Jerk Tweets Sexist Remark, Prompts Me to Muse About the Meaning of "Freedom"

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people" - Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler

It took a long time before this saying made any sense to me. Surely everyone knows that women are people, right? What else would they be? Space aliens? Robots? Very convincing holograms?

That was a joke --- I knew, even when I first heard the saying, that it was referring not to the tautology that female Homo sapiens are Homo sapiens, but to the philosophical concept of personhood. At the time, though, I couldn't imagine that anyone did not extend personhood fully to women, so the saying still struck me as bizarre.

Well, here is a wonderfully clear example of someone doing just that:

Tweet from Pax Dickinson saying "Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How's that for an unpopular truth?" Image taken from the Public Shaming tumblr

This guy was, until recently, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, a popular news website with an emphasis on business and technology (particularly information technology) news.

But I don't care so much about who the speaker is so much as I do about what he is saying: Women's suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. What? People are freer when fewer of them can vote? How does that make any sense?

I would submit that it only makes sense when you assume that the "individuals" he's talking about are men. Women's freedom is compatible with women's suffrage --- see recent elections in which women's votes made the difference between a Republican rape philosopher and a more liberal (if not always pro-choice) Democrat.

Women's votes made the difference in 2012 in the Indiana U.S. Senate race between Richard Mourdock (the "pregnancy from rape is God's will" guy) and Joe Donnelly*, in the Connecticut Senate race between Linda McMahon and Chris Murphy**, in the Massachusetts Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren***, in the Ohio Senate race between Josh Mandel and Sherrod Brown****, in the Pennsylvania Senate race between Tom Smith and Bob Casey*****, and in the Virginia Senate race between George Allen and Tim Kaine. 

Women's votes failed to make the difference in the Wisconsin Senate race between Tommy Thompson and Tammy Baldwin, and in the governor's races in Montana and Washington --- if only women had voted, the Democratic candidates would've won those races, but the Republicans' advantage among men was strong enough to carry them to victory anyway.

(It should be pointed out that, for the most part, abortion and other "women's issues" do not drive the gender gap in voting behavior --- there are much bigger differences between the sexes on whether to strengthen or cut back the welfare state and whether to pursue a hawkish or dovish foreign policy, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics. The hard-right candidates that women voters rejected in 2012 espoused both extreme anti-abortion, anti-contraception positions and a desire to greatly diminish the welfare state, so it's hard to tell whether their anti-choice zealotry was the deciding factor in alienating women voters. But the fact remains that, if only men had voted, a lot more of those anti-choice zealots would be sitting in Congress today.)


So, besides being more likely to vote against candidates looking to curtail their reproductive freedoms, women also vote for candidates they think will strengthen the social safety net. What does that have to do with personal freedom?

Well, I think having a robust social safety net is critical for maximizing individual freedom: there are a lot more choices available to you if you don't have to worry about losing your home and being unable to feed yourself and your family if you lose your job. You're more free to blow the whistle if you think your employer is doing something unethical, to fight against what you see as unfair or exploitative working conditions, and to engage in political activism or commentary outside of work without being afraid that these things will cost you your job. You are also more free to leave a job for whatever reason. There's a reason FDR named "freedom from want" as one of his Four Freedoms, and why he used that word --- freedom --- instead of, say, "rights" or "entitlements" or "needs."

There's also a subset of welfare-undermining measures that serve only to criminalize poverty, to subject people needing government assistance to intrusive, degrading treatment and erode their freedom. Things that fall into this category are mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, requiring welfare recipients to document that they spent a certain number of hours each week either working or engaging in approved job-seeking or job-preparatory activity, tying the amount of money a family receives to how well their children are doing in school, or requiring people applying for welfare to be fingerprinted.

People who favor such mean-spirited measures usually think there are legions of idlers living on welfare just because they don't want to work, and spending their benefits on luxury items. 

(They are mistaken --- almost every form of public assistance that exists in the US is time-limited or situation-specific, like unemployment insurance (which expires after a certain number of weeks that varies by state), the program people are usually thinking of when they say "welfare" (which is officially called TANF: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which has, among many other limitation, a five-year lifetime cap on benefits), or WIC (which you can only get if you are pregnant, nursing, or have children younger than five years old). The one program that doesn't come with a predetermined expiration date is food stamps, which you can only get if you make 130% of the federal poverty rate or less, and which you can only use to buy food).

But whether or not the idlers exist, it's important to focus on the fact that these people --- the people who favor draconian measures to curb welfare fraud --- are more concerned with ferreting them out than with getting aid to those who need it, and subjecting those people to minimal state intrusion and hassle. That does not sound like a person who is concerned with human freedom; to me, that sounds a lot more like a person who cares little for people and a whole lot for pinching pennies.

There are some personal-freedom issues on which women tend to favor more restrictive policies than men do: according to this poll, women are less likely than men to support legalizing marijuana, to give just one example. But the conclusion one draws from that, taking into account everything I've said above, isn't that men are pro-freedom and women are anti-freedom; it's that most people favor at least some restrictions on individual freedoms, and that there are some differences between the sexes in terms of what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. The only way you arrive at "Women's suffrage is incompatible with individual freedom" is by defining "individual freedom" so selectively as to leave out any personal-freedom issue on which women are more liberal than men.

*Donnelly is pro-life, but unlike Mourdock he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of forcible rape. He also voted for the Affordable Care Act and for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

**McMahon supported the Blunt amendment, which would've allowed employers to opt out of providing insurance coverage for contraception. She also wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is slightly more popular among women than among men (i.e., for women it's almost a 50/50 split, while men are opposed by a slim majority). 

***The biggest issue at stake in this race was obviously regulation and reform of the financial sector, which is not a "women's issue" but is, according to Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, a greater priority with women voters than with men, though this poll shows huge majorities of both sexes favoring reform.

