History of Feminism
Related: About this forumhas anyone heard of Cordelia Fine
i listened to her on an interview on NPR about a year ago.
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
A brilliantly researched and wickedly funny rebuttal of the pseudo-scientific claim that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children—boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks—we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework.
Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men’s and women’s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men’s brains aren’t wired for empathy and women’s brains aren’t made to fix cars. She then goes one step further, offering a very different explanation of the dissimilarities between men’s and women’s behavior. Instead of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.
Passionately argued and unfailingly astute, Delusions of Gender provides us with a much-needed corrective to the belief that men’s and women’s brains are intrinsically different—a belief that, as Fine shows with insight and humor, all too often works to the detriment of ourselves and our society.
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MadrasT
(7,237 posts)I also ordered this one:
Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.
In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all.
Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”
Biological determinism does not sit well with me. The only female stereotype that applies to me is, um... I turn to gooey mush when I see kittens. End of list, LOL.
So I just can't buy these studies that talk about sex/gender differences being "hardwired". They "feel" wrong to me based on my own experience as an atypical female, and my knowing a lot of people who dance outside and in between gender boundaries. I am now doing a lot of reading about these "brain wired differences" types of studies, as well as other studies that take the other side (like these two books).
I have a gender-based research project or two of my own in mind but it will likely be a few years before I would ever get to that.
Part of my issue with this is that I just don't buy into the notion that gender is a binary, either/or kind of thing.
My (somewhat recent) interest in feminism comes from me suddenly realizing that since I am a female-bodied person who presents as a woman, that even if I don't feel like "a woman", the world perceives me as "a woman", so yeah, feminism matters. I get lumped into the "women" bucket whether I like it or not. Honestly I had no time for feminism until recently because I didn't really perceive myself as "a woman". Gender simultaneously frustrated and bored me, so I ignored it as much as possible.
Conversely, I have never felt like a man or like I was born in the wrong-gendered body... I just don't identify as any specific gender much at all.
Gender used to really annoy me and now it just seems endlessly fascinating. Funny how when you get curious about something it turns from "annoying" into "interesting", LOL.
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)from my own personal experience and living in an environment that is so gender role oriented (texas) i was finding comments made to me about who i was, because i was a woman. and they were wrong. that simple. not who i am at all. people would insist i was that because after all, everyone knows a woman thinks and feels the prescribed roles. then coming onto du and hearing it repeatedly, i started doing some research of my own. it does not feel true to me either. and there is a lot of evidence to support the feeling it is not true. i also think that is one of the reasons we have such a push back from patriarchy is because the definition of our roles are becoming murky. and there is the demand that we recognized assigned gender roles. but having grown up with mostly men and boys, and in present RL, i did not see them adher to the roles assigned either. raising two sons i saw much of the behavior taught.
i heard one of the studies in fines book she challenged is men are more visual. men being more visual made no sense to me. if that were true, then it would imply in all things visually. and it simply doesnt exist. she said that the study was a questionairre with no control asking if they were turned on by a picture. this was 1980's. so of course the men answered as society allowed them to and the women answered as society demanded they answer.
hence, men are more visual.
there was a study, i believe 2008 where they actually hooked up the brains and found it to not be true. but people will not let it go. even if common sense and research tells us otherwise.
New brain research challenges the myth that men are more visual than women.
http://sexuality.about.com/b/2006/06/19/new-brain-research-challenges-the-myth-that-men-are-more-visual-than-women.htm
It is considered an almost forgone conclusion across research disciplines, among pop psychologists of all stripes, and in the general population that men are more “visual” than women when it comes to the way they get turned on. Men, we’re told, are visually aroused, whereas women just need a good sense of humor, and possibly a strong jaw, and they're on board.
This misguided, but pervasive belief can be linked to a host of other gender stereotypes which are further complicated by sexual politics and differences in social power. So arguments which should be challenged, such as the “fact” that men leer more than women do, that they objectify women’s bodies more than women do men’s bodies, and that they just can’t stop watching porn, are explained as somehow being related to a mix of genetics, patriarchy, and simple mindedness.
Challenging these ideas can be a monumental task. Researcher bias being what it is, science rarely offers support for these "counter-intuitive" ideas. What's worse, when research does start to complicate matters, the media, and even smart bloggers who should know better, distort the findings beyond recognition.
Nonetheless, a recent study published in the journal Brain Research is offering the first preliminary but important evidence to dispel the age old myth that visual imagery is more important to men than it is to women. And it's worth considering without hyperbole.
