Refuting the Mars/Venus B.S. with One Cool Comic

This is funny in a mocking and condescending kind of way, which must be why I liked it.

Next Time Someone Says Women Live On A Different Planet, Show Them This.

28th August 2014

http://www.robot-hugs.com/interpretation/

Contesting essentialist theories of patriarchal relations: evolutionary psychology and the denial of history

Nice article - definitely worth your time to read. Warning - it is quite long.

Contesting essentialist theories of patriarchal relations: evolutionary psychology and the denial of history

Journal of Men's Studies, The, Fall, 2010 by Jesse Crane-Seeber, Betsy Crane

Why do empowered females often choose to date, have sex with, and marry jerks, males whose performance of traditional masculinity brings them positive attention from other powerful males, but who often treat females and 'weaker' males poorly? Despite research revealing that women do like dating nice men (Urbaniak & Kilmann, 2003), practitioners of evolutionary psychology have strongly argued for the genetic and evolutionary basis for dominant-male attractiveness to females (Delton, Robertson, & Kenrick, 2006; Ellis & Symons, 1990). One early sociobiologist summarizes the conclusions of evolutionary theory as, "Nice guys finish last" (Ghiselin, 1974). As part of a 15-year-long, mother-son dialogue on this question, we examined the literature on gender from the earliest human societies until the dawn of patriarchy to understand why women are desired because of how their bodies look while men are valued for their social status, power, and aggressiveness, and why women choose such men.

This essay revisits myths about the origin of patriarchy, arguing that they play a role in the social-historical constructions of sexuality and relationships that they ostensibly explain. We argue that legitimating myths are part and parcel of the reproduction of patriarchal relationship patterns, characterized by male domination accepted by males and females, repression of the feminine and homosexuality, as well as the disciplining of masculinity. As McCaughey (2008) recently argued, a "caveman mystique" based on evolutionary theory permeates popular culture, granting privileged epistemic status to "scientific" discourse such that men experience their sexuality as "acultural, primal" (p. 3). Highlighting the ways that humans produce identities through performative interaction, we offer an alternative narrative that can produce more dynamic ways of relating. Our perspective entails the rejection of an essential self that precedes action, we instead interpret identity as something we do through habit and repetition, producing our sense of ourselves in recognizable way (Butler, 1988).

Central to our discussion is the concept of hegemonic masculinity, the "configuration of gender practice, which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of the patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 77). Historical and evolutionary explanations of male dominance act to legitimate these disciplinary practices that shape gendered expectations of heteronormative identities and relationships. In our analysis, patriarchy shifts from being something men do to women and becomes a shared logic that we all respond to. Considering what gender relations could look like outside of a male-supremacist model of social power, we offer a historically contingent view of how patriarchal relations developed.

Critically important stories of our how ancestors once lived have long been minimized or erased. Traces of other ways of relating are easily trivialized, like indigenous communities today that struggle to protect cooperative economies from governmental and corporate ambitions. The prevailing story told to children at home and at school is that men have always been dominant, implying that current social relations are the result of survival of the fittest. Not surprisingly, this his-story, whether based on ancient religious texts or Victorian interpretations of archaeological findings, was crafted by elite male authors raised in cultural systems that naturalized an emotionally distant approach to knowledge and society (Seidler, 1994). History is recorded from the perspective of the conquerors and their decedents, for nearly 10,000 years, the power to narrate history has been exercised by those who identify with and legitimate male-supremacy.

It is not true however, that all males have been winners in these historical struggles. While boys and men benefit to some extent from patriarchal relations, they are also damaged by the disciplining practices needed to reproduce misogynist relations. By analogy, racism and colonialism were also said to "benefit" dominant groups. Yet activists like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others have pointed to the self-destruction involved in dominating others (Memmi, 1991; Nandy, 1984). One day the notion that men "benefit" from silencing and sexually victimizing women may seem as ethically preposterous as a Christian "benefitting" from slaughtering pagans (Todorov, 1984).

