Masculine and Feminine: Is It All In Our Head?
The other day, Brent (who is a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and a he**uva Methodist Pastor) wrote this: “By the way, I strongly reject that there are any interesting or meaningful innate differences (aside from sex organs) between men and women. I believe it’s socialized and acculturated to the extent that it may as well be biological, but it’s not. In other words, women are not innately more or less anything than men. And vice versa… except physical strength, but that goes back to differences in reproduction, from what I understand.”
Yesterday, Smockity Frocks (who has a real name and so many children she might just live in a shoe) wrote this: “Maybe I am oversimplifying this, but how about the fact that women have breasts and a uterus? That makes us perfectly suited to nurturing tiny, helpless babies. Men have test…osterone which makes them suited to defending nursing mothers and babies from savage beasts and marauding raiders.”
So, are the differences between the genders simply physical, are those differences thrust upon us by the expectations of our culture, or are there innate differences in the way we’re wired?
I stumbled across some research that may be helpful here. Mark S. George is a neuro-psychiatrist who co-authored the book The Neuroscience of Clinical Psychiatry: The Pathophysiology of Behavior and Mental Illness. As you can tell from the title, it’s a real page-turner.
Dr. George actually conducted brain scans of both men and women as they recalled a range of emotional experiences. He didn’t expect to find major differences. He didn’t even set out to distinguish between the men and the women. He was studying the response of human brains to various emotions — not the difference between male and female response. However, the differences, in his own words, “were so huge that I hesitated to report them.” In his experiments, melancholy feelings activated neurons in an area eight times larger in women than in men.
Sandra Witleson, a research scientist from Canada, did studies to determine the location of emotions in the brain. Again, she wasn’t trying to see how men and women respond differently to emotions — just trying to figure out where in the human brain emotions are triggered and stored. She showed emotionally charged images to the brain’s right hemisphere (by isolating the left eye and left ear). Then she reversed the experiment, showing the same images to the left hemisphere. From MRI scans, she found that a male’s emotion is located in two areas of the right hemisphere only, but a woman’s emotion is located in various regions of both hemispheres.
Of course, we could make a “chicken/egg” argument out of this. Did the brains come this way (nature), or were they shaped this way (nurture)?
I vote for nature — which is the chicken (or is it the egg?) — and here’s why. Recent studies of fetal development show that around 16 weeks into the development of a male fetus, the chemical hormone androgen washes over his tiny, little brain. When that happens, many of the fibrous connections in the corpus callosum (the communication link between the two sides of the brain) begin to dissolve. Because of this, approximately 80% of us boys are only able to use one half of our brain at a time.
A female fetus does not experience this androgen wash, so she is born with the interconnecting fibers intact. Most females, then, can retrieve and store information simultaneously. Drs. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz, professors of neurology at Yale University, say this is why women recover more fully from a stroke or a brain injury than a man.
So, maybe the differences are all in our head after all! But does this have any practical implications?
November 5th, 2009 at 10:32 am
People who discount sex differences or dismiss them as parts only differences seem to have two motivations for doing so.
1. Reaction against an over dichotomizing of sex differences. “All men must be XYZ, while all women must be ABC.” They are wise to respond to the historical (and current) overdoing of sex differences. They are not wise when they overreact and commit the same error, only from the opposite direction.
2. Pressing forward a social agenda which is meant to erase sex and gender from the conversation. These are few, I believe. But some may have very strong voices.
Sex and gender are complex human realities. Rather than conclude something about them and be done with it, we ought to inquire more. It is a mistake the sum up differences in counting organs.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Thanks for the shout-out, John. I think it is a chicken and egg thing, as you say. I still side with “nurture,” i.e., factors outside of simple biology. If a brain responds a certain way to different emotional stimuli, it’s probably mostly because they have been conditioned to respond that way. I’m not saying there are no biological differences, only that whatever differences exist are negligibly small. Who knows?
