NYT piece debunking 'Brain Sex'

[GraceTheDisgrace]

Scientists Daphna Joel and Cordelia Fine in the New York Times Opinion section.

'In 17th and 18th century Europe, the rise of egalitarian ideals created the need for a scientific account of women’s inferior status. Thus was born gender biological complementarity — the notion that, as historian of science Londa Schiebinger explains in The Mind Has No Sex, “Women were not to be viewed merely as inferior to men but as fundamentally different from, and thus incomparable to, men.” It has been with us in one way or another, roping in science to explain the gender status quo, ever since.

At its core is the persistent belief that men’s and women’s natures can be usefully and meaningfully carved into two categories or “natural kinds,” that are distinct, timeless, and deeply biologically grounded. Today’s version of this idea continues a centuries long quest to find the source of this hypothesized divergence in abilities, preferences, and behavior in the brain...'

www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/opinion/male-female-brains-mosaic.html

I don’t know where Fine stands on trans issues because, as I mentioned earlier, they are entirely absent from the two books of hers I read, but the only way that they could be used to support argument is if a transwoman said ‘Fine says there’s no difference between male and female brains, therefore you can’t say my brain isn’t female.’

I do think the article was commissioned as part of the trans-‘baffle them with science’ strategy though.

if the hypothesis that men behave the way they do, sexually, because of society, then why do we see predatory sexually behaviour in conservative/religious men?

Because conservative/religious and sexually predatory are not remotely mutially exclusive. Conservative/religious societies often hold women in low regard, which does not exactly encourage men to view them with respect. You seem to have a very simplistic view of cause and effect when it comes to social conditioning.

Ah, so you’re arguing both: 1. that men are hardwired to be predatory and to sexually exploit women via prostitution

Loaded statement. I don't see sex work as exploitation. The reason why we don't have a "meeting of minds" on this is because you don't believe that I don't see it as exploitation; you think that I think it's exploitation and I'm making excuses in my mind, but this is not the case.

I'm going to admit my mystification here.

If we want neuroscience to come out with good evidence that 'ladybrain' is a sexist fiction intended to perpetuate the idea that women are to be subordinated by nature, that there is no such thing as a 'female brain in a male body', and neuroscience succeeds in doing so, we're going to accuse them of genderist ideology?

Brain sex is a fundamental tenet of trans ideology. They tell us that they have a 'mismatch' between a female brain and a male anatomy, and that the gender identity corresponds to the sexed brain, which takes precedence, and represents a body that was 'born wrong'.

Feminism tells us that the brain, like the liver, heart, kidney, etc., are human organs, not female or male organs, and that the differences between men and women arise from chromosomal and hormonal differences, and socialization; and that there is no such thing as a 'female brain', just a human brain that is located in a female body getting female hormones and (under patriarchy) feminine socialization; and a human brain located in an male body getting male hormones, and (under patriarchy) masculine socialization.

Neuroscience is in the NYT providing evidence of why feminism was right and transgenderism was wrong, and telling us that the answer is to stop gender stereotyping, and accept that people are individuals. And you want to reject it because ...? I don't follow.

Come to think of it, the absence of transgender from Fine’s work is rather odd.

How do you write about sex differences (or their absence) and not talk about transgenderism?

Wanting to do something pleasurable which you've been told not to do is a human trait, not a male one. The conditioning which causes many men to treat women in a predatory way is made up of subtle (and some not-so-subtle), all-pervasive differences in how men are treated compared with women from when they are tiny children. It's not an overt "Don't do this because it's wrong/against your religion".

Famouspj - do violent people need socialising? Sexual promiscuity increases stds and potentially de-stabilizes the environment for child rearing (i am happy to consider that stable promiscuous partnerships exist with positive impacts for offspring but they are few and far between).

Fair enough, but with my own upbringing, I was told not to look at porn, and my friends called me a "pervert" or "dirty bastard" when I said anything sexual. Yet, I still enjoyed looking at porn once I got my hands on it. Why was my brain not influenced by the society, or culture around me, to make me dislike porn?

Upbringing can differ dramatically from flat to flat in the same building. Socialization gets everyone in society, though boys and girls get it differently.

You live in a society that obsesses over sex, hypersexualizes and objectifies women, and pushes both men and women to regard sex as hugely titillating. You are also, presumably, a sexually functional human being who is liable to be sexually aroused by sexually explicit material.

