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Yet the belief persists that there are innate brain differences between the sexes. As the neuroscientist Gina Rippon writes in The Gendered Brain, dealing with the myths of ‘neurosexism’ is like playing ‘whack-a-mole’: each time you smack one down, more spring up elsewhere. Why are these myths so tenacious? For a start, findings are often based on small sample sizes, or observed effects are overblown. There are also reporting biases, the most obvious of which is the ‘file drawer effect’. Studies that discover differences between the sexes are readily submitted for publication, while those that don’t tend to be filed away. Observations of similarity therefore go underreported, and accounts of brain sex dimorphism are less likely to be undermined by research that fails to replicate their findings. As the psychologist Gerald Haeffel put it in a Royal Society paper published in June, ‘Psychological science is on an extraordinary winning streak. A review of the published literature shows that nearly all study hypotheses are supported. This means that either all the theories are correct, or the literature is biased towards positive findings.’

Science writers and journalists play their part in the myth-making. When they announce evidence of brain sex differences, they often omit to mention that the resounding effect relates to zebra finches or prairie voles, or – when the evidence is human – that the participants’ average age was sixty, so that scientists were scanning brains that had undergone the best part of a lifetime’s influences. Researchers and reporters know what they’re doing: sexism sells. There is an appetite for science that legitimises our prejudices. Perhaps there’s some version of the just-world hypothesis at work: my not being good at chess is less vexing if I can blame it on the sex limitations of my brain, rather than the competing demands on my time, the undermining effects of stereotypes, or my laziness. Or maybe it’s easier to digest simple explanations for troubling phenomena. Why grapple with the complex confluence of bodies and cultures when you can settle for believing that sex differences are rooted in our genes or in the lives of our ancient ancestors? Rippon mentions a paper whose authors attempt to trace the gendering of pink and blue to our evolutionary origins. Their conclusion is even sillier than the premise: food-gathering cavewomen had to be able to pick out blushing berries; cavemen hunters were adapted to scan the horizon against a blue sky.

Writing in the New Humanist in 2009, Raymond Tallis advised: ‘If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun.’ There is now a whole genre of popular science devoted to debunking the neuroscience of sex differences. This sometimes results in a stodgy, carping sort of writing, and one wonders how many minds are actually changed by it, but as long as the ‘neurotrash’ piles up, it is important to have patient, conscientious rebuttals on the record. Rippon, in her comprehensive book, doesn’t reject the possibility of brain sex differences outright, but instead shows that tugging at the thread of most of the claims in circulation reveals a gendered origin story. Male infants walk earlier, but do so after greater motor encouragement; female infants talk earlier, but are usually spoken to more. Men tend to outperform women on ‘mental rotation’ tasks, that is, when visualising the way an object would appear from a different vantage point. But the difference isn’t observed in young children and is more reliably correlated with time spent playing computer games: it’s less a question of neuroanatomy than of who has a Nintendo. A survey of a million people across 48 countries, published in 2015, indicated that women have significantly lower self-esteem than men. In trying to account for that striking finding, you can either choose to probe the brain’s self-evaluation centres and tell just-so stories about archaic humans, or you can take seriously the fact that every culture has ways of making women feel bad about themselves.

When we scour brains for signs of sex, we’re bound instead to find the imprints of gender. And unless we’re careful, we’re apt to mistake one for the other. If there are primordial sex differences, we have spoiled our chances of finding them: sexism not only changes our brains, it also tends to blunt the objectivity that’s needed to do good science. Maybe some of us are innately worse at chess, or maths, or mental rotation tasks, but stereotypes and material barriers set far lower ceilings than biology does. To accept this means starting our inquiry from a different point. In her recent book The Disordered Cosmos, the cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein asks: ‘What are the conditions we need so that a 13-year-old Black kid and their single mom can go look at a dark night sky, away from artificial lights, and know what they are seeing? What healthcare structures, what food and housing security are needed?’* Most brains are good enough for most things; the problem is that too many are underfed, sunk in cortisol, hemmed in by stereotypes and taken up with the demands of survival. Prescod-Weinstein’s words echo those of Stephen Jay Gould forty years ago: ‘I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.’

Last edited by uziq (2022-09-05 03:46:07)

Last edited by uziq (2022-09-05 04:02:18)

uziq wrote:

even in hardline theocratic societies, like the taliban's afghanistan, there are long-standing tribal and regional practices of elders engaging in homosexual acts with younger men. they are 'muslims'.

Last edited by SuperJail Warden (2022-09-07 08:23:51)