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OK, Will, I am fuzzing up your thesis about sex difference because I wonder about how grounded parts of it are, and like I said, I find exaggerations of sex difference slightly maddening. So a few thoughts in response to yours (and from here on out I am channeling Slate columnist Amanda Schaffer, who knows much more than I do about all of this).
I agree with your claim about aggression, to the extent that boys on average tend to score higher on specific measures for aggression that's physical and verbal. I'm not sure the relevance of the study you cite though; I'd offer this one instead.
About responsiveness and social editing, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Responsiveness to anger, pain, or what? And does social editing mean changing the way you present yourself based on cues from people around you, and is the idea that women do more of it? I Googled to not much avail. I see that the second study you cite sort of relates to some idea of responsiveness (though the findings show only a partial sex difference). But the third study is about money and kid toy preferences, which doesn't seem to relate to responsiveness or social editing (am I missing something). And what's the fourth one supposed to signify? The authors say that the finding that the male chimps played more "is practice for later dominance behavior." But why--couldn't it just as easily be about females' greater industriousness or something? And in any case, aren't we far afield from whether men are more likely to be desirous and women more likely to want to be desired, itself a speculation based on preliminary research?
Feel free to ignore me--I know you have your own blog to manage!
ADDENDUM: On bloggingheads.tv, Ann Althouse and I discuss how women's sexuality may differ from men's and what this new sex research means for feminism.
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Slate's William Saletan returns for a second guest post on female sexuality:
Hey, no fair with the complications, Emily! I had a nice, simple thesis
that men and women were different,
and you had to go fuzz
it up with all your nuance and stuff. But, heck, I’m a gentleman. You took
my bait; I’ll take yours.
I can’t rehash all the research on sex patterns in aggression, responsiveness,
and social editing in this space or without putting everyone to sleep. Plus,
why trust my spin? Here are abstracts and write-ups from a few recent studies,
which can be interpreted in various ways. A little nature here, a little nurture
there. Have at it.
1. Do angry men
get noticed?
(Current Biology,
2006)
Angry
male faces were detected significantly more rapidly by male than female
observers. … Our findings are consistent with the notion of a perceptual system
in both males and females that has evolved to rapidly detect aggression in
males.
In
humans, evolution has resulted in marked differentiation between males and
females, including differences in the structural and functional organization of
the brain. These differences are reflected in patterns of cognitive and
behavioural abilities. For example, females tend to perform
better than males at fine motor and perceptual discrimination tasks, whereas
males are better at route-finding tasks. Males are also physically larger
and more aggressive than females, and so more likely to pose a physical threat. Such physical differences between the sexes may in turn have
shaped the cognitive processes involved in detecting threatening behaviour in
others. Early detection of an angry facial expression, for example, might
reduce the likelihood of an injurious or potentially fatal confrontation. … Recent evidence suggests that females are better than males
at recognizing non-threatening facial expressions such as happiness or sadness.
2.
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
(Nature,
2006)
We engaged male and female volunteers
in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and
then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while
these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes
exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas … towards fair
players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in
males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was
accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an
expressed desire for revenge.
3. Sex
differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children
(Hormones
and Behavior, 2008)
Male monkeys, like
boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female
monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. … The
similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop
without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy
preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which
are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and
humans.
(More on the study here:
The animals were offered two categories
of toys— ones with wheels such as wagons and other vehicles, and various dolls
and cuddly toys.)
4. Sex
differences in the development of termite-fishing skills in the wild
chimpanzees
(Animal Behavior,
2005)
[T]he techniques of female offspring closely
resembled those of their mothers whereas the techniques of male offspring did
not, suggesting that the process by which termite fishing is learned differs
for male and female chimpanzees.
(More on the study here:
By the first day, adult
females were getting at the mustard and a young female watched carefully and
began to pick up the skills, she said. Two young males did not fare as well—one
simply sat next to his mother and tried to steal some mustard from her, Dr.
Lonsdorf said. The behavior of both sexes may seem familiar to many parents,
she said, adding, "The sex differences we found in the chimps mimic some
of the findings from the human child development literature." She pointed
out, however, that at least in the case of chimps, each is doing something
important, since the males' play is practice for later dominance behavior.)
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Will, we invite you to join the party and you show up and ask hard questions. Ok, I'll bite. You ask whether the women-as-reactive pattern extends "to other realms
of life," since "it certainly
resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression,
responsiveness, and social editing." So tell us more about the research you're referencing. I'm often driven mildly crazy by the exaggeration of findings about brain-based sex difference. It's just sexier to say that women are different from men than to say they're mostly similar. (See this great series by Amanda Schaffer for a take down about sex-based differences on language and types of intelligence.) On the other hand, when the research is solid, it's of course worth grappling with. My recollection is that you're right about aggression, but remind us why, and fill us in on the other fronts you raised.
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Fellow XX Factor contributors and readers, we're not the only ones intrigued by Daniel Bergner's article in the New York Times Magazine on female sexuality. Slate's own William Saletan has written about it as his "Human Nature" blog.
Will writes:
May I join the conversation? I was struck in Bergner's article by the same idea Meghan flagged: that perhaps "there's something reactive about female sexuality." (I have another take on the idea here.)
To me, what's really provocative about this theory is that its logic doesn't seem confined to sexuality. Bergner quotes Meredith Chivers as speculating:
[O]ne possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary.
If the dyad theory is correct, why wouldn't it extend to other realms of life, with one sex initiating and the other reacting? It certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing.
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Ann, your reading of Bergner's article seemed spot on for me, particularly the part about women not wanting to find clear-cut answers in order to keep the door open for sexual possibility. The part of "What Do Women Want?" that stood out to me most was the discussion of sexologist Lisa Diamond's research:
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees
significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the
statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to
the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book [Ann Heche, Julie Cypher] and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden.
While I believed they were being honest, I never understood my bisexual female friends who would say similar things to Diamond's statement -- that they were attracted to the person, not the gender (or maybe, as Meghan mentioned, they were attracted to the person's desire, not their gender). Anyone who's attended a liberal arts college in the past 20 odd years knows at least one women who earns the not-so-kind epithet "LUG," or lesbian until graduation, and those women are not taken especially seriously.
Research like Diamond and Chivers' is valuable, not just for getting women to understand themselves, but to potentially foster more understanding of non-normative orientations. To answer your question Meghan, no, like Nina, I don't believe that women are divided between the divergent systems of sexuality, the physiological and the subjective. It seems from the research being done, we're fairly far from coming up with any definitive commentary about women's sexuality. I think we're probably not even asking the right questions yet.
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Meghan, thanks for starting a discussion about this Sunday's twisty and complicated NYT Magazine story on female desire. One quick response: You wrote about Meredith Chivers' experiment in which participants were shown a variety of sexual (and semi-sexual) images:
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: they said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women's minds and bodies are subconsciously at war, or that the women were conscious of their less "normative" desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
I agree that the split between bodily reactions and psychological reactions Chivers found was fascinating. (Though I wonder how cleanly those divisions can actually be made.) But the way you describe that discrepancy makes it inherently a problem—either our minds and bodies are "at war" or we're "ashamed" of getting turned on by horny bonobos. Is it possible that the women simply had complicated reactions that, in the immediate testing situation, they weren't fully prepared to untangle or report accurately? Not that I like perpetuating the idea that women are this deep, dark forest of mystic mysteries, while men, in turn, are straightforward and easy to comprehend. (Ann, I'm a fan of your Freudian reading of the article.) But I'm not sure Chivers' data necessarily paints a picture of a womanly torment.