Gender Brain Drain

Hopefully certain feminists won't read this because researchers are finding that men's and women's brains are (gasp!) different. The article describes the activities of psychologist Sandra Witelson, who likes to look at brains under the microscope, including that of Albert Einstein.

She began by studying the corpus callosum, the cable of nerves that channels all communication and cooperation between the brain's two hemispheres.

Examining tissue samples through a microscope, she discovered that the more left-handed a person was, the bigger the corpus callosum.

To her surprise, however, she found that this held true only for men. Among women there was no difference between right-handers and left-handers.

"Once you find this one difference," she remembered thinking, "it implies that there will be a cascade of differences."

As she systematically analyzed the brains in her refrigerator, she discovered that other neural structures seemed larger or smaller among men, depending on whether the man had been right-handed or left-handed.

They were relatively the same size in women. "The relationships that we were finding were always — and I do mean always — different for men and women," she said.

She narrowed her study to right-handed men and women, still looking for differences in microscopic anatomy between the left side of the brain and the right side. She meticulously counted the neurons in sets of tissue in which each sample measured 280 microns wide — about twice the thickness of a human hair — and 3 millimeters deep.

Staring through the microscope, she was baffled.

"I had the first two patients, and they were so very different," Witelson said. "I kept looking and looking at them, trying to see what the difference could be."

Then she consulted the donor documentation for each tissue sample. "Finally, I saw that one was a man, and one was a woman."

...

Slowly, she formed a theory: The brains of men and women are indeed different from birth. Yet the differences are subtle. They might be found only among the synapses in brain structures responsible for specific cognitive abilities.

I can almost hear the pitter-patter of Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon as she types up a screed denouncing Witelson. Anything supporting the notion that there could be cognitive differences between women and men that is genetic as opposed to being the result of patriarchal brainwashing is strictly verboten over there. I highly suspect she'd jump all over Witelson for her assertion that there is at least some genetic basis for "male" or "female" behavior:

Last year, a worried farming couple brought their youngest child to McMaster University Medical Center.

They were no longer certain whether their child was a girl or a boy. The youngster had traits of both, as occurs in about one in 5,000 births. In this child, nature had devised a living test of gender and the brain.

The medical experts determined that the child's body was a composite of normal and abnormal cells. Some had a girl's usual complement of two female sex chromosomes. Many, perhaps due to a mutation, had only one female chromosome and consequently were almost male.

"Which cells got to the brain?" wondered Witelson, who was called in as a consultant. "You have to consider the sex of the brain."

The doctors all suspected the child's brain was masculine. There was no way to know for sure. They could not safely take a sample of neural tissue to biopsy.

Until recently, reconstructive surgery based on a doctor's best guess was the rule in such cases. But in Hamilton, they counseled patience, Witelson recalled.

"We said, 'Let the child's behavior tell us what sex the child is.'"

Oh, that'll go over like a lead balloon. Honestly, I don't mean to pick on Amanda because I agree with much that she has to say and my criticism here is applicable to many of the writers at the feminist blogs I read. It's just that I read something by her this morning that caught my attention.

She was being critical of movie review at
Men's Daily News. Now, from what I've read at MDN, it's an atrocious place. It seems to be all about promoting the Marion Morrison, er, John Wayne mentality of masculinity so I'm behind Amanda and her comrades in their assaults on it. Anyway, the author of the review wrote this paragraph:

I must admit that one of my weakest areas of overall knowledge is the “chick flick” genre of film. I basically avoid seeing movies designed to appeal specifically to women as I don’t happen to be a female, and this, unfortunately, precludes my interest in a good deal of the Harlequinisms passed off as blockbusters by the motion picture industry.

And Amanda wrote the following in rebuttal:

They're passing as blockbusters because the money women spend on movie tickets isn't real money, which only men have, but Monopoly money that they pass off as real money, artifically elevating the movies to blockbuster status.

Having read this exchange, I was left wondering what the hell Amanda was talking about. I feel stupid because I can't see what she saw. I can't see anything in that paragraph intimating that the buying power of women is somehow not as good as men's. To me, the guy said, rather ineloquently, "Hey, movies with stereotypical romance plots don't interest me and Hollywood sends a lot of them our way." Any sense of misogyny aside, where does he say anything about women and their money other than they go see these movies a lot? I cant' find any qualitative judgement, only quantitative. It's stuff like this that gets in my craw.

There was an entry at Feministing within the past month or so about overweight people - I can't remember if it was overweight women or overweight men & women - being discriminated against in the job place. Being denied jobs because of their weight. While I agreed with the poster, it seemed a bit hypocritical considering the site's logo is a sort of 007/Barbie combination and the ads that hawk Feministing apparel feature a woman who has a similar body type to all of the editors - thin. She's thin and white. Thin, white, and early to mid 20s. For me, the site brings back the 90s with Beverly Hills 90125 and TV shows featuring "rich kids with problems." To be sure, rich white kids have problems - many of the same problems that kids of all colors and classes have. But there was just something about those TV shows featuring predominantly white casts driving expensive cars that seemed to be dislocated from reality. They were like caricatures of the reality of teenagehood. And that, to a certain extent, is how some of the feminist blogs come across to me. The ones I've fallen into the habit of reading are all by young white women that, as near as I can tell, conform to the current standards of beauty.

I mentioned my thoughts on this at the site and Amanda of Pandagon avoided the question by saying that there's nothing wrong with looking at pictures of beautiful women. No one said that there was something wrong with looking at pictures of beautiful women. The question was whether or not there was something hypocritical with a site by thin women protesting the treatment of overweight women that seems to promote the thin ideal which has, at the very least, a part in the reason why overweight women are being discriminated against in the first place. If not slightly hypocritical then counterproductive, perhaps? While certainly not equal to, it does bear more than a passing resemblance to a situation in which Playboy were to publish a similar rant on discrimination against overweight women in the workplace. I just get this weird feeling reading some of these feminist blogs that they're like a coalition of the willing. I don't know the feelings on this matter of women who are not white, thin, and young. I have observed that women who disagree with the editors tend to be older than them. This is purely anecdotal, granted, but I puzzle over such things.

Perhaps part of my frustration stems from the fact that I think "equality feminism" generally has truth on its side as well as the moral high ground over misogyny but I get very little sense of this from these blogs. Instead, there's misandry, venom, and precious little reasoning, precious little appeal to women who don't consider themselves to be feminists to take up the cause. And there's also no appeal to men who aren't already feminists to think about their own behaviors and their own stances on the issues. If I'm mistaken in thinking that these blogs are or can be more than extended bitch sessions, then so be it. (No pun intended.)