But what I’m sure of is this: We are hopelessly biased toward seeing differences in terms of genetics, biology, heredity, etc. The modern history of scientific inquiry is filled with scientific studies, later discredited, which purport to account for differences between men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights, etc., in terms of biology. There may or may not be a small genetic lever in some cases, but this lever is very small compared to the giant lever of sociology and psychology. To say that differences are learned, socialized or acculuturated is NOT to say they’re not real. On the contrary, they may be as “determinative” as biology.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:52 am
excellent citations JT. I believe i have that text in my academic library.
As a card carrying feminist I now have a new perspective on this, as a mom of a little boy. I’m very aware of the “historical” separate and not equal treatment of boys vs. girls in the classroom. Now, there seems to be an opposite separate and not equal movement — from antecdotal observation I suspect that there’s an epidemic afoot of medicating boys with ADHD medication to control their behavior.
In one case a friend of the family, who finally relented and put her son on the medication after consistent insistence from teachers, found out that her son was the LAST boy in that particular class to NOT be on ritalin.
This trend might be a symptom of boys’ being less able to control their impulses and focus (nature). Or a symptom of continued decline in our educational system (environment). But, does it really matter? What matters is how we respond to it, as parents.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Christie, you’re right about this. My sister has had similar experiences with her son. In fact, there was study of 30,000 children in two school districts in Virginia. A full 20% of the 5th grade white boys had been diagnosed as ADD. That number is so abnormally high that it should have resulted in some sort of EPA testing to see if there is something in the water up there! The vast majority of those diagnoses came after a recommendation by school officials that the boys in question be tested. That study was published in The American Journal of Public Health, and is referenced often in books about raising boys (see, for example, RAISING CAIN, in which the authors contend: “In our experience it is evident that most of what is being called ADD today would not have been called ADD fifteen or twenty years ago and that much of it falls within the range of normal boy behavior.”)
November 5th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
No ranting today (I think). Anyway, I’d have to vote heavily on the side of nature, with a touch of nurture thrown in. My practical example – Moms and Dads and how they handle the children – generally, a mom will be able to watch a child, cook the supper, and do one or two other tasks at the same time, while dad prefers to focus on one task at a time. Again, it’s a generality, but after hearing so many of my woman friends observe the same thing at home, it does seem to make the argument for nature having more of a hand in our differences than some may like.
November 5th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
I think it is both nature and nurture. There are scientifically accepted and proven differences in neurology and hormones in utero as you have already pointed out that can account for some of the differences. It is also clear that males and females are socialized differently. So it is certainly some of both. Anyone who says it is only one or the other is either being dishonest or is just not aware of the other side of the debate.
I also wanted to point out that it isn’t really true males only use one side of their brain at a time. It is just that males’ brains don’t have as tight a connection between the brain hemispheres as females do. There is activity all over the brain at any given point in time in both males and females. It is not the case that males only show one side lighting up at a time on fMRI’s. Just a little food for thought.
November 5th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
My bad, Matt. I didn’t mean to say that both sides aren’t in use simultaneously. But most men only draw on one side at a time. Also, the cross-talking from one hemisphere to the other is only present in a small percentage of men, whereas it is normative among women.
Finally, I agree it is a combination of both nature and nurture. I did not leave much room for nuance this morning when I wrote the post. Probably should’ve waited for that second cup of coffee to kick in first!
November 6th, 2009 at 11:22 am
I do find it a bit funny that many of those in the ‘culture has caused the genders to react the way they do’ crowd may well be saying the genders are the same because … well, the culture says there shouldn’t be differences. No offense, just a curious irony.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I have two girls and a boy. I’ll never be convinced of the nurture-and-culture-only view. I completely agree with Fajita’s comment here.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I still think we have to be careful in saying men don’t have much cross talk. Even in men, the brain is still extremely interconnected. If our brain didn’t cross talk we would have a hard time seeing, breathing, smelling, walking, thinking, and sneezing all at the same time. There is quite a bit of cross talk.
So I am not quite sure what “the cross-talking from one hemisphere to the other is only present in a small percentage of men” means. Can you help me get what you are saying here? I think I know what you are saying but I would like to hear more on it.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
The way I read the data, Matt, it seems like women — with the thicker fibrous connection — can transfer information faster between the two hemispheres. This may make for quicker decisions and judgment calls (aka “women’s intuition”).
