A new book claims male and female brains — far from being similar, as some feminists claim — are very different …
The Female Brain, a book published by Dr Louann Brizendine, an American neuro-psychiatrist, has caused a stir among experts in the psychiatric and behavioural fields in America by insisting men and women are different because their brains are different.
Here’s an extract from the book that intends to explain why women like to chat more than men, whether through endless text messaging or through face-to-face sharing of confidences: ‘Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centres in a girl’s brain,’ says Dr Brizendine in her book.
‘We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.’
Mmmm. Parents, think twice before buying that mobile for your daughter.
Dr Brizendine, from the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco, contends that women’s brains have unique chemical and structural characteristics that underpin feminine traits such as compassion, empathy, occasional panic and, yes, chattiness.
Though a feminist, Dr Brizendine’s thesis blows a large hole in the feminist orthodoxy — and the painfully politically correct line — that holds that men and women possess interchangeable emotional, intellectual and psychological traits.
On the flip side, of course, this also means that men, struggling to live up to the template of ‘new men’ who can be caring and empathetic, are apparently being forced to behave in a way for which they are simply not designed.
Now it seems that the so—called metrosexual male, that emotionally androgynous by-product of the feminist age, has to face up to the possibility that his modern persona is impossible because he is hard-wired to behave ‘like a man’, possessed of emotional reserve, a combative streak and an ability to judge distance better than his female partner. Dr Brizendine’s findings also form part of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. Many experts believe the brain is not hard-wired at birth, but grows in association with outside experience and is, literally, sculpted by external factors such as family, institutions and prevailing social tenets.
This makes room for the trendy theory that women are disadvantaged—whether at home or in the workplace—because an old-fashioned, patriarchal society has moulded their psyches into believing their ‘lowly’ predicament is the natural order of things.
But Dr Brizendine is categorical. ‘There is no unisex brain. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they are born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality,’ she says.
Where, one wonders, does this leave the strident feminist tenet that men and women must be equal in all areas of life?
Dr Brizendine does not see her book as a means to solving the nature versus-nurture debate, or as a means of rebuffing feminist theories. She describes it simply as a handbook for women, a sort of manual for those seeking a better understanding of what, biologically, makes them tick.
So what are the basic differences between men and women’s brains, according to Dr Brizendine?
All brains begin as female brains, she says, before testosterone (in the case of the developing male child) shrinks the brain’s communications faculties (limiting factors such as empathy), reduces the hearing cortex (which means you have to shout when telling your son to stop strangling his sister), and drastically increases the male brain’s preoccupation with sex.
‘Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road,’ Dr Brizendine writes.
Men, for their part, have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex ‘where women have the airfield nearby that lands private planes’.
Is this an excuse for men to be obsessed about sex all the time? One could argue that we’re simply following our neural programming.
Dr Brizendine’s research serves to explain the genesis of a series of all too familiar everyday scenarios: why a woman uses about 20,000 words per day, while a man uses about 7,000.
Why a woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened. Why a teenage girl is so obsessed with talking to her friends on the phone.
Why, thanks to the unique chemical make-up of her brain, a woman tends to know better what others are feeling, while a man can’t spot an emotion unless someone actually cries or threatens him. Women, she argues, also have a larger part of their brains devoted to remembering things. A woman discerns and responds to conflict quicker than a man.
So, chaps, when you’ve had a row with your wife and she reminds you about the last three times you came home late from a night out, she’s not being punitive, she’s just reacting to the way her brain is wired.
These differences between the genders run deep. They are too marked to be the sole product of nurture—and yet isn’t it equally wrong to put them all down to synapses, chemical reactions and hormones?
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