Many theorists of patriarchy and its history have modeled their analyses on class warfare: men as a class were seen to hurt women as a class (Engels, 1884). We propose that relational constructivist analysis make more sense when thinking about gender and sexual identity performance. This allows our analysis of male dominance to highlight ongoing disciplinary practices that shape men's and boy's expectations of themselves and each other, for example, homophobic bullying and violence. Viewing society not as a clash of pre-existing groups, but as the playing out of family, educational, and professional relations demonstrates how inequalities are continuously sustained (see Tilly's [1998] treatment of poverty). Relational analysis of patriarchy reveals that hegemonic masculinity is not the only way to be male (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Instead of men vs. women, we see practices that turn sweet boys into arrogant, confused, and isolated young men, a dangerously under-theorized component of bullying and school shootings. In short, analytically transforming patriarchy from a "thing" into a set of interlocking practices shows that all sorts of men are harmed by dominating males who enact traditional roles (Heasley, 2005).

To clear intellectual space for this account of patriarchal gender relations, we first offer a critique of evolutionary psychology. Responding to those who naturalize gender identities, we highlight politically enabling insights of feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories of identity production. The second section utilizes insights from feminist archeology to dispute the inevitability of gender-based dominance, instead offering a narrative of how sex differences were given powerful ideological weight, with ongoing consequences.

ARE MEN FROM MARS?

Contrary to the folk wisdom embodied by the bestselling book series, (1) we maintain that men and women are not from separate planets. Human communities have always consisted of male, female, and trans members living together, right here, on earth. Nonetheless, many stories about the origins of dominating male-female relations obscure our shared origins.

Religious authorities have provided ideological and cosmological justifications for hierarchical societies by telling stories about how kings, presidents, the divine father in heaven, and husbands all share a fatherly duty to protect (and control) those under their authority. These social arrangements are justified by a history that begins with female subservience ordained by a male god. A husband's authority over his wife and children, starting with Adam in the garden, becomes a template for ecclesiastical and royal powers. One evangelical Christian website "dedicated to the restoration of Christian family culture" sums up this logic: "A culture characterized by biblical patriarchy is one in which godly men lead, provide for, and protect their families and communities with the aims of implementing the rule of the Lord Jesus in every area of life and of raising up the foundation of many godly generations." (2) Reformers in each faith tradition have contested the patriarchal bent of the Abrahamic religions. Yet creation stories, as well as inherited traditions and laws, continue to privilege male social power and control of women's sexuality. These messages resonate from ancient scriptures through religious institutions, media outlets, and social movements.

In response to divinely legitimated patriarchal origin-stories, feminist theory has long followed Simone de Beauvoir's (1989) contention that "Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself' (p. 725). This relational ontology of gender has long undergirded feminist critiques of both religious and secular ideologies, and has been extended by queer and poststructural theorists. Though critics of constructivist ontologies deride postmodern studies of social meaning, adopting a relational critique does not entail intellectual idealism that denies materiality; it only complicates the relationship between matter and power. Butler (1993) argued that performativity entails "a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter" (p. 9). What these critiques indicate are the historically shifting and unpredictable ways that bodies are made to mean particular things, within a given way of interpreting the world (Foucault, 1990). Bodies only come to "mean" what they do through ideological, scientific, and other operations, which are embedded in human history and political contestations. It is not that there is no real world; (3) rather, there is no place outside of the world from which to view it (as the discipline of Science Studies has so aptly demonstrated, see Haraway, 1989; Latour, 1999, 2008).

In defending essentialist notions of gender, religious traditions have allies in evolutionary theory. While the feminist critique of gender as innate has developed over decades, many still argue that variance between males and females in mate selection and physical aggressivity means that distinct sexual logics are genetically hardwired (Buss, 1989; Buss & Shackelford, 1997; Ellis, 1992; Sadalla, Kenrick, & Vershure, 1987). Biological reductionists claim that females, being physically weaker, need powerful males to care for them and their children. Both religious and genetic explanations erase the question of how gendered relations came about and are sustained, instead positing them as permanent.