Girls typically learn to talk sooner, read earlier and suffer from fewer reading and learning disabilities than boys.
It also seems that men’s brains are more compartmentalized when it comes to the separation, storage and retrieval of information. In other words, male brains seem to be able to file ideas away and shut down while women’s brains keep ideas and problems going around and around until the ideas and problems are acknowledged and named.
So, it would seem that the speed with which women can cross talk has pros and cons.
You studied this stuff in greater detail than I did, Matt. What’s your take? How far off-base am I?
November 13th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Reading through the many responses, I see that no one picked up my baton and ran with it. That’s OK. I only took one graduate-level sociology course, but it blew my mind on this whole sex/gender discussion. BTW, the terms aren’t interchangeable: sex is biological; gender is socially constructed. (In fact, many cultures have more than two!) Anyway, we read the following book in the class, which discusses in depth about many of the issues you raise above, especially your strong reliance on biology and science:
Michael Kimmel, _The Gendered Society_, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Anyway, I found it very surprising–contrary to most of what I thought I knew… Maybe the guy’s full of it, but he makes a compelling case. Read it if you dare. But I take issue with people saying things like, “I see these differences so often between boys and girls or men and women that there MUST be something biological going on. It must be mostly nature.” That’s the gist of the discussion above, right? But that underestimates (at least in Kimmel’s view) how strong are the sociological forces that shape gender in our world.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
These forces are so strong and pervasive, in other words, that they will _appear_ to us to be biological (because we are already bent toward seeing the world that way). The differences ARE real and mostly unchangeable, just not for the reason that we think.
(I hate when I do that: In the above post I wrote, “which discusses in depth about many of the issues.” Should read “which discusses in depth many of the issues.” Proofing!)
November 13th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Hey, John… Kimmel tackles the argument about brain hemispheres on pp. 34-35. Says Jonathan Beckwith, professor microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School: “[E]ven if they found differences [between male and female brains], there is absolutely no way at this point that they can make a connection between any differences in bran structure and any particular behavior pattern or any particular aptitude” (35).
November 13th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Brent,
I hear you. I think that, historically, the mainstream has overemphasized biology and under-emphasized the sociological forces you mention. However, I think the mainstream tide is turning and we’re now left with textbooks, such as Kimmel’s, which (in my opinion) overemphasizes the role of society in determining gender and pretends there is no biological distinction between male and female (apart from genitalia, of course).
I think Fajita’s comment (his name is really Chris Gonzales, and he’s a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota) is right on target. People who push too hard on one or the other side of the “nature vs. nurture” pendulum are probably trying to sell something.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
“bran structure…” Oh brother!
I like Kimmel’s book because in my view he successfully attacks a harmful legacy of Enlightenment thinking: our culture’s over-reliance on and unquestioned faith in science. Science itself, as you know, is human-made; it is biased; it is ideological. All of its conclusions are provisional at best and will change over time. Having said that, I’m a big fan of it. But it can’t answer life’s ultimate questions.
Regardless of the extent to which gender differences are biologically or sociologically determined, they are real and meaningful. And–we Christians should hasten to add–purposive. That would be true even if it were 100 percent “nurture.” Right?
November 13th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Right again, Brent — on both accounts. First, the phenomenon I think you’re referring to is what Karl Popper and others have referred to as “scientism” — the belief that natural science trumps everything from philosophy to psychology to religion and everything in between. Far too often, science attempts to answer things it has no way of answering (specifically things ontological and teleological). Science, by definition, cannot answer these things, and it is only within the context of origin and destiny that we are really able to discuss morality with any sense of “ought” rather than “is”.
Now, as to the differences being real/meaningful/important/intentional whether they are biological or socially constructed…this is part of what I’ve been trying to get at in this entire conversation. There are differences, and saying this does not imply that one sex/gender is inferior to another.
Men and women are equal, but they are not identical. Rather, they are complementary. This means they cannot always be interchangeable. That’s really my point. And that point has implications.