Feminism: The Ugly Truth. Mike J.D. Buchanan
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women’s moods and hormones. She graduated in neurobiology from UC Berkeley, attended Yale School of Medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology and is an endowed clinical professor. She joined the faculty of UCSF Medical Center at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in 1988 and now holds the Lynne and Marc Benioff-endowed chair of psychiatry. At UCSF, Brizendine pursues active clinical, teaching, writing and research activities.
In 1994 she founded the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, and continues to serve as its director. The Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic is a psychiatric clinic designed to assess and treat women of all ages experiencing disruption of mood, energy, anxiety, sexual function and well-being due to hormonal influences on the brain. Brizendine also treats couples in the clinic.
Additionally, Brizendine teaches courses to medical students, residents and other physicians throughout the country, addressing the neurobiology of hormones, mood disorders, anxiety problems, and sexual interest changes due to hormones.’
Professor Brizendine is clearly far more qualified than I to make statements about the female brain and to compare it with the male brain. What startled me when I read The Female Brain was the sheer extent of the differences between the two brains: men and women truly do inhabit different mental worlds. Brizendine outlines how a range of hormones affect women’s brains as they progress through life stages: foetal, girlhood, puberty, sexual maturity/single woman, pregnancy, breast feeding, childrearing, perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. She reveals in the book that during her medical education at Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, she ‘learned little or nothing about female biological or neurological difference outside of pregnancy’, and continues:
‘The little research that was available, however, suggested that the brain differences, though subtle, were profound. As a resident in psychiatry, I became fascinated by the fact that there was a two-to-one ratio of depression in women compared with men. No one was offering any clear reasons for this discrepancy. Because I had gone to college at the peak of the feminist movement, my personal explanations ran toward the political and the psychological. I took the typical 1970s stance that the patriarchy of Western culture must have been the culprit. It must have kept women down and made them less functional than men. But that explanation alone didn’t seem to fit: new studies were uncovering the same depression ratio worldwide. I started to think that something bigger, more basic and biological, was going on.
One day it struck me that male versus female depression rates didn’t start to diverge until females turned 12 or 13 – the age girls began menstruating. It appeared that the chemical changes at puberty did something in the brain to trigger more depression in women…
When I started taking a woman’s hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages in life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality [Author’s italics]…
Of the fluctuations that begin as early as three months old and last until after menopause, a woman’s neurological reality is not as constant as a man’s. His is like a mountain that is worn away imperceptibly over the millennia by glaciers, weather, and the deep tectonic movements of the earth. Hers is more like the weather itself – constantly changing and hard to predict.’
From the chapter, ‘The Birth of the Female Brain’:
‘Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground, and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn’t told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviors. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction. One of my patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter’s room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth, saying, ‘Don’t worry, little truckie, everything will be all right.’
This isn’t socialization. The little girl didn’t cuddle her ‘truckie’ because her environment molded her unisex brain. There is no unisex brain. She was born with a female brain, which came complete with its own impulses. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they’re born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values, and their very reality.’
From a later chapter, ‘The Future of the Female Brain’:
‘Almost every woman I have seen in my office, when asked what would be her top three wishes if her fairy godmother could wave her magic wand and grant them, says, ‘Joy in my life, a fulfilling relationship, and less stress with more personal time.’
Our modern life – the double shift of career and primary responsibility for the household and family – has made these goals particularly difficult to achieve. We are stressed out by this arrangement, and our leading cause of anxiety and depression is stress. One of the great mysteries of our lives is why we as women are so devoted to this current social contract which often operates against the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality [Author’s italics].
During the 1990s and the early part of this millennium, a new set of scientific facts and ideas about the female brain has been unfolding. These biological truths have become a powerful stimulus for the reconsideration of a woman’s social contract. In writing this book I have struggled with two voices in my head – one is the scientific truth, the other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be as welcome.’
How, you might well ask, can ‘almost every woman’ seeking ‘less stress with more personal time’ be reconciled with women’s alleged quests for senior positions in the workplace in general, and for executive directorships of major companies in particular? It can’t. Professor Brizendine followed The Female Brain with The Male Brain (2010). It’s larger, but less interesting. The book, that is.
Onto a book written by Simon Baron-Cohen, an eminent British psychologist. His biography on Wikipedia:
‘Simon Baron-Cohen FBA is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is best known for his work on autism, including his early theory that autism involves degrees of ‘mindblindness’ (or delays in the development of theory of mind); and his later theory that autism is an extreme form of the ‘male brain’, which involved a reconceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathizing – systemizing theory.’
The professor’s book The Essential Difference was published in 2003. He starts by summarising the theory to be outlined in the book:
‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.
The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’
He describes empathising in the following terms:
‘Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathising does not entail just the cold calculation of what someone else thinks and feels (or what is sometimes called mind reading). Psychopaths can do that much. Empathising occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction, an emotion triggered by the other person’s emotion, and it is done in order to understand another person, to predict their behaviour, and to connect or resonate with them emotionally.’
Systemising is described as follows:
‘Systemising is the drive to analyse, explore, and construct a system. The systemiser intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system. This is done in order to understand and predict the system, or to invent a new one…
Just as empathising is powerful enough to cope with the hundreds of emotions that exist, so systemising is a process that can