Evolutionary psychology has been an ardent defender of gender roles as innate, insisting that males and females have differentiated mating strategies (Townsend, 1998). Evolutionary forces impel men to "spread their seeds" (through rape, if necessary) and women must secure powerful mates to ensure the survival of their children. This is inferred, "Because women more than men invest physiologically in offspring" and is the reason that "men, relative to women, are predicted to have a stronger preference for younger mates" (Delton et al., 2006, p. 268). One evolutionary explanation of male spousal abuse asserts: "insofar as males are specialized for aggressive competition and male fitness is largely determined by the frequency and exclusivity of mating access, it is hardly surprising that males commonly attempt to exert aggressive control of females" (Wilson & Daly, 1993, p. 275). Another argues that "from the woman's perspective rape can best be understood by consideration of the negative influences of the behavior on female fitness for future reproduction" (Thornhill & Thornhill, 1991, pp. 245-246).

Read on.

Tags: gender, gender differences, history, evolution, essentialism, Contesting essentialist theories of patriarchal relations, evolutionary psychology, denial of history, Journal of Men's Studies, Fall, 2010, Jesse Crane-Seeber, Betsy Crane, religion, men, women, patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity

New York Times - Male Studies vs. Men's Studies

Male Studies is a recently proposed field (it's not really a field yet) that seeks to displace Men's Studies - they argue that men's studies emerged from feminist studies and is therefore biased in favor of women (because men's studies tends to support feminism) and is therefore anti-men.

From what I have read, male studies tends to favor an essentialist view of masculinity (men are defined by their XY chromosomes and their genitals) while men's studies tend to favor a social constructionist view of masculinity (men are partly defined by biology, but even more so by the cultural and social definitions - the constructions - of what constitutes masculinity, often in opposition to femininity). Of course, this is a gross generalization, although it seems to be the overall sense of the division.

Males studies advocates tend to be anti-feminist, sometimes mildly so and other times vehemently so - men's studies tends to support the basic ideas of feminism (equality for the sexes/genders) while also identifying places where their policies are anti-male.

I'm sure if I am wrong about these generalizations, someone form the males studies camp will correct me. With that introduction, here is an article on the turf war between the upstarts and the establishment from today's New York Times.

The Study of Man (or Males)

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: January 7, 2011

IF you are a college graduate of a certain age, you probably remember that there used to be an all-purpose discipline that studied men and their behavior. It was called history. There was also a subject, called literature, that studied what men wrote. And art examined the pictures men painted.

Frustration with the neglect of women’s accomplishments — call it phallocentrism if you like — was what led to women’s studies, which has lately morphed into gender studies on some campuses. Women’s studies also gave rise to something called men’s studies, which is essentially pro-feminist. You can’t exactly major in men’s studies, but roughly 100 universities offer courses that fall under the umbrella, and the field has produced influential thinkers like Michael Kimmel, who is a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Manhood in America: A Cultural History.”

The academic turf devoted to sex and gender these days is so crowded, in fact, that the prospect of a newcomer, a discipline called male studies, has generated a minor controversy.

Male studies, largely the brainchild of Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist, doesn’t actually exist anywhere yet. Last spring, there was a scholarly symposium at Wagner College on Staten Island, intended to raise the movement’s profile and attract funds for a department with a tenured chair on some campus. A number of prominent scholars attended, including Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers, who invented the term “male bonding,” and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill University, who specializes in the study of misandry, the flip side of misogyny. Both are on the advisory board of the Foundation for Male Studies, which Dr. Stephens founded last year.

There will be a second conference in April at the New York Academy of Medicine — right on the heels, as it happens, of the annual conference of the American Men’s Studies Association — and the two groups have already begun jousting.

Robert Heasley, a sociology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and president of the association, has accused the new movement of “inventing something that I think already exists.” And at the Wagner College conference, Rocco Capraro, a history professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, said much the same thing. Men’s studies had been around for 30 years, he pointed out, and was “an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with men’s identity and experience in the present, over time, across space.”

His definition was sufficiently vague, in other words, that it seemed to cover just about everything male-related, and he suggested that the differences between men’s studies and male studies were mostly ones of emphasis.

Actually, the differences are a good deal deeper than that. One argument that male studies advocates make is that men’s studies has essentially been co-opted. According to Professor Tiger, the trouble with men’s studies is that it’s “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies.”

There is also a political dimension to the split. “I’d like to get away from this terminology but it’s true,” Professor Heasley said in a recent interview. “It’s left wing/right wing.”