****Mandel seems to have campaigned on his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that his opponent, Sen. Sherrod Brown, voted for it. Mandel also opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and including sexual orientation and gender identity in anti-discrimination laws. 

*****Casey is pro-life, but unlike Smith he would allow an exception to a general ban on abortion for victims of rape or incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger. He voted for the Blunt amendment, but has also voted to protect Planned Parenthood's federal funding under Title X, and to rescind the Mexico City Policy (aka the "global gag rule" forbidding aid organizations from even referring people for abortion services). He also supported the Paycheck Fairness Act and introduced a bill to require colleges to do more to prevent (and track, and prosecute) sexual assault and domestic violence. Smith, as I mentioned, favors a total ban on abortion with no exceptions, and is one of the lesser-known Republican rape philosophers.

Cognitive Sex Differences within Autism - Part I

One hypothesis about why there are so many more boys and men on the autism spectrum than there are girls and women is that boys and men, for whatever reason, are more likely to get diagnoses of autism spectrum conditions.

One of the reasons commonly put forward by people (including me) making this argument is that the diagnostic criteria reflect a picture of autism derived disproportionately from autistic boys and men, and autistic girls and women differ sufficiently from their male counterparts in their abilities, behavior, developmental histories etc. to ensure that they will often fail to meet those criteria.

While browsing PLOS ONE I found a couple of recent-ish articles looking into what those differences might be.

The more recent study, just published this week, involved giving four largish groups of participants (one autistic and one neurotypical group within each sex, with each group having thirty-two people in it) a battery of tests designed to measure five different skills: theory of mind, emotion recognition, executive functioning, perceptual attention to detail, and manual dexterity.

What are all those things and how would you go about measuring them? Well, the first of those skills, theory of mind --- also called cognitive empathy or mind-reading --- is one I've written a lot about on this blog. I've also written a lot (usually in the same posts) about the tool psychologists seem to use most of the time to assess this skill in adults: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. I don't think I need to say anything more about either the skill or the test; the test is relatively straightforward, a series of black-and-white photographs of faces, cropped to show only the eyes, paired with a choice of four emotion words. You are supposed to guess which of the words best describes what the person whose eyes are in the photograph is feeling.  

I listed theory of mind and emotion recognition separately, even though the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test obviously involves both. There's another test the researchers used, one that they describe as a test of emotion recognition, that reads to me like it's almost the same thing as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, only it uses pictures of entire faces instead of just eyes. It's called the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces Test.

To test the participants' executive-functioning abilities, the researchers used something called the Go/No Go Task. This involves pressing buttons on a computer keyboard in response to certain cues appearing on the computer screen; in this study the cues were arrows pointing either to the right or to the left. (Right and left were each associated with a different target key: P for right and Q for left. So the people taking the test were literally minding their P's and Q's!) The test also includes extraneous cues that test takers are not supposed to respond to. So what's being tested is not just one's ability to hit a key when a light goes on; it's also one's ability to restrain one's key-hitting impulse when something close to, but not exactly like, the target stimulus appears.

There were some other things the researchers included under the umbrella of executive functioning: working memory (tested by having the participants repeat nonsense syllables), word generativity (ability to come up with lots of words beginning with the same letter in a short amount of time) and motor planning, which they tested using the Assembly subtest of the Purdue Pegboard Test. (This involves putting simple objects together in a set order using whatever hand they tell you to use.) This obviously assesses manual dexterity as well as the ability to figure out what you need to do in what order (i.e., motor planning), although they also had the participants complete the other parts of the Purdue Pegboard Test to test manual dexterity alone.

Finally, the test they used to measure attention to detail was the Embedded Figures Test, which I've also blogged about before, noting that autistic people have shown a particular aptitude for this task.

The results are mostly unsurprising: the autistic study participants did worse at both of the facial-expression-interpreting tasks, and also at pressing the right key in the Go/No Go task. On the two language-related memory tasks, they performed no differently than the control group. (This is not surprising given that all of the participants are described as "high-functioning," having average-to-above-average IQs (about 115, plus or minus about 15 points) with verbal IQ greater than or equal to performance IQ).

The emotion-recognition data get more interesting when you look more closely at them, though; apparently the autistic study participants had more trouble identifying some emotions than others. Fear was the one it took them longest to recognize; it was also the hardest one for the non-autistic people to identify, too, but the gap between the two groups' average reaction times is the biggest in this category. It took the autistic study participants, on average, somewhere between four and five seconds (closer to five) to identify the fearful faces. For the non-autistic participants, it took maybe three and a half seconds. Happy faces were the easiest for both groups to identify, and the difference between groups was only half a second compared to the 1-1.5 second gap in their response times to fearful faces. All the other reaction times are clustered within a relatively narrow range for both groups: between 2.5 and 3 seconds for the autistic group, and between 2 and 2.5 for the control group. So, even though fear was tricky for everyone, it proved especially challenging for the autistic people. The study authors guess that maybe this is because autistic people studiously avoid looking at other people's eyes, and the eyes are apparently the most important cue that someone looks frightened.

There were also a couple of novel findings, too, though. For instance, on the Assembly component of the Purdue Pegboard Test, it was only the autistic men who had any problems relative to their same-sex control group. The autistic women were, you might say, indistinguishable from their peers. 

But the most surprising thing, for me, was their results on the Embedded Figures Test. This is a pretty solidly defined Thing Autistic People Are Really Good At, yet in this study, where there was a difference between autistic and non-autistic groups, it was the non-autistic people who found the hidden shape faster. (That was also true for the men and not for the women).

In general, the authors describe a pattern of male and female autistics having more or less the same degree of impairment in what they call the "hallmark" of autism spectrum conditions, which is inability to pick up on another person's nonverbal cues to their mental or emotional states*, but with the autistic men, and not women, also having additional impairments in other domains.

