The XX Factor: What women really think.

Chimps, Toys, and Sex?

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.

 

What Do We Want To Know About What We Want?

Meghan, not to evade your questions, but I found myself focusing on the subtexts of Daniel Bergner's article: He is particularly fascinated by the difficulty of doing scientific research on female sexuality and by the jarring multiplicity of theories and by the tenacity of the postfeminist sexologists like Meredith Chivers in the face of the morass—more fascinated, almost, than he is by their findings about female sexuality itself. From the start, the emphasis is not just on how their data don't add up in any expected way, but also on the ways their thinking about their data doesn't add up predictably or neatly, either.

I don't mean at all to suggest that Bergner (a distant acquaintance) disparages the endeavor. But his article prompted me to wonder—in the rather ungrounded, speculative spirit the field seems to encourage—whether Freud's famous question invites a sort of Freudian reading: Maybe the last thing men really want to know is what, exactly, women want. As for women, what do they want to know? Well, to apply some crude evolutionary logic, it might seem advantageous if they were eager to probe the mysteries of their own desire not in order to come up with clear-cut answers, but to keep the door open to an array of possibilities. Could be a promising recipe, at any rate, for achieving the goal that brought Chivers to the field in the first place: "I wanted everybody to have great sex."

Mars and Venus Walk Among Us

Yes, I think it's safe to say that Clark Hoyt doesn't get Maureen Dowd, despite her efforts to explain herself to him (what a fun interview that must have been). Dowd said that she's playing with sexist gender constructs, not aping them. She also defended herself as an equal opportunity offender—she questions Obambi's masculinity as well as Hillary's womanliness, and this makes it all more OK. That works for me, most of the time.

It does drive me crazy, though, when women writers or TV commentators, or whoever, make their name by taking supposedly brave stands against what they've decided are feminist platitudes. I'm not talking about Dowd. The easy-mark offender of late is Charlotte Allen, and sometimes Caitlin Flanagan plays this game; in past days, Ruth Shalit had it nailed, if I remember right.

Today in Slate, Amanda Schaffer has a series that takes on a related breed: two scientists (Louann Brizendine and Susan Pinker) who say they're feminists, have read the literature on sex differences in the brain, and emerged to tell us what they frame as the politically incorrect truth—women really are from Venus and men really are from Mars. Specifically, they say that women have better verbal aptitude, talk more often and use more words, are better at empathizing. Men are better bets to be top mathematicians and scientists, a la Larry Summers, and that's not likely to change as the culture changes. Amanda expertly goes in and takes her own look at the science and finds that Brizendine and Pinker played down the contrary evidence, made various questions seem far more settled than they are, and hype the idea that differences are innate, and fixed, when that may well not be the case. She also interviewed various scientists who said, hey, Pinker and Brizendine made my work stand for a proposition it doesn't stand for.

Amanda has also done some thinking about why the reluctant truth-teller female scientist walks among us so prominently at the moment. (Other than the obvious ka-ching, ka-ching answer: Brizendine's book, which came first, was a best-seller.) That part of the series won't run til next week. In the meantime, any thoughts? Do you think that bashing principles or ideas that feminists hold dear fast-tracks certain women to success? Or am I oversensitive, huffy, and in need of a tall glass of iced tea since it's too early in the day for a drink?