Your upbringing may have given you feelings of embarrassment -- for example, are you open with your parents about having looked at porn? I assume you aren't, because you'd been raised knowing they wouldn't approve. Some people would say, having been raised that porn is taboo might make you more affected by it.

Upbringing should equip us to contend with our socialization, but it can't (short of us being raised entirely outside society) be a replacement for it. As parents we're not trying to play the role of society entire, but even if we were trying to, we couldn't do it.

AspieAndProud I keep a short list in my head of prominent ...let's say advocates for women's issues... who have never come out publicly to speak on transgenderism whatsoever. The ones I am thinking of (who I intentionally will not name on MN) do their very important work by visiting universities and making speeches. They don't work directly on the issue of gender criticism but they are obviously radical feminist in their work and thinking. If they lose their platform, their work ceases to reach its audience. It sometimes looks like they go far out of their way to avoid being deplatformed for heresy. I don't know if CF or DJ should be on that list, or if I have imagined the whole thing, but it's what I suspect.

And you want to reject it because ...? I don't follow.

Nobody is saying don’t treat people as individuals, just don’t deny differences at population levels.

We don’t dismiss the gender pay gap because many men earn less than many women. We can clearly see that there is a difference at population levels.

Fine refers to ‘odds’ and ‘group averages’ and then ignores them in her conclusion. These odds and averages aren’t imaginary.

Sexed brain characteristics, where they exist, are overlapping distributions. They are too close to say ‘This individual brain has this characteristic, therefore it is male’.

But over a populations there are significant differences.

"Evolution has produced humans who are sexually dimorphic in almost all respects (grip strength, lung capacity, etc), documented in great detail in the thread on sports competition."

No one really thinks that humans aren't sexually dimorphic physically, but it's worth noting that Evolution actually has produced humans that are much less sexually dimorphic than our ancestors. I wonder why no one ever discusses this when they talk about humans?

"But are we really supposed to think that evolution stops at the neck? If evolution produces a body that is more physically capable of violence, wouldn't the same process produce a brain that was more prone to using violence?"

Evolution has produced a in humans a body that is less physically capable of violence than its ancestors were (as well as less physically dimorphic). I would imagine this extends to brains as well.

What you're really asking is whether there is a higher residual tendency towards violence in males than there is a residual tendency towards violence in females.

Unfortunately we cannot answer this question because all individuals are noted as being male and female by others and are thus treated differently from birth. We need a purely egalitarian society as a control and we don't have one of those.

We can look at trends, though, and we do see that there is less male violence against women in more egalitarian societies. Furthermore we can look at adoption studies and determine whether upbringings emphasizing nonviolence do indeed reduce violence in either males or females. This would indicate a strong role for socialization.

Loaded statement. I don't see sex work as exploitation. The reason why we don't have a "meeting of minds" on this is because you don't believe that I don't see it as exploitation; you think that I think it's exploitation and I'm making excuses in my mind, but this is not the case.

Oh no, I quite believe that you don’t see prostitution as exploitation; many people seem not to. Many people either have never looked into the actual realities of prostitution and/or don’t care because -eh- it’s just poor women.

Prostitution causes harm, from human trafficking to increased risk of STDs; it doesn’t really matter whether you believe it or not, the harms exist.

And you say men are hardwired for this.

In fact, the things that you’be stated that men are hardwired for:

-predatory behavior
-using prostitutes
-sending dick pics

You want to haggle over prostitution not being exploitative; fine; agree to disagree, since this thread isn’t about prostitution but about innate brain differences between the sexes.

Are you also arguing that predatory behavior in men isn’t harmful? That sending unsolicited dick pics is AOK behavior?

And that this all innate, hard-wired male behavior that no amount of socialization will overcome?

I don’t blame Fine for remaining silent on transgenderism in the current climate if she’s GC.

I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a chapter of Delusions of Gender or Testosterone Rex that was dropped either at the publisher’s insistence or because Fine censored herself.

I just think the glaring absence of transgenderism in books about gender is telling.

The only popular science book I’ve read that gives the subject any real attention is Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Little Finger (also a fantastic read despite Dreger’s recent equivocation over sex) - and that was more about the controversy about self-censorship than about transgenderism itself.