The authors point out that this contradicts what had been conventional wisdom about cognitive sex differences within autism, which held that autistic women were usually more severely disabled than autistic men**.

I haven't forgotten about the other, earlier study; I'm just going to give it its own post so as not to make this one overlong.


Lai, M., Lombardo, M., Ruigrok, A., Chakrabarti, B., Wheelwright, S., Auyeung, B., Allison, C., , ., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2012). Cognition in Males and Females with Autism: Similarities and Differences PLoS ONE, 7 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047198


*This elusive quality can be called theory of mind, mentalizing, "mind-reading" or empathizing. It may also involve more than one cognitive, emotional or perceptual ability, but this study doesn't really go into that.

**To be REALLY picky, this study doesn't address the issue of intellectual disability, as no one who participated in it would meet the criteria for having ID. This shows that autistic men of slightly above average IQ are more likely to have problems with motor planning and figure disembedding.

Another "Extreme Female Brain" Sighting

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory of autism, sex differences and whatever else he's applied it to lately states that people have one of three basic cognitive styles: Type E, the empathizer, who understands people and relationships; Type S, the systemizer, who understands abstract ; and Type B, who can do both. Prof. Baron-Cohen has identified autism as exemplifying the Type S cognitive style taken to extremes, but hasn't written much about its opposite, the extreme Type E, or Extreme Female Brain. He allows that it must exist, but he doesn't think it would be as disabling in modern society as an Extreme Male Brain --- autism --- is. Other people (Crespi and Badcock) have suggested paranoid psychosis as the condition typical of the Extreme Female Brain, as it involves being morbidly obsessed with other people. In the paper I discuss here, a pair of evolutionary psychologists make the case that the psychopathology characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain is disordered eating.

The paper I discuss in this blog post describes a series of four different "experiments" in which groups of college students, of varying size (as large as n = 160, as small as n = 37), are given multiple psychometric exams. They are tested for the following things: disordered eating, sensitivity to other people's judgments, Empathizing Quotient (EQ), Systemizing Quotient (SQ), performance on various tasks considered representative of either empathizing or systemizing (e.g. guessing what emotion people in photographs are feeling, or mentally rotating three-dimensional objects), and schizotypal personality disorder. Some of the data are compatible with the idea of a high-empathizing, low-systemizing Extreme Female Brain that is particularly susceptible to disordered eating, and some are not.
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Thought to exist, but seldom glimpsed in the wild

Today on the fascinating psychology blog BPS Research Digest, I saw that some other researchers think they've found a candidate for an Extreme Female Brain, which according to Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory ought to exist, probably in about the same numbers as the Extreme Male Brain (which he identifies as autism) does, but which hasn't been described in the psychological literature.

The new article, by evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. and assistant professor of psychology Jennifer Bremser --- both affiliated with the State University of New York --- and published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, tries to make the case that eating disorders stem from the heightened sensitivity to others' judgments that is characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain.

What they did was to give a group of undergraduate psychology students at SUNY a battery of tests: the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT), which looks for disordered attitudes about eating (sample questions: "I feel extremely guilty after eating"; "I feel that food controls my life"); the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, which measures how anxious you are about what other people think of you (sample questions: "I often worry that I will say or do the wrong thing"; "I feel very upset when I commit some social error"; "When I am talking to someone, I worry about what they may be thinking about me"); Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizing and Systemizing Quotients (which I have critiqued here and here); the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (PDF), which tests for nine traits associated with schizotypal personality disorder: ideas of reference (which means thinking that other people, or the media, are talking specifically to or about you when they aren't really), excessive social anxiety, odd beliefs or magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, odd or eccentric behavior, a lack of close interpersonal relationships, odd speech, constricted affect (i.e., not being very good at showing one's feelings), and general suspiciousness; and several tests that measure skills that would be associated with either an empathizing or systemizing cognitive style: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the Intuitive Physics Test and the Redrawn Vandenburg and Kuse Mental Rotations Test (Version A). Then they looked for relationships between all of these different test scores, and between any given score and the test taker's sex.

Their hypothesis --- that an empathizing cognitive style is more characteristic of women than of men, and tends in its extreme form towards disordered eating and social anxiety --- would predict the following: women scoring higher, on average, on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests, and lower on the SQ, Intuitive Physics, and Mental Rotation tests; women scoring higher than men on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation, and high scores on those measures being correlated with high scores on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests for both sexes. 

They found significant differences between the sexes on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation (both were higher for women), and also on the EQ, but not on the SQ. Women were also likelier to display something called "empathizing bias", which they defined numerically as each study participant's z-score on the EQ minus their z-score on the SQ. (Z-scores are a measure of how far an individual's score on a given statistical measure is above or below the average score. A negative number means the person, or sub-group, scored below average, while a positive number means they scored above average). Thus, the empathizing bias score is supposed to represent how much better a person does at empathizing than systemizing (or not, if it's zero or a negative number).

There was also a disparity between how participants scored on the EQ and SQ versus how they did on the more "objective" measures of systemizing or empathizing skill, the Intuitive Physics, Reading the Mind in the Eyes and mental rotation tests. The sexes differed strongly on their (self-reported) EQ scores, but performed almost identically on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Obviously guessing what emotion a black-and-white photograph of a stranger's eyes is meant to convey is very different from accurately gauging the emotional states of one's relatives and friends, so that still leaves open the possibility that women perform better at this task when it involves real people who are known to them, but it's just as likely that women tend to overrate, and men to underrate, their interpersonal sensitivity on self-reported measures, and that real differences between the sexes on this ability are minimal. 

The opposite pattern occurred between the SQ and one of the "objective" measures of systemizing ability: men and women scored equally on the SQ, but men outperformed women on the Intuitive Physics test. (I can't find any results on the mental-rotation test broken down by sex).

