Real Simple at vanguard

For centuries, the evergreen media topic of gender differences, especially regarding the brain, generally has been a hostile one, with a not-so-hidden agenda to justify discrimination against women, such keeping them out of college and jobs. (”They’re too hysterical, too weak, etc….”) Often the points are “backed up” by loads of psuedo-science.

So no wonder that neurology has been a very sensitive topic of discussion, too hot to handle, among trail-blazing feminists of the past 40 years or so, who have worked hard to get women included in society as equals. To do this, they have had to emphasize women’s similarities to men and their strengths.

The good news is that this discussion is evolving now, partly as the result of some emerging research on the brain. Also, as a result of social changes, women feel more secure to discuss differences, and even weaknesses. We are now allowed to be fully human (like men), not necessarily superwomen, and still deserve equal rights.

An example of such progressive discussion can be found, where else, but in this month’s Real Simple. Here, between recipes and buying guides, you can find an interesting story written in layman’s terms, “How the Sexes Differ,” by Michelle Stacey. It’s based on the work of Dr. Marianne Legato, who founded the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University.

This is the first pop magazine article that I’ve seen that distills diverse current major research published in journals from the past several years about brain differences. The article is excerpted from Legato’s new book, Why Men Never Remember and Men Never Forget.

Legato points out that women are much more likely to get chronic pain disorders, lung cancer (as non-smokers), mood disorders, and autoimmune disorders (such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, and scleroderma). This is important dialogue to define these problems partly as “women’s issues,” without putting women down as “inferior” (as opponents of “women’s lib” would have contended in past eras). A result is to organize to take these problems more seriously as real biological issues, encourage treatment and research, and legimitize the experiences and relieve isolation of patients.

However, the article is not without some (very typical) faults of pop-magazine articles on gender difference. One heading about difference is “sexual dysfunction.” In this section, Legato is quoted about women being less in the mood for sex after a fight than men — with anger and stress switching off the libido. As feminists such as Leonore Tiefer have persuasively argued , the medical establishment often uses questionable medical terms like “female sexual dysfunction” to pathologize, or portray as deviant, normal response (so they therefore need to buy a drug for the problem). If a woman isn’t turned on, she’s often not turned on for a good reason (like she is angry at her partner), not because she is experiencing biological “sexual dysfunction.”

Like a lot of articles on gender differences, this one also generally fails to mention the extremely vast variations that exist between men and women. (The exception is the subhead, “Biology isn’t destiny, but it plays a big role in how women and men react to everything from stress to sex.”)

Without this caveat stated through the (admittedly short) article, it gets reductive, putting men and women in predetermined categories, such as women as more empathetic and men as more competitive, whereas (like with the health issues) all men and all women are different. For example, your gender alone is not going to determine if you are empathetic or competitive. I’m sure you would agree that any of us could quickly find a lot of very competitive and non-empathic women, or headache-prone or anxiety-disordered men, as examples (who, yes, still deserve equal rights).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Disability Issues, Feminism, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.