Do You Have a Male or Female Brain?

“Men feel emotions stronger than women but aren’t usually as able to control those feelings.”

Oh hurray, and we are also excusing men for their actions because they “feel emotions more strongly” buy aren’t “able to control” themselves. Yay patriarchy!

I can't be bothered to do this quiz, but I'm ace at maths and art, and did both at A-level.

Haven't a single clue who/what Chadwick Boseman, Crepy Crawlers or and EasyBake oven are, though.

Clearly I have a FML brain.

They seem to have missed off option C) - looks like some sort of z list celeb, but I haven't got a fucking clue who. Which is probably a good thing.

@banivani I wouldn't have even know who that guy was

I only made it this far:

If you had to describe this image to a friend who couldn't see it, what would you say?

a) This is a picture of Chadwick Boseman, a very handsome man with black hair and brown eyes. He looks like he’s at a premier and is wearing all white.

b) It’s a picture of Chadwick Boseman.

Oh my dear lord.

Such a pile of crap. Apparently I have a male brain.

“With a male-dominant brain, you have strong spatial awareness, can better judge size based on sound and can thrive on little sleep. You have more confidence, too — or at least are better at asserting yourself. Men feel emotions stronger than women but aren’t usually as able to control those feelings.”

Ah. So I have a male brain. I've done these quizzes before and they always say that, so I'm hardly surprised

Some of the questions on this one were either completely irrelevant (90's toys for anybody who wasn't a kid in the 90's?) or the options to choose from didn't include what I wanted to choose, so it was a bit shit.

Personally I have the brain of a goldfish.

What was the thread about again?

On a more pertinent note, I can recommend Lise Elliott's Pink Brain, Blue Brain. She is a neurologist whose specialisation is brain plasticity in infancy/early childhood. She notes that (a) insofar as you can measure any cognitive differences at all by adulthood, the d values - difference in means divided by product of the standard deviations - is tiny; and (b) since we can find ample evidence that people treat their children differently according to sex from birth onwards, and since we know the developing brain is incredibly plastic, there is absolutely no way even in principle you could determine whether such tiny differences as we can measure are down to nature or nurture.

The second question - following the subtext along the logic train - implies we are turning our sons into girls by training them in how not to live in squalor.

As for the first question: play doh was banned in our house because it got squashed into the carpet, and I don't know what creepy crawlers are, but Dbro and I preferred using the actual gas oven to bake together. Not sure whether that made me a boy or him a girl. Perhaps we were both hermaphrodites?

This board could greatly contribute to eradicating this thinking by ending the tradition of accusing everyone who doesn't agree with the party lines of being a man.

I was shit at both maths and art, does that make me non-binary?

Me too, I preferred English, had long hair (often tied with a ribbon) and wore skirts a lot. But now I work in coding, have very short hair & live in trousers with useful pockets.

We must both be non-binary.

I was shit at both maths and art, does that make me non-binary?

But is liking pineapple on Pizza a male or female trait?

Exactly! But every time I point out that they identify with stereotypes they go "no, gender roles exist, but identity is something totally different". The sheer cognitive dissonance is astounding.

In fact, I had several posts back and forth the other day, and in the end they got so cornered, so instead of replying again, they deleted the comment (and with it all the replies, on instagram) and blocked me. Close your eyes, hold your ears, and sing la la la.

Whether you like Pineapple on your pizza determines whether you have a lady brain? wtf

MrGHardy - I completely agree. What is ‘gender identity’ divorced from biological reality if not stereotypes. David Thomas’s column in the Daily Telegraph is interesting - ‘I knew I was a woman because I cry in films, am an emotional person, like wearing dresses, worry all the time, enjoy shopping and am interested in interior design’ What is this if not a stereotype of what David thinks a woman is? For the record, if this is the test of womanliness then I fail miserably.

Professor Cohen has a thesis of ‘systemising’ and ‘empathising ’ brains. No prizes for guessing who he thinks gets which one. Gina Rippon makes the excellent point that even Professor Cohen doesn’t claim that ALL women have empathising brains (making them a natural fit for low paid caring jobs of course) but some men can have them too and some women have systemising brains. So - why call them male and female brains at all then?

I also think it’s a disgrace how low paid many caring jobs are.

I don't have a brain if I did I would be dangerous

"It's so regressive. I cant believe that we are foung back to a place where females are defined by stereotypes."

I have heard the following argument several times now: "There are gender roles, yes, but gender identity is different", upon me asking what exactly they are identifying as. Never have I heard what this magic 'gender identity' actually is, though.

It's so regressive. I cant believe that we are foung back to a place where females are defined by stereotypes.

Indeed. My brain is female because it's in a female body. That is all.

It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of evidence. And the evidence does not support the 'Male and female brain' hypothesis.

There's evidence that adult brains may be a mosaic of traits conventionally thought of as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. There's only one sure way of telling if a brain belongs to a man or a woman, that's to check its chromosomes... nothing to do with function.

"We've determined that your brain is more FEMALE! Be sure to share your results with your friends!"

Oh well.

I gave up on the second page, so I guess I'll never know if my brain is male or female. How will I ever cope?

Seriously though, even if there were average psychological differences between men and women, that doesn't equate to a "male brain" and "female brain". Nobody ever says that being over 5ft 10 is a "male height" and being under 5ft 6 is a "female height" (and anyone in between had an "androgynous height" I guess).

I do not believe in male and female brains.

Precisely because I am capable of engaging mine.

I think there are differences in male and female brains but not the differences our sexist society has told us are there. And our brains are too complex to put into words what those differences are, complicated more by the strong influences of culture.