The genes cannot be denied. And yet, of course, there are no genes for liking guns or dolls, there are only genes for channeling male instincts into imitating males and female instincts into imitating female behavior. There are natures that respond to some nurtures and not others:
SEXING THE MIND
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At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperac-tive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled: "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy, " wrote psychologist Dianne McGuiness, a sentiment to which almost every man with a memory of school will raise a hearty cry of assent:"
But another fact begins to emerge at school. Girls are simply better at linguistic forms of learning, boys at mathematical and some spatial skills. Boys are more abstract, girls more literal. Boys with an extra X chromosome (XXY instead of the normal XY) are much more verbal than other boys: Girls with Turner ' s syndrome (no ovaries) are even worse at spatial tasks than other girls but just as good at verbal ones: Girls who were exposed to male hormones in the womb are better at spatial tasks: Boys who were exposed to female hormones are worse at spatial tasks. These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls: According to one researcher, such suppression has done both boys and girls far more harm than good. i8
And the brain itself begins to show strange differences.
Brain functions become more diffuse in girls, whereas they take up specific locations in the heads of boys: The two hemispheres of the brain become more different and more specialized in boys: The cor-pus callosum, which connects the two, grows larger in girls: It is as if testosterone begins to isolate the boy ' s right hemisphere from colonization by verbal skills from the left: These facts are far too few and unsystematic to be regarded as anything more than hints of what actually happens, but the role of language acquisition must be criticaclass="underline" Language is the most human and therefore most recent of our mental skills—the one we share with no other ape: Language seems to come into the brain like an invading Goth, taking the place of other skills, and testosterone appears to resist this: Whatever actually happens, it is indis-putable fact that at the age of five, when they first arrive at school, the average boy has a very different brain from the average girl.
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Yet at five the testosterone levels in the average boy are identical CO those of the average girl, and a fraction of what they were at birth: The pulse of testosterone in the womb is a distant memory, and there will be little difference between the sexes in testosterone levels until the age of eleven or twelve. A boy of eleven is far more similar to a girl of the same age than he has been before or will be again. He is academically her equal for the first time, and his interests are not so far apart. Indeed, there is one piece of medical evidence that at this age a person can still grow up to be, mentally, either a typical man or a typical woman, despite the hormonally induced differences of childhood: This evidence comes from thirty-eight cases of a rare congenital disorder in the Dominican Republic: Called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, this disorder causes its male possessor to be unusually insensitive to the effect of testosterone before birth. As a result, such people are born with female genitalia and reared as girls. Suddenly, at puberty, their testosterone level rises, and they turn into almost normal men: (The main difference is that they ejaculate through a hole at the base of the penis:) Yet, despite their childhood as girls, these men have for the most part adapted fairly easily to male roles in their society, which suggests either that their brains were masculinized even as their genitalia were not or that their brains were still adaptable at puberty."
Puberty strikes a young man like a hormonal thunderbolt: His testicles descend, his voice breaks, his body becomes hairier and leaner, and he begins to grow like a weed. The cause of all this is a veritable flood of testosterone from his testicles. He now has twenty times as much of it in his blood as a girl of the same age: The effect is to develop the mental photograph laid down in his head by the womb 's dose and to make his mind into that of an adult man.'
SEXISM AND THE KIBBUTZ LIFE
Asked about their ambitions, men from six different cultures replied with much the same answer. They wanted to be practical, shrewd, SEXING THE MIND
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assertive, dominating, competitive, critical, and self-controlled. They sought power and independence above all. Women from the same cultures wanted to be loving, affectionate, impulsive, sympathetic, and generous. They sought to serve society above all." Studies of male conversation find it to be public (that is, men clam up at home), domineering, competitive, status-obsessed, attention-seeking, factual, and designed to reveal knowledge and skilclass="underline" Female conversation tends to be private (that is, women clam up in big groups), cooperative, rapport-establishing, reassuring, empathetic, egalitarian, and meandering (that is, to include talk for talk 's sake)."
There are, of course, exceptions and overlaps. Just as there are women who are taller than men, so there are women who want to be assertive and men who want to be sympathetic.
But just as it is still valid to make the generalization that men are taller than women, so it is valid to conclude that the adjec-tives listed above are fairly typical of the natures of men and women. Some must be related to the differences between hunting and gathering, the most uniquely human of the sex differences.
For example, it cannot be a coincidence that men enjoy hunting, fishing, and eating meat much more than women do. Some may be more recent, reflecting social norms that the sexes have i mposed on themselves through peer pressure and education (which was not always as sex blind as it strives to be today). For example, the male desire to be self-controlled may be a modern attribute, a recognition that he has a nature that needs controlling. Others may be more ancient, reflecting basic patterns that all apes share and that baboons do not, such as the fact that a woman generally leaves her group on marriage and lives with her offspring among what were hitherto strangers, whereas a man lives among kin. Others may be more ancient still and shared with all mammals and many birds, such as the fact that women nurture babies while men compete with other men for access to women. It surely cannot be a coincidence that men are obsessed with status in hierarchies and that male chimpanzees compete for status in strict hierarchies of dominance: The Israeli kibbutz system has proved to be a large natural
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experiment in the persistence of sex roles. Men and women were initially encouraged to drop all sex roles in kibbutzim: Haircuts and clothes were unisex; boys were encouraged to be peaceful and sensitive, while girls were treated like tomboys; men did household chores and women went out to work: Yet three generations later, the attempt has largely been abandoned, and kibbutz life is actually more sexist than life in the rest of Israel. People have returned to stereotypes. Men politick, while women tend the home; boys study physics and become engineers, while girls study sociology and become teachers and nurses: Women manage the morale, health, and education of the kibbutz, while men manage the finances, security, and business: To some this is easily explicable: People have simply rebelled against the eccentric pattern set by their parents: Yet that explanation is more condescending than one that treats them as agents of their own choice, choosing according to their natures: Women clean house in a kibbutz because, like women everywhere, they complain that men would not do it properly. Men do not clean house in a kibbutz because, like men everywhere, they complain that if they did, their wives would say it had not been done properly. 2'