February 19, 2013

• Sometimes half the truth is worse than a lie.

  JDN 2456343 EDT 15:53

   

  A review of The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine.

   

  As soon as I saw that the birthday gift I had opened was a book called The Male Brain, I was worried it would distort science in the service of gender stereotypes.

   

  It turned out to not be quite as bad as I feared, but it does have a lot of the flaws I expected. One of the most ubiquitous is a tendency that seems subtle at first, but turns out to be quite insidious in its effect: This is her tendency to shorthand “Studies show that to men are more likely to X” as simply “men X”.

  Occasionally she does it right, offering the necessary hedges such as “boys more often than girls will go behind their parents’ backs to take risks and break rules” (p.15) and “In cultures around the world there is a lot of variability among fathers” (p.81); but much more commonly she omits the “more often” and the “usually” and the “statistically” and just says things like, “boys tease and reject other boys who like girls’ games and toys” (p.19), “boys can’t understand why girls like to talk and text so much or why they need to share every minute detail” (p.41), and “sex doesn’t always lead to love, but for the male brain, it is a necessary part of getting there” (p.62).

  Compounding this error, she also ignores the variation within each sex, and makes generalizations that apply only to neurotypical, extroverted, non-sensitive heterosexual cisgender men (since the topic is gender, I can forgive the cisgender and maybe the heterosexual, but the rest?). For instance, she asserts things like “Research shows that it takes extraordinarily intense sensations to activate the reward centers of the teen boy brain, and homework just doesn’t do it” (p.35) and “The amount of stimulation it takes to make an adult cringe will barely get a rise out of a teen boy” (p.37). Well, that might be true for non-sensitive boys, but it is certainly not true–not even remotely close to true–for sensitive boys.

  Indeed, about half of what she said was true about “the male brain” simply wasn’t true of me; “Men accuse women of being too emotional and women accuse men of not being emotional enough” (p.95) rang particularly hollow, as one of my most painful failed relationships came from precisely the opposite dynamic.

  I realize that I am hardly a typical man; I am intellectual, autistotypic, introverted, sensitive, and bisexual; I am unusually high in IQ, emotion, and empathy; but as I was reading I came to realize that there’s something wrong with this whole search for “typical men” in the first place. Suppose we did find this elusive creature, who actually fits every stereotype, aligns with every statistical trend; where is he? And suppose such men exist; they must be pretty rare, right? It is in that sense perfectly normal to be atypical. (The statistics are pretty mind-blowing for most people: If there are 10 traits, each of which 90% of people have, the odds of having all of them are only 35%. If there are 20 traits, the odds drop to 12%. Of course, that’s assuming they are all independent; but even with realistic correlations, it’s easy to have a set of traits for which the majority has each of them but only a minority has all of them.)

  As a result, the book creates a false sense that men and women are categorically different: men are aggressive, women passive; men are stoic, women emotional; men are competitive, women conciliatory; and so on, all down a long list of stereotypes. Brizandine does do a good job of citing her sources; as far as I can tell, all the trends she cites are indeed statistically valid trends. But they are just that, trends, and in some cases the effect size is actually quite weak. A study will find a 4% difference, which might even be significant only due to publication bias, and then it gets repeated and embellished slightly several times, on down the line until in books like this it’s made to sound like a vast chasm. (A few actually are vast chasms, like the 20-fold difference in testosterone production. Men are about 8±2 mg/d, women 0.4±0.1 mg/d. Even using the larger male standard deviation, that’s a 4-sigma difference.)

  Also, the book is highly reductionistic, which I suppose is typical for neuroscience. In its worst example, it explicates romantic attraction as if it were basically just a matter of lining up pheromones and seeing what matches; it takes complex human interactions and tries to reduce them to simple chemistry. I wouldn’t be surprised if pheromones have something to do with it (in fact even this has not been conclusively shown), but there is clearly a lot more to it than that. (Honestly, if it were that simple, you could get anyone you want to sleep with you by spraying the right pheromones.)

  Part of it might be that we assign so much significance to being the proper gender. If it were not an insult to be seen as “less of a man”, but merely a simple statement of personality, like “less introverted”, then perhaps we could characterize masculinity in some quantitative way and then say that some people are more or less masculine. Maybe ultimately this is what we should aim for? But for now, it feels deeply unsettling to be told that because I don’t like sports, have intense emotions, and am sensitive to loud noises, this means that my brain is not truly a “male brain”. What is it then? Last I checked I have a penis.

  Brizendine claims that her goal is to encourage compassion and understanding between men and women, but in fact I think her book is more likely to have the opposite effect. Compassion derives from understanding individuality and accepting diversity, not shoehorning people into rigid categories. The Male Brain gives sexism an air of scientific respectability. As such, even though most of what it says is based on sound science, the presentation makes the book very dangerous indeed. 

  • 5:20 pm
  • 1 Comment