But ultimately the differences have to do with radically different notions of what it means to be a man in the first place.

The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable. To Professor Kimmel, we live in a world that is increasingly gender-neutral and gender integrated and that this is a good thing for men and women both. “That ship has sailed — it’s a done deal,” he said recently, dismissing the idea that men and women are as different as Martians and Venutians.

The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined. Men think and act differently from how women think and act because that’s how evolution shaped them. In the most extreme formulations of essentialism, men are basically still Neanderthals: violent, clannish, sexually voracious and in need of female domestication.

Professor Tiger, who has a somewhat more benign view of men than that, nevertheless worries that the changes that have allowed women to control their own reproductive process have unnaturally and disastrously altered the balance of power between the sexes.

But the biology vs. culture argument has been going on for years, and the male studies movement is less an expansion of that debate than a response to a specific crisis, the nature of which both sides agree on: academically at least, young men are in trouble.

Starting in grammar school, they lag behind girls by most observable measures, and the gap widens through high school and college. If males go to college at all, that is. College enrollment tilts at almost 60-40 in favor of women, and once enrolled, women are more likely than men to do well and to graduate.

There are a lot of explanations for why this is so. A popular theory, set forth in books like “The Trouble With Boys,” by Peg Tyre, and “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Hurting Our Young Men,” by Christina Hoff Sommers, is that grammar school classrooms have become excessively feminized, impatient with boys’ naturally boisterous behavior and short attention spans and inattentive to the way in which boys learn differently from girls. (Critics who went to school in the ’50s, when seat-squirming, loud-talking and other boyish hijinks were even less tolerated, are told that back then education didn’t matter so much and that a boy who didn’t do well in school had more and better employment options than such a student does today.)

Professor Tiger believes that by the time girls get to college, there is a Darwinian component to the achievement gap: women are aware of the divorce rate and the likelihood that they may raise children without ever marrying in the first place. “They’re studying for two,” he explained. “Guys just don’t have that sense, that inwit. That’s biology at its most essential.”

And then there are the various cultural arguments: that at least by some standards of masculinity, learning — reading and writing especially — is “uncool,” and that college campuses have become inhospitable to men, who now suffer from fragile self-regard. People associated with the male studies movement frequently bring up the date rape seminar now obligatory on most campuses. On their very first day at college, awkward young men are gathered into a room with their female counterparts and, the argument goes, made to feel like sexual predators.

Miles Groth, who teaches psychology at Wagner College and was host of the conference there last spring, says that what he hears all the time from male undergraduates on his campus is “I just don’t feel welcome here.” Professor Groth’s “Engaging College Men,” published last year by Men’s Studies Press, discusses programs at 14 campuses directed at improving the lot of men, and he has himself established a men’s center at Wagner, a small, private liberal arts school where only 36 percent of the students are men and a quarter of them are recruited athletes on scholarship.

The 15 or so members, many of them philosophy majors, meet once a week to share their thoughts in an atmosphere that is a “safe haven” for creating male intimacy, according to Michael Martin, a freshman football player. “I think of it as a fraternity in the truest sense,” he explained. “I think women love that we do this. Or if they don’t, they haven’t had it accurately explained to them.”

Kyle Glover, a senior and leader of the group, had this to say: “Guys are struggling. I’ve heard this argument that now is the girls’ time to get back but I don’t accept that.” He went on: “We talk a lot about what makes us tick as males. How did we get here? What’s your relationship with your dad like? Your mom? What do you think women want from you? What do you think you want from them?”

Professor Groth’s courses examine what it means to be a man from the points of view of psychology, anthropology, literature and even movies. “Why the silence?” he said between classes one day. “Why hasn’t our generation been more vocal about what’s happening to our young men?” And then he partly answered his own question: “It’s the continuing myth of male power. If I as a man raise these issues I’m just raising that old specter of male power because I want to keep women under control.”

Professor Groth, Professor Tiger and Dr. Stephens all seem at great pains not to say anything critical about feminism or women’s studies. “I don’t think male studies has emerged from acrimony,” Professor Tiger insisted. And yet the male studies movement appears to be animated at least in part by a sense that feminism has gone too far on campus and the women’s studies departments are too powerful. Professor Tiger and Dr. Stephens like to recite by the sheaf statistics showing how much more resources are being poured into the study of women and their problems than into men and their plight.