Fine tiptoes around sexual behaviours. The Delusion of Gender (from memory) almost exclusively focusses on intellectual capacities like maths or ability to make abstractions. When we look at brains and try to sex them on measures other than size there is nothing very interesting. Basically the overlap is too much to be of predictive value. There is no blue or pink brain (even thought the Cohen guy would have us believe this, hence I assume Fine's focus on male autistic brains). This is exactly what GC people think. Our BIOLOGY is different (periods, hormone cycling...) as is the effect of our lived experience on our brains (birth, breastfeeding....). So women may jump out of bed at 3am when the baby cries: because of their lived experience, or they may be genetically programmed, it hardly matters which because it DOESN'T affect women's capacity to programme computers or solve a differential equation. One should ask who in the hell thought it would?

*Brain sex is a fundamental tenet of trans ideology. They tell us that they have a 'mismatch' between a female brain and a male anatomy, and that the gender identity corresponds to the sexed brain, which takes precedence, and represents a body that was 'born wrong'.

Feminism tells us that the brain, like the liver, heart, kidney, etc., are human organs, not female or male organs, and that the differences between men and women arise from chromosomal and hormonal differences, and socialization; and that there is no such thing as a 'female brain', just a human brain that is located in a female body getting female hormones and (under patriarchy) feminine socialization; and a human brain located in an male body getting male hormones, and (under patriarchy) masculine socialization.*

First, the fundamental flaw here is that you're expecting science to meet your political and social beliefs. Science (when done properly), starts with data, and draws a conclusion from the data, not the other way round.

Second, you concede that female hormones such as oestrogen are more present in the female body. We know that hormones impact behaviour (I'm sure you wouldn't argue with the role of hormones in making us feel hungry and seeking out food, for example). Since we know that hormones impact behaviour, I'm not sure why you find the idea of a hormone like testosterone causing aggression and higher libido so controversial.

You live in a society that obsesses over sex, hypersexualizes and objectifies women, and pushes both men and women to regard sex as hugely titillating. You are also, presumably, a sexually functional human being who is liable to be sexually aroused by sexually explicit material.

I'm not buying this. Yes, I live in a society in which sex is hugely titillating, and yes, I definitely saw that as a child (although didn't girls see the same stuff? Never mind). But I remember going through a phase, aged 10 - 11, in which it seemed like everyone around me was having their first experiences with girls, but yet, I had absolutely no interest. I was worried for a long time because I thought it meant I was gay (homophobia was a lot more common where I live, and back then). Anyway, by the time I was 13, I became a lot more interested in girls, and I was having sexual thoughts about them all the time... but it's not like I'm consciously choosing to have those thoughts, they would just happen without me even knowing. To me, that's not the type of thing that's conditioned, that's a lot deeper... ultimately, I attributed it to puberty. Given the nature of onset, and the timing, I can't fathom how it was due to conditioning in society... if it was conditioning by society, I would have been interested in girls aged 8 - 11, because I saw those messages a lot in my childhood... but yet, it didn't happen until age 13, which, funnily enough, is when you would expect a surge in testosterone in a teenage boy.

What you're really asking is whether there is a higher residual tendency towards violence in males than there is a residual tendency towards violence in females.

Unfortunately we cannot answer this question because all individuals are noted as being male and female by others and are thus treated differently from birth. We need a purely egalitarian society as a control and we don't have one of those.

That's not an unanswerable question. First, we can observe behaviours in men who are castrated, men with poor testosterone levels, transgender men who take testosterone, etc... but of course, you have to take into consideration that those people are living in different circumstances (a man who has been castrated might feel depressed, for example). That allows us to make connections between a hormone like testosterone and violence.

But of course, we do have the rest of the animal kingdom to look at (I am always bemused as to why discussions around gender always omit the rest of the animal kingdom, as though humans aren't biological organisms too). You can observe violence in male animals vs female animals, measure testosterone levels in animals, etc. etc. But do note that non-human animals are barely capable of conscious thought or reasoning, and act mostly on instinct... yet, what we see in primates, and many other mammals, is the male animals constantly beating the shit out of each other for "mating rights." Our second closest ancestor, gorillas, have a strongly patriarchal society in which one dominant gorilla basically has a harem of female gorillas!

But this is not to say that we should model ourselves after animals. "The way things are is not the way they ought to be." It's important though to understand a problem before trying to address it. I think men are more prone to violence and aggression because of their biology, and I think that should be kept in mind when trying to reduce male violence and aggression in society.

We can look at trends, though, and we do see that there is less male violence against women in more egalitarian societies.