There was also a very inconsistent pattern of correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and the various systemizing and empathizing variables. High scores on the disordered-eating measure correlated with high scores on the fear-of-negative-evaluation (FNE) measure, and also with high scores on the EQ. There was no relationship between SQ scores and either disordered eating or fear of negative evaluation, and EQ and SQ scores were positively correlated with each other. Most strangely, SQ scores were correlated positively with empathizing bias: the number that reflects the imbalance between one's empathizing and systemizing abilities!

Also, within each sex the overall pattern of disordered eating patterns correlating with greater empathic ability (whether self-reported or "objectively" measured) seems to fall apart. 

Two graphs, Figure 1 and Figure 2, show bars for average male and female performance on both the EQ and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, at low and high ends of the disordered-eating spectrum. According to these graphs, women score about the same on these tests regardless of whether they show disordered eating patterns or not, and for men the results are all over the place. On one test (the Mind in the Eyes), men who score low on the Eating Attitudes Test do equally well with all women, while men who score higher do more poorly on average, but their range of results is very, very broad. The error bar is wider than the bar on the graph is tall. 

On the EQ, the men show more or less the pattern the researchers expected: men at the high end of the disordered-eating spectrum scored higher than men at the low end on average, but for the former group especially there was a lot of within-group variation.

They also found correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and several of the traits that make up schizotypal personality disorder: disordered eating correlates positively with ideas of reference (i.e., thinking everything refers to you, specifically), magical thinking and suspicion. Fear of negative evaluation correlates positively with ideas of reference, suspicion, social anxiety and constricted affect. (This latter makes sense --- if you are afraid people are judging you, of course you are going to try and minimize the extent to which those people are able to tell what you're thinking or feeling! It's called a "poker face".)

They also wanted to see if any of these psychological problems --- disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation, schizotypal personality disorder or any of its component traits --- interfered with one's ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in one's head. (Their reasoning for doing this wasn't just for giggles --- let's take a bunch of emotionally stressed people and ask them to do something both pointless and difficult! Hilarious! --- it can be hard to shake the idea that a lot of psychological experiments are done with precisely that objective --- but because they wanted to see if people who were unusually and morbidly concerned with what other people thought of them, and were thus "hyper-mentalizers" who would be reckoned extreme empathizers in Simon Baron-Cohen's typology would also show the expected impairment in systemizing tasks. 

Annoyingly, they did not compare people's scores on the mental-rotation task with their scores on other direct measures of systemizing or empathizing ability: they assumed, given earlier findings, that high scorers on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation are also high empathizers. As I have said above, the data are less than clear in their support of this assumption. 

They found that people (they do not break it down by sex, probably because at this stage in the study they were dealing with a lot fewer participants) who scored high on their measure of disordered eating tended to do worse at mental rotations, consistent with their prediction. However, they also found a small (too small to be significant) positive correlation between mental-rotation scores and fear of negative evaluation. Of those two things, I'd consider the FNE score to be the more pure indicator of a "hypermentalizing" excess of concern for what other people think; there's a lot that's still unknown about the psychology of eating disorders, to the point that calling disordered eating a behavior born out of a fear of negative evaluation by others would be speculative.

The correlations they found between the various schizotypal personality traits and mental rotation ability surprised me, too. You'd think, if greater skill at mental rotation of three-dimensional objects indicated a logical, "systemizing" type of mind, that there would be a strong negative correlation between mental-rotation scores and those schizotypal traits that bespeak irrationality, like magical thinking or ideas of reference. (Especially magical thinking). But no, there's no correlation between either of those things and how well one does at mental-rotation tasks. The only components of schizotypal personality disorder that showed any significant relationship to mental rotation were social anxiety and constricted affect, both of which were negatively correlated. 

A negative correlation between skill at mental rotation and one's score on the social anxiety subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire does fit with the researchers' idea of "hyper-mentalizing" at the expense of systemizing. But the lack of such a correlation with fear of negative evaluation does not fit, and instead makes one wonder if what's going on is, instead, anxious people's anxiety interfering with their ability to perform the rotations. 

In their Discussion section, the researchers do not comment on most of these discrepancies, but the one they do address --- worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test* by people with more severely disordered eating --- they attribute to those people's having greater, not less, emotional sensitivity**. Why, they're so sensitive they see things that aren't even there, so they do poorly on certain tests of emotional sensitivity and interpersonal acuity like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.

I'm being silly, but that really is their explanation:

Comparable to the heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli (auditory, visual and tactile) common among people with autism, individuals with the EFB [Extreme Female Brain] may be hypersensitive to social stimuli. Disordered eating may ameliorate the experience of negative evaluation anxiety that results from heightened sensitivity to social stimulation. 

Consistent with this idea, emotional processing deficits have been linked with eating disorders including the inability to recognize, label and describe emotions in detail and to link feelings with bodily correlates (Bourke, Taylor, Parker and Bagby, 1992 [link]; Eizaguirre, de Cabezon, de Alda, Olariaga and Juaniz, 2004 [PDF]; Garner, Olmsted and Polivy, 1983 [link]) Also, compared to healthy controls, women with anorexia had difficulty recognizing emotions from facial expressions and vocal tones (Jansch, Harmer and Cooper, 2009 [link]; Kucharska-Pietura, Masiak and Treasure, 2003 [link]).