Lurking around the edges of the male studies movement, moreover, in Web sites like Paul Elam’s A Voice for Men, is a certain amount of anti-feminist hostility, if not outright misogyny. There used to be a link on the Web site for the Foundation for Male Studies to an interminable screed by someone called the Futurist, who was convinced the overvaluing of women and undervaluing of men was about to create a civilizational cataclysm. The piece began more or less rationally, but soon flared with gas jets of anger and worries about “rage-filled ‘feminists’ who would gladly send innocent men to concentration camps if they could.”

This intemperateness has recently caused Professor Groth to distance himself a little from the foundation, though Dr. Stephens believes that the rift is less philosophical than methodological, with Professor Groth concerned with setting up men’s centers and Dr. Stephens with establishing an academic department devoted to men.

Some of Dr. Stephens’s critics like to account for his male studies enthusiasm by pointing out that he went through a bad marital breakup, something he readily admits. “I was a happy psychiatrist until 1994, when I decided to get divorced,” he said, sitting in his windowless, ground-level office on the Upper East Side. “The kids got alienated and I got bankrupted — part of the gender-skewed system.” What got him thinking about what eventually became male studies, he went on to say, was his discovery that divorce law barely acknowledged paternal instinct and a sense, growing out of his psychiatric practice, that no one was paying attention to the special needs of men.

Dr. Stephens is an old-fashioned-seeming man, with a grandfatherly mustache and a fondness for bow ties, but he is convinced that, far from being a throwback, he is in the forefront of something: “I don’t have a goal. I have a vision. I sign all of my correspondence, ‘Looking forward.’ I’m looking forward to some really new approaches to understanding ourselves.”

ONE of Professor Groth’s colleagues at Wagner, Jean Halley, who teaches sociology and gender studies, describes him as a popular teacher whose courses on gender and masculinity attract a big enrollment. But she complains about the essentialism of male studies and says that Professor Groth “seems to like to position himself in a contentious way.”

Professor Groth, who is unmarried and has no children, is a boyish 63. He typically wears a coat and tie but keeps his shirttail carefully untucked. What motivates him, he says, is concern over the way college-age men seem to be foundering and a concern that if nothing is done, they may soon find themselves both unemployable and unmarriageable.

“It’s not O.K. these days to talk about the problems of boys and young men without seeming to be anti-girl,” he said. “There aren’t enough courses and enough people willing to come out of the woodwork and take the flak. A lot of people are hoping it will go away, but I’m not going away. I’m tenured.”

He added that he sometimes wondered if the name “male studies” itself was a problem and said, “I like ‘andrology,’ except that’s the study of prostates.”

Last semester, Professor Groth taught a course on the psychology of men; of 30 students, all but five were women. “I asked everyone, ‘Why are you taking this course?’ ” he recalled. “The boys didn’t say anything. The girls all said, ‘We want to understand the guys better.’ ”

Charles McGrath is a writer at large for The Times.

Tags: men, men's studies, male studies, constructionism, essentialism, The Study of Man (or Males), Charles McGrath, New York Times, feminism, gender studies, women's studies, Michael Kimmel, Edward M. Stephens, Lionel Tiger, Paul Nathanson, Robert Heasley, Rocco Capraro, masculinity

Neurosexism in Brain Research - Promoting Sex Differences

As anyone who reads this blog will have guessed by now, I believe that gender identity is at least as much a social construct as it is a biologically determined factor. I am a social constructionist.

However, there are many who disagree with that perspective - essentialists - including the authors of this paper on how sex differences and gender identity are based almost entirely on the exposure of the fetus to testosterone in utero.

For a limited time (until October 15), this paper can be downloaded for free with registration (follow the link).