Be careful with correlation and causation. As a general trend, there's more violence against women in countries where prostitution is illegal, you know.

I mean, a reduction in violence could be due to anything. More egalitarian countries also tend to be very, very rich. Logically speaking, having money or not having money is going to have a big impact on whether or not someone is violent!

I don't want women to be conditioned into reaching the same levels of male violence, especially male sexual violence thanks. I'd rather, ya know, no-one be subject to violence.
And ewww please ignore the pervy troll, clearly getting kicks out of this.

I don't want women to be conditioned into reaching the same levels of male violence, especially male sexual violence thanks. I'd rather, ya know, no-one be subject to violence.

Think outside the box. The reason why many of men's sexual behaviours are classified as violence is because they're unwanted by women. Why is it not regarded as violence to send a vag pic to a man, or watch a naked man on webcam? The answer is because men take ownership of these things. Men like vag pics, and they like being watched on webcam. Once people take ownership of these things, it's no longer violence.

Uh huh. Cool story bro.

PJ. No.

I explicitly DID discuss human evolution in the context of our ancestors and other animals. As I carefully and painstaking explained at least twice to you, the trend in the human lineage - relative to our great ape ancestors, is a REDuCTION in the sexually dimorphic traits you are discussing.

Like other animals experiencing an environment which necessitated biparental care (mostly because our offspring are among the most helpless ever), humans have evolved strong social pair bonds, lower levels of polygamy, and reduced sexual dimorphism.

This is a broad and strong evolutionary trend which includes such diverse animals as many monogamous and cooperatively nesting birds, several cases in rodents, and also weirdly enough, some insects. So you. Can take your “feminists ignore biology” back to Bio 101 which seems to be all you have had time for.

And no, you are wrong that we can actually know if it is society or not that impacts any specific behavior. As it is males are treated differently by others than females are because they are seen as male by others and our society has different rules and expectations for males than for females. Experiments to control for this would be highly unethical for obvious reasons.

I don’t think that it is controversial that hormones have effects on sexual behavior, though everything you described could describe female puberty as well (by the way I find it pretty hilarious that you felt the need to explain to a group of well educated women that kids going through puberty become sexually interested in other). Not a single person here has tried to argue that biology in no way impacts behavior.

you concede that female hormones...

Dude, I'm a gender critical radical feminist. That means I understand biological sex, which includes hormones. I live in a female body. Believe me, ain't none of us trying to discount the existence of sex hormones, chromosomes, or other biological differences between the sexes. And yeah, we know, testosterone supposedly relieves men of responsibility for their violent actions.

I'm not buying this.

You'll have to forgive me, I didn't realize I was having a conversation with a dude who wants to go on and on about his pubertal sexual experiences. I'm going to pass on this one. Entertain yourself with someone else.

The reason why many of men's sexual behaviours are classified as violence is because they're unwanted by women.

Nice bit of misogyny there - blaming women for men's actions.

You'll have to forgive me, I didn't realize I was having a conversation with a dude who wants to go on and on about his pubertal sexual experiences. I'm going to pass on this one. Entertain yourself with someone else.

If that is in response to the poster I think you are referring to, in another thread it was pointed out that said poster thinks that male violence can be cured by women having group sex in public.

Obviously before I post this, the usual disclaimers apply in that there’s no ethical way of actually determining once and for all if differences in male and female brains are nature or nurture and in reality there’s probably a bit of both, however, I read something recently (I will try to find it and post a link) that was a summary of a meta-analysis of many different studies into gender differences to see if there actually was such a thing as a male brain and a female brain. It covered a variety of experiments including some done on animals and a study on how testosterone injections on pregnant women (which the women had been given as legitimate medical interventions for conditions they had) affected their unborn children. Overall men and women seemed to be more alike than different but there were a couple of areas where they considered the differences in behaviour to be marked enough that they were likely to have a biological factor. 1 - men have a higher sex drive than women. 2 - men are more likely to express feelings of aggression physically whereas women are more likely to express feelings of aggresssion verbally.
I am trawling the internet while making breakfast trying to find the link but it could go some way to explain some of the differences. It’s obvious, however, to anyone with a brain that even if these differences are biological in some way, socialisation plays a massive role.

If that is in response to the poster I think you are referring to, in another thread it was pointed out that said poster thinks that male violence can be cured by women having group sex in public.

Oh it's the same thread, and more than enough evidence of disingenuity for me.