Jones, Harmer, Cowen and Cooper (2008) [link] investigated emotional face processing in female undergraduates with high and low levels of disordered eating. Participants completed the Eating Attitudes Test-26 and the Facial Expression Recognition Task, a computer task in which participants view faces depicting 7 different expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral) at different intensities. The participants with higher levels of disordered eating were less accurate in identifying happy and neutral faces. Among participants with high levels of disordered eating, there was a tendency to classify more happy faces as neutral, and more neutral faces as either angry or sad. In addition, there was evidence that reaction times to recognize disgust were longer, while reaction times to recognize fear were faster than participants with low levels of disordered eating. When disordered eating reaches clinical levels, the effects of hyper-mentalizing may manifest as mental state misattributions. This may be because they are using their own experience to model the experience of others, and their bias to classify emotions with a negative bias may influence their attributions. For instance, when shown pictures of women who are said to have overeaten, females with high levels of disordered eating ascribed more negative emotional states to these women than control participants do. Thus, women with higher levels of disordered eating appeared to use their own experience of overeating to describe how the other women would feel (Beebe, Holmbeck, Schober, Lane, Rosa, 1996 [link]).

It is also possible that the physiological and cognitive effects of starvation produce deficits in performance. In a study looking at performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, individuals with anorexia performed worse compared to healthy controls (Russell, Schmidt, Doherty, Young and Tchanturia, 2009 [link]. 

An alternative explanation is that low scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task does not represent a deficit of theory of mind ability, but rather an excess that reflects hypermentalizing. Abu-Akel (2003) [PDF] suggests that theory of mind dysfunctions range from the complete absence of the ability to represent other people's mental states (as shown in severe autism) to having the representational understanding of mental states, but a deficit in the ability to apply this understanding (as in Asperger's syndrome) to the abnormal or excessive attribution of mental states (as in schizotypy). It may be that this third class of dysfunction is misconstrued as a deficit, rather than an excess. Consistent with this interpretation, the RME is one of the most widely used instruments to investigate theory of mind performance in adults; however, scores on the RME depend only on accuracy. The test does not identify the nature of the errors that impede performance. For example, there can be errors of absence (failing to detect a mental state when it is present) and errors of excess (wrongly inferring a mental state in its absence). We suspect the second class of errors (errors of excess) account for most of the lower scores on this test among individuals with anorexia.

(They also seem to be arguing that people cursed with an excessive degree of awareness of other people's judgment of them might be self-medicating by starving themselves: if they are women, they will produce much less estrogen, which the authors believe "may also produce changes in empathizing and theory of mind performance." So that's a novel proposal --- people with eating disorders starve themselves to dull their razor-keen interpersonal sensitivity, in the interests of making their lives bearable. Obviously there's no evidence for this, and I've never seen anyone who has an eating disorder describe it like that, but at least it does people with eating disorders the courtesy of treating them as rational beings, which not all of the accepted explanations do.)

I do not doubt at all that people who have this kind of hypersensitvity exist --- I know a few! What I doubt is that 1) these people are all the same, and all have this skill for the same reason; 2) these people are any likelier to develop eating disorders than the general population; and 3) these people are necessarily bad at "systemizing," which seems to include such things as logical reasoning, pattern recognition, organization and spatial cognition. Indeed, the data from this same study suggest that people who are good at one half of the empathizing/systemizing duality seem to be good at the other half, too.

You can also count me as agnostic, still, on the question of whether women are, overall, better empathizers and men better systemizers. I don't rule it out, as at least some cognitive differences between the sexes do seem to exist, and show up consistently in studies, but as yet I don't see strong empirical support for it. 

Also, they dance around this in their Discussion section, but never directly address it: disordered eating is quite common in autistic girls and women, and even non-autistic people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia, perform similarly to autistic people on tests of mentalizing ability (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again), mirror self-recognition, emotion recognition, body awareness, executive function and central coherence (the Embedded Figures Test).

If autism is supposed to be the Extreme Male Brain, and the Extreme Female Brain is supposed to be its opposite, doesn't that complicate things a lot? 

Bremser JA, and Gallup GG Jr (2012). From one extreme to the other: Negative evaluation anxiety and disordered eating as candidates for the extreme female brain. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (3), 457-86 PMID: 22947672

*In the present study, it was only the male participants who showed this pattern, but the researchers cite lots of other studies of people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, who show the same impairment. Some of the other researchers hypothesized that insufficient nutrition made those patients less able to perform complex cognitive operations of any sort, which sounds convincing to me.

**I am having UNBELIEVABLE trouble spelling "sensitivity" today. I always seem to leave out one of the "I's".  

Women in Comics

Comics fan Elliott Brown recently posted a short article on Change.org criticizing DC Comics for putting its "New 52" universe-wide reboot almost exclusively in the hands of male writers and artists:

The number of women working for DC has been hovering around 10% for years -- similar to their adversary company, Marvel. But this September, DC will be rebooting its universe and giving its characters (and creative teams) an overhaul. Many of the characters that will be erased are female, which in and of itself is a tragedy, but in addition to that, what few female creators DC has employed will also be cut from the team. Only 2 out of 100-odd people DC employs as ongoing creators will be women: Gail Simone, who will be writing Batgirl, and Amy Reeder, who will be doing pencils on Batwoman.

That tally immediately made me wonder exactly how many women were currently writing or drawing for Marvel, and on which titles.

(I don't shun DC or anything --- I love, or am interested in, quite a few things they've done, especially under their "mature" label, Vertigo. And they've given us that classic of modern comics, Watchmen! But most of the comics I own are Marvel --- I'm an X-Men fan, and the X-Men have been around a lot longer, and racked up a lot more back issues, than most of what else I read.)

Anyway, Marvel isn't having any similar across-the-board relaunch, so it's going to be a bit harder to track down all of their series that are still going concerns.

