTION

  Meet Evan.

  When his wife, Jane, is upset, he sits with her on the couch, reading a magazine or book ‘to distract himself from his own discomfort’ while he cradles Jane with the other arm. After a few years working on this issue, Evan gradually comes to be able to offer comfort in a more conventional way. The politically correct and/or scientifically uninformed among you may be wondering about the cause of Evan’s peculiar behaviour. Does he secretly find Jane deeply unattractive? Is he in the slow process of recovery from some deeply traumatic incident? Was he raised by wolves until the age of thirteen? Not at all. He’s just a regular guy, with a regular guy-brain that’s wired all wrong for empathy. That a simple act of comfort is not part of Evan’s behavioural repertoire is the fault of the neurons dealt him by na
ture: neurons that endure a devastating ‘testosterone marination’; neurons that are lacking the same ‘innate ability to read faces and tone of voice for emotional nuance’ as women’s; neurons, in a word, that are male.1

  Evan is just one of several curious characters who populate Louann Brizendine’s New York Times best seller, The Female Brain. In her depiction, men’s empathising skills resemble those of the hapless tourist attempting to decipher a foreign menu and are sharply contrasted with the cool proficiency of females’ achievements in this domain. Take Sarah, for example. Sarah can ‘identify and anticipate what [her husband] is feeling – often before he is conscious of it himself.’ Like the magician who knows that you’ll pick the seven of diamonds even before it’s left the pack, Sarah can amaze her husband at whim, thanks to her lucky knack of knowing what he’s feeling before he feels it. (Ta-DA! Is this your emotion?) And no, Sarah is not a fairground psychic. She is simply a woman who enjoys the extraordinary gift of mind reading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain:

  Maneuvring like an F-15, Sarah’s female brain is a high-performance emotion machine – geared to tracking, moment by moment, the non-verbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.2

  Just what is it that makes the female brain so well suited to stalking people’s private feelings as though they were terrified prey? Why, you are asking, are male neurons not capable of such miracles – better placed instead to navigate the masculine worlds of science and maths? Whatever the answer du jour – whether it’s the foetal testosterone that ravages the male neural circuits, the oversized female corpus callosum, the efficiently specialised organisation of the male brain, the primitively subcortical emotion circuits of boys, or the underendowment of visuospatial processing white matter in the female brain – the underlying message is the same. Male and female brains are different in ways that matter.

  Having marital problems, for instance? Turn to What Could He Be Thinking? by ‘educator, therapist, corporate consultant, and … New York Times bestselling author’3 Michael Gurian, and you will discover the epiphany the author experienced with his wife, Gail, on seeing MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scans of male and female brains:

  I said, ‘We thought we knew a lot about each other, but maybe we haven’t known enough.’ Gail said, ‘There really is such a thing as a “male” brain. It’s hard to argue with an MRI.’ We realized that our communication, our support of each other, and our understanding of our relationship were just beginning, after six years of marriage.

  The information from those scans, says Gurian, was ‘marriage saving.’4

  Nor are spouses the only ones who, it is now claimed, can be better understood with the benefit of a little background in brain science. The blurb of the influential book Why Gender Matters by physician Leonard Sax, founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), promises to show readers how to ‘recognize and understand … hardwired differences [between the sexes] to help every girl and every boy reach their fullest potential.’5 Likewise, parents and teachers are informed in a recent Gurian Institute book that ‘Researchers [using MRI] have literally seen what we have always known. There are fundamental gender differences and they start in the very structure of the human brain.’6 Thus, Gurian suggests that ‘to walk into a classroom or home without knowledge of both how the brain works and how the male and female brains learn differently is to be many steps behind where we can and should be as teachers, parents, and caregivers of children.’7

  Even CEOs can, it is said, benefit from a greater understanding of sex differences in the brain. The recent book Leadership and the Sexes ‘links the actual science of male/female brain differences to every aspect of business’ and ‘presents brain science tools with which readers can look into the brains of men and women to understand themselves and one another.’ According to the jacket blurb, the ‘gender science’ in the book ‘has been used successfully by such diverse corporations as IBM, Nissan, Proctor [sic] & Gamble, Deloitte & Touche, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Brooks Sports, and many others.’8

  Is it realistic, you will begin to wonder, to expect two kinds of people, with such different brains, to ever have similar values, abilities, achievements, lives? If it’s our differently wired brains that make us different, maybe we can sit back and relax. If you want the answer to persisting gender inequalities, stop peering suspiciously at society and take a look right over here, please, at this brain scan.