Here's a list of recently- and soon-to-be-released titles featuring women writers and/or artists:

• Emma (a serialized adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name) - written by Nancy Butler and drawn by Janet K. Lee


• X-23 - written by Marjorie M. Liu; #'s 3, 7, 10, 11 and 12 drawn by Sana Takeda


• Ultimate Fallout - #'s 2, 4 and 5 drawn by a team of artists including Sara Pichelli


• The Iron Age - # 2 co-written by Jen Van Meter; #3 co-written by Louise Simonson, cover art by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Hulk - #'s 37 and 38 drawn by Elena Casagrande


• Fear Itself: The Worthy - cover art on #1 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Amazing Spider-Man - variant cover for #667 drawn by Stephanie Hans


• Mystic - cover art on #1 by Amanda Conner


• X-Factor - #'s 209, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223 and 224 drawn by Emanuela Lupacchino


• Spider-Girl - cover art on #8 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Spider-Island: Cloak & Dagger - drawn by Emma Rios


• Anita Blake: Circus of the Damned (an adaptation of Laurell K. Hamilton's novel Circus of the Damned) - written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jessica Ruffner


• Journey Into Mystery - #626 drawn by Stephanie Hans

That's thirteen titles out of 250 putting out new issues in July and August; what's more, only about half of them appear to have women artists involved in whole projects rather than just coming in to do a cover, or to pencil one or two issues in the regular artist's absence.

(Just doing covers, or hopping from series to series doing single issues here and there, isn't a bad thing --- some artists might even prefer it. For instance, Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic seems to specialize in covers. I just bemoan the fact that so few women are involved long-term because that means their creative visions are less likely to make a lasting impact on a series, or to shape the way characters and events develop.)

This Is Not a Review of "X-Men: First Class" ...

... if you're looking for one of those, I can direct you to this one by Neil Kapit, a fellow X-fan and author of the webcomic "Ruby's World," who pretty much says what I would say if I were to review this film.

No, I'm going to focus on something much narrower about this movie: its depiction of Angel Salvadore, a relatively minor character in the comics and a supporting character in the film.

I was very surprised to see her in this movie, because 1) she's a very recent character, and wouldn't really belong in a story about the relationship between Professor X and Magneto as young men (not that that's stopped any of the previous movies, where characters from different generations of X-Men have always been thrown together willy-nilly), 2) none of the other characters*, or plotlines, she's involved with make any appearance in this movie, and 3) she's very unphotogenic. She's half-girl, half-fly, and her offensive weapon is super-acidic barf.

Here's what she looks like using that power in the comics:Gross, isn't it?

That's why I was so surprised, before seeing the movie, when I read that she'd be in it. Female characters in movies, especially in comic-book movies, action movies and other movies aimed at a teenage-boy audience, are primarily there as eye candy; when they're allowed to do cool stuff and look pretty it practically counts as a feminist victory, but the look-pretty requirement is not negotiable.

And there's no way to make disgusting green barf look pretty; hence my surprise.

It turns out I underestimated Hollywood's ability to pretty almost anything up: I can't find any video on YouTube that includes this, but when the younger mutants are all showing each other their powers and picking out their X-Men codenames, Angel demonstrates something that looks nothing at all like what's pictured above. She strikes a pose, puckers her lips and releases a smoldering fireball about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, which arcs prettily through the air and lands on the statue's head, where it begins to corrode the metal**.
She uses this power again in a battle near the end of the movie; she's flying through the air breathing fire like a dragon. Less ladylike, but still not gross.

*Except Professor X, obviously, and also Magneto. Though the extent to which Magneto was actually involved in the events of Planet X are debatable ... the character who tried to suborn the Xavier School's "special class" into a reconstituted Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and conquer the world was apparently later revealed to be Not Really Magneto At All. I haven't read the comic where that gets hashed out, though, so I am quite fuzzy on the details. I just know that the whole question of "Does Planet X Count as a 'Magneto Story' or not is very contentious --- see the comment thread on this post.

**For whatever reason, the fireball-spewing part of Angel's power demonstration is missing from all the clips I can find.

An Intriguing Idea from Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

In Chapter 19 (titled "Gender Detectives") of her book, Delusions of Gender (which I review here), Cordelia Fine describes how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories:

Anyone who spends time around children will know how rare it is come across a baby or child whose sex is not labeled by clothing, hairstyle, or accessories. Anyone with ears can hear how adults constantly label gender with words: he, she, man, woman, boy, girl, and so on. And we do this even when we don't have to. Mothers reading picture books, for instance, choose to refer to storybook characters by gender labels (like woman) twice as often as they chose nongendered alternatives (like teacher or person). [Gelman, Taylor & Naguyen, 2004] Just as if adults were always referring to people as left-handers or right-handers (or Anglos and Latinos, or Jews and Catholics), this also helps to draw attention to gender as an important way of dividing the social world into categories.

This tagging of gender --- especially different conventions for male and female dress, hairstyle, and accessories, and use of makeup --- may well help children learn how to divvy up the people around them by sex. We've seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. [Levy & Haaf, 1994] This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already learning to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. [Serbin, Poulin-Dubois, & Eichstedt, 2002 (PDF); Poulin-Dubois et al., 2002] And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong. [Zosuls et al., 2009]

It's at this critical point in their toddler years that children lose their status as objective observers. It is hard to merely dispassionately note what is for boys and what is for girls once you realize that you are a boy (or a girl) yourself. Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labeled "Me" versus "Not Me"), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender. [Martin, Ruble & Szkrybalo, 2002 (PDF); Martin & Halverson, 1981] Developmental psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become "gender detectives," in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe. [Martin & Ruble, 2004 (PDF)] Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers' amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference:

[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced "only boys like cold water, right Dad?" Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and "chewing" on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment. [Ruble, Lurye, & Zosuls, 2008]

In a later chapter, she hypothesizes that this drive to delineate gender categories, and to sort oneself into one of them, might stem from a broader human desire to belong to a group:

As we've seen, children are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasized through conventions of dress, appearance, language, color, segregation, and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance. Meanwhile, at about two years of age, children discover on which side of the divide they are located. It remains to be seen, in my view, whether subtle gender differences in babies' toy preferences before they know their own sex can be explained by socialization by parents, unwitting or otherwise. But once children know their own sex, in theory they can start to take socialization into their own hands.

And it's plausible to think that they will. Gaining membership to a group, any group, normally brings a money-back guarantee of favoritism. In the infamous minimal group studies conducted by Henri Tajfel and colleagues, adults are randomly assigned to trivial groups. For example, they are asked to estimate the number of dots on an array, and then categorized as either a dot overestimator or a dot underestimator. It's hard to imagine a categorization of less psychological significance. And yet membership of even such arbitrarily assigned and short-lived social categories can engender a warm glow toward fellow dot overestimators (or underestimators) that does not extend so far as those who take a different approach to dot guesstimating.

Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group. Recent work by Rebecca Bigler and colleagues has shown that this is especially the case when groups are made visually distinct, and authority figures use and label the groups. In one study, three- to five-year-old preschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they'd been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The color groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories. Children's cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label ("Good morning, Blues and Reds"). At the end of the three weeks, the experimenters canvassed each child's opinion on a number of matters. They found that being categorized as a Red or a Blue for just three weeks was enough to bias children's views. The children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children. While some forms of favoritism were common to all the children, more was seen in kids from the classroom in which teachers had made a bigger deal out of the Red versus Blue dichotomy.

Just imagine how powerfully exactly the same psychological mechanisms can drive in-group pride and out-group prejudice when it comes to gender. In the young child's world, gender is the social category that stands out above all others, right from the start. Conventions of clothing and accessories mean that gender is extremely obvious visually, and boys and girls may be regularly labeled and organized ("Now it's the boys' turn to wash their hands") by gender, especially in early education settings. And, unlike adults and older children, younger children don't tend to have other social categories like jock, doctor, Christian or artist with which to identify. The drive for group belonging may explain why young children insist on girlish or boyish behavior or dress even in the face of parental displeasure, suggest Diane Ruble and colleagues.

This theory is really interesting to me, and I particularly like the idea that it's not a particular set of gender-related traits that are innate, but rather 1) the capacity to distinguish the sexes, and to know one's own sex, and 2) the drive to find one's place in the social group in which one lives. In our large, mobile, relatively fluid but still highly gendered society, gender roles are probably going to be the first social identities that suggest themselves to a child.

I like this theory, because it explains a lot of the same things that "hard-wiring" theories of gender explain, but it's much more flexible. Which is good, considering that gender norms have changed, a lot, throughout history and today's conceptions of the Eternal Feminine or the Eternal Masculine sometimes conflict with these past notions of masculine and feminine.

(One trivial example: pink and blue. Pink used to be for boys, because it was like a softer version of red, while blue, the color of the Virgin's veil, used to be for girls. Now, of course, it's the other way round).

There is one thing that the book doesn't address, that I'd like what Fine (or any of those developmental psychologists she cites) thinks about it: given that the usual course is for children to discover what sex they are, and then become interested in learning, and correctly performing, the gender role corresponding to that sex, why do some children choose a different sex to emulate?

I can remember that, while I did not always think of myself as having gender (or even as being human) throughout my entire childhood, when I did think in those terms I always knew two things: 1) I was a girl, and 2) I was, and wanted to be, like a boy. And when I grew up, I would be a woman who was like a man. Furthermore, this wasn't just who I was in the absence of any gender self-socialization; I self-socialized in very much the way Fine describes. I just chose to learn, and conform to, the masculine role.

That sort of thing --- why you would choose to imitate people of the other sex, rather than your own --- isn't answered. And neither is the related matter of how transgenderedsexual* people form their gender identities --- they often have strong senses of themselves as sexed, gendered beings, but the sex and gender categories they feel they belong to are not the ones assigned to them at birth.

*Edited 1/23/11 to reflect Juliet's preference, stated in comments, for "transsexual" over "transgendered."

Gender on the Brain: Cordelia Fine Exposes "Neurosexism"

I was given Cordelia Fine's new book, Delusions of Gender, as a Christmas present, and I just finished reading it a couple days ago*.

It's very easy and fun to read, despite going into a lot of technical detail about the design of various studies (although she manages to write about those details in wonderfully clear, simple prose --- I *try* to do that on this blog, but I think her book is better-written, and easier to understand, than many of my researchy posts) and trying to tease out the separate strands of a very complicated knot of biology, psychology, culture that lies underneath the surface of what we understand gender to be.

She spends a lot of time discussing a topic that's also been on my mind a lot recently: fetal testosterone. She takes a much broader view of this literature than I do, because I am focusing exclusively on those studies that I consider relevant to the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, while she's addressing the whole idea that a "male brain" and a "female brain" even exist, much less that they differ as radically as most people writing popular (and academic) books on brain sex seem to think.

She peppers her book with quotations from such works as Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain (if you have time, read Mark Liberman's series of posts on Language Log debunking this book; they're hilarious and eye-opening), Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters, John Gray's however-many-there-are-now Mars and Venus books, Allan and Barbara Pease's** Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, and various books authored or co-authored by Michael Gurian of the Gurian Institute: Leadership and the Sexes, It's a Baby Girl!, and What Could He Be Thinking?

As an additional bit of context, she also quotes liberally from sources a hundred years old or more, laying out their nearly-identical visions of the masculine and feminine mind; the only difference is in what kind of pseudoscientific technobabble is used to justify the idea of separate spheres for men and women: in the old books, it is woman's physical frailty, nervous sensitivity and smaller brain that fit her for a purely domestic life, while in the new books, it is her relatively larger corpus callosum, her greater verbal fluency and emotional sensitivity, that fit her for the caring professions or for full-time wife-and-motherhood.

The book is divided into three parts, the first and last of which (called "'Half-Changed World', Half-Changed Minds" and "Recycling Gender") deal with psychological research on the effects of sexism and gender stereotyping on women's choices, behavior and performance on various tests, and with how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories, starting at very young ages.