  If only it were that simple.

  * * *

  About 200 years ago, the English clergyman Thomas Gisborne wrote a book that despite its, to my mind, rather unappealing title – An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex – became an eighteenth-century best seller. In it, Gisborne neatly set out the different mental abilities required to fulfil male versus female roles:

  The science of legislation, of jurisprudence, of political economy; the conduct of government in all its executive functions; the abstruse researches of erudition … the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of commercial enterprise … these, and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind endued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application.9

  It was only natural, the author argued, that these qualities should be ‘impart[ed] … to the female mind with a more sparing hand’ because women have less need of such talents in the discharge of their duties. Women are not inferior, you understand, simply different. After all, when it comes to performance in the feminine sphere ‘the superiority of the female mind is unrivalled’, enjoying ‘powers adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise, and to diffuse, throughout the family circle, the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness’.10 What awfully good luck that these womanly talents should coincide so happily with the duties of the female sex.

  Fast-forward 200 years, turn to the opening page of The Essential Difference, a highly influential twenty-first-century book about the psychology of men and women, and there you will find Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen expressing much the same idea: ‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’11 Just like Gisborne, Baron-Cohen thinks that it is those with the ‘male brain’ who make the best scientists, engineers, bankers and lawyers, thanks to their capacity to focus in on different aspects of a system (be it a biological, physical, financial or legal system), and their drive to understand how it works. And the soothing reassurance that women, too, have their own special talents remains present and correct. In what has been described as a ‘masterpiece of condescension’,12 Baron-Cohen explains that the female brain’s propensity for understanding others’ thoughts and feelings, and responding to them sympathetically, ideally suits it to occupations that professionalise women’s traditional caring roles: ‘People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff.’13 Philosopher Neil Levy’s neat summary of Baron-Cohen’s thesis – that ‘on average, women’s intelligence is best employed in putting people at their ease, while the men get on with understanding the world and building and repairing the things we need in it’14 – can’t help but bring to mind Gisborne’s eighteenth-century wife, busily unbending the brow of her learned husband.

  Baron-Cohen does, it must be said, take great pains to point out that not all women have a female, empathising brain, nor all men a male, systemising one. However, this concession does not set him apart from traditional views of sex differences quite as much as he might think. As long ago as 1705, the philosopher Mary Astell observed that women who made great achievements in male domains were said by men to have ‘acted above their Sex. By which one must suppose they wou’d have their Re
aders understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!’15 Likewise, a few centuries later intellectually talented women were ‘said to possess “masculine minds”.’16 As one writer opined in the Quarterly Journal of Science:

  The savante – the woman of science – like the female athlete, is simply an anomaly, an exceptional being, holding a position more or less intermediate between the two sexes. In one case the brain, as in the other the muscular system, has undergone an abnormal development.17

  Baron-Cohen, of course, does not describe as ‘abnormal’ the woman who reports a greater tendency to systemise. But certainly there is an incongruous feel to the idea of a male brain in the body of a woman, or a female brain housed in the skull of a man.

  The sheer stability and staying power of the idea that male and female psychologies are inherently different can’t help but impress. Are there, in truth, psychological differences hardwired into the brains of the sexes that explain why, even in the most egalitarian of twenty-first-century societies, women and men’s lives still follow noticeably different paths?

  For many people, the experience of becoming a parent quickly abolishes any preconceptions that boys and girls are born more or less the same. When the gender scholar Michael Kimmel became a father, he reports that an old friend cackled to him, ‘Now you’ll see it’s all biological!’18 And what could be more compelling proof of this, as a parent, than to see your own offspring defy your well-meaning attempts at gender-neutral parenting? This is a common experience, discovered sociologist Emily Kane. Many parents of preschoolers – particularly the white, middle-and upper-middle-class ones – came to the conclusion that differences between boys and girls were biological by process of elimination. Believing that they practised gender-neutral parenting, the ‘biology as fallback’ position, as Kane calls it, was the only one left remaining to them.19