Those parts of the book fill in the background for the middle part, "Neurosexism," which discusses research into hormonally-driven "hard-wiring" of gendered interests, behaviors and aptitudes. (It's in this part of the book that she tackles the prenatal-testosterone literature). While she does offer some critique on methodological grounds, her biggest beef is with popularizers who extrapolate universal truths from ambiguous results derived from very small, restricted samples of people.

An example:

[W]hen I decided to follow up [Louann] Brizendine's claim that the female brain is wired to empathize, it nonetheless proved to be an exercise that turned up surprise after surprise. I tracked down every neuroscience study cited by Brizendine as evidence for feminine superiority in mind reading. (No, really, no need to thank me. I do this sort of thing for pleasure). There were many such references, over just a few pages of text, creating the impression that it is no mere opinion, but scientifically established fact, that the female brain is wired for empathy in a way that the male brain is not. Yet fact-checking revealed the deployment of some rather misleading practices. For example, let's work our way through the middle of page 162 to the top of page 164 in her book. We kick off with a study of psychotherapists, which found that therapists develop a good rapport with their clients by mirroring their actions. Casually, Brizendine notes, "All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women." For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study.
...
A little later, readers are told that "brain-imaging studies show that the mere act of observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state can automatically activate similar brain patterns in the observer --- and females are especially good at this sort of mirroring." Cited as support for this feminine superiority in emotional mirroring is a 2004 neuroimaging study by cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer and colleagues, who compared brain activation when someone was either receiving a painful electric shock to the hand or was aware that a loved one was receiving the same painful electric shock to the hand. Singer and colleagues found that some brain regions were activated both by being shocked and watching someone else be shocked. If you think I'm going to be nitpicky about what any sex differences in activation in this study mean, you're wrong. Actually, the problem of interpretation is rather more basic. Only women were scanned.

Even when there aren't gross factual errors in the reporting of the research, Fine's inclusion of social- and developmental-psychology perspectives on gender --- how children learn it, how children and adults learn to change their behaviors, and their understanding of themselves, to fit into it --- makes it clear that whatever gendered differences do turn up on brain scans, they are as likely to be the effects of gender socialization as they are to be the underlying physiological cause of gender.

So, if we're not "hard-wired" by means of prenatal and pubertal hormone surges into immutable, characteristic and complementary "male" and "female" selves, what are we? Are we just blank slates, onto which society can write whatever it likes? Is there no such thing as human nature at all?

That's the alternative vision most commonly invoked in these debates: if you don't accept the idea that gender is hard-wired, you must be an environmental determinist who doesn't believe people are born with anything at all in their heads.

Luckily for us, this isn't a binary, and we don't have to choose between nature and nurture.

Here's Fine again, this time from the Epilogue of her book:

The fluidity of the self and the mind is impressive and is in continual cahoots with the environment. When social psychologists discover, for example, that mere words (like competition), everyday objects (like briefcases and boardroom tables), people, or even scenery can trigger particular motives in us, or that similar role models can seep into our most private ambitions, it makes sense to start questioning the direction of causality between gender difference and gender inequality. We are justified in wondering whether, as gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, "gender difference is a product of gender inequality, and not the other way around."

Nor is gender inequality just a part of our minds --- it is also an inextricable part of our biology. We tend to think of the chain of command passing from genes, to hormones, to brains, to environment. (As biologist Robert Sapolsky describes this common misconception, "DNA is the commander, the epicenter from which biology emanates. Nobody tells a gene what to do; it's always the other way around.") Yet most developmental scientists will tell you that one-way arrows of causality are just so last century. The circuits of the brain are quite literally a product of your physical, social, and cultural environment, as well as your behavior and thoughts. What we experience and do creates neural activity that can alter the brain, either directly or through changes in gene expression. This neuroplasticity means that, as [neuropsychologist Anelis] Kaiser puts it, the social phenomenon of gender "comes into the brain" and "becomes part of our cerebral biology."

As for hormones that act on the brain, if you cuddle a baby, get a promotion, see billboard after billboard of near-naked women, or hear a gender stereotype that places one sex at a higher status than the other, don't expect your hormonal state to remain impervious. It won't. "Even how we behave or what we think about can affect the levels of our sex hormones," point out Gene Worship authors Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers. This continuous interplay between the biological and the social means that, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has put it, "components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being."

And so, when researchers look for sex differences in the brain or the mind, they are hunting a moving target. Both are in continuous interaction with the social context. Some researchers have even started to investigate how the brain, or hormones, respond differently while doing stereotyped tasks, depending on whether gender stereotypes are made salient. And gender differences in the mind can shift from moment to moment: for example, as stereotype threat is created or dispersed, or self-identity changes. But also, our actions and attitudes change the very cultural patterns that interact with the minds of others to coproduce their actions and attitudes that, in turn, become part of the cultural milieu: in short, "culture and psyche make each other up." When a woman persists with a high-level math course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotions, values, interests, hormones, and brains --- because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.
...
Our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable, and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.

This closing statement encapsulates what I like so much about this book; it brings feminism, sociology, and a more accurate, more nuanced understanding of human biology together to give us a broader view of what gender is --- or at least how many different things, over a person's whole lifetime, go into creating gender.

For some other reviews of this book, see Neuroskeptic*** and Echidne of the Snakes (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

*I was also given Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, which covers similar ground --- both books poke and prod at the conventional wisdom that sex hormones shape "male" and "female" brains before birth, and that masculine and feminine behaviors, interests and life paths are the inevitable outcomes of these two different types of brain. I haven't finished reading Brain Storm yet, but I will probably also review it here when I do.

**Another of their books, not cited in Fine's book, refers in its title to a particularly stubborn gender stereotype that drives many feminists --- particularly sex-positive feminists --- absolutely batty: Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love. As if no woman has ever been horny, or no man ever wanted to be loved!

***Who is cited as a source twice, and quoted once, in this book!