Sex Differences in the Brain, Behavior, and Neuropsychiatric Disorders

Ai-Min Bao: Department of Neurobiology, Institute of Neuroscience, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China, baoaimin@zju.edu.cn

Dick F. Swaab: Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract

Sex differences in the brain are reflected in behavior and in the risk for neuropsychiatric disorders. The fetal brain develops in the male direction due to a direct effect of testosterone on the developing neurons, or in the female direction due to the absence of such a testosterone surge. Because sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place earlier in intrauterine life than sexual differentiation of the brain, these two processes can be influenced independently of each other. Gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender), sexual orientation (heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality), pedophilia, sex differences in cognition, and the risks for neuropsychiatric disorders are programmed into our brains during early development. There is no proof that postnatal social environment has any crucial effect on gender identity or sexual orientation. Structural and functional sex differences in brain areas, together with changes in sex hormone levels and their receptors in development and adulthood, are closely related to sex differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric disorders. Knowing that such a relationship exists may help bring about sex-specific therapeutic strategies.

Ultimo167 did a good dissection of this article at his blog, so I will leave that to him. Funny how when I mentioned his article here I was lamenting my lack of access to these articles - then I got the link to this, which will only be useful until October 15.

So rather than point out the problems with with paper, I want to present a more well-researched and convincing perspective, from the neuroscientist Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference.

Here is column she wrote in 2007 that debunks some other misconceptions about the differences in brains between men and women - this time about emotions.

Boys set adrift by dud science
July 25, 2007 12:11am AEST

The gulf between the sexes may be somewhat overstated, writes Cordelia Fine

IT'S a hard time to be a man. Everywhere - in newspapers, magazines and bestselling books - are descriptions of the neurological inadequacies that supposedly explain why boys and men are such emotional dunces.

In his highly influential book Why Gender Matters, for example, Leonard Sax tells parents and teachers of an extraordinary design flaw in the male brain.

In young boys and girls, says Sax, emotion is processed in the primitive, basic parts of the brain. As girls approach adolescence, the cerebral cortex - the talking, reflective, reasoning parts of the brain - also becomes involved, allowing older girls and women to understand and talk about their feelings. But in boys, this useful link between emotion and distinctly human capacities is never properly forged. Male emotion remains mute and incomprehensible in the deep, dark parts of the brain.

As Sax puts it: "In boys, as in men, the part of the brain where emotions happen is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing and speech happens. Asking a teenage boy to talk about how he feels (is to ask) him to make connections between two parts of his brain that don't normally communicate."

Immediately, we think of the prehistoric caveman fuming inarticulately in his cave. No wonder he reaches for his club, especially if his cavewoman is a little too outspoken in her complaints. Louann Brizendine, author of the bestselling The Female Brain, warns that "(m)en's brain circuits and bodies may readily revert to a physical expression of anger fuelled by the frustration of not being able to match women's words".

Do the neural circuits of males really condemn them to such pitiful emotional illiteracy? I live with no Shakespeare or Milton, it's true, but I have noticed an absence of neither alacrity nor eloquence in my husband when it comes to expressing his feelings about my more irritating habits. I had never regarded my husband's often moving and intense emotional self-insights as any more than the normal output of a functioning adult human. Yet perhaps, I began to wonder, they deserved more wholehearted praise: a clasping of hands and thrilled cry of, "Well done! You tunnelled through to the communication centre!"

I like to give credit where it is due. And so I read the neuroscientific research on which this popular claim about the male brain is based. Immediately, I plunged into the strange world of pseudo-science. Journal articles that on a reference list seem to offer impressive support for bold claims, on closer inspection turn out to offer findings that are tangential, ambiguous or simply irrelevant.

Many of these articles - and the claims about sex differences that they have inspired - come under scrutiny in the online forum Language Log. Here, University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman meticulously exposes with weary humour the gaping chasms between scientific fact and popular interpretation.

He concludes that many writers who use neuroscience to "explain" boys' needs present research in a way that is "shockingly careless, tendentious and even dishonest. Their over-interpretation and misinterpretation of scientific research is so extreme that it becomes a form of fabrication."

Liberman patiently corrects Brizendine's many false assertions about males' inferior capacity for communication - a chore that, as he puts it, "is starting to make me feel like the circus clown that follows the elephant around the ring with a shovel".

But with little of this critical analysis reaching the popular press, the brain-based myth of incoherent male emotion persists and is used to bolster gender stereotypes. Recently, for example, well-known Australian child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg claimed emotion and language parts of the brain that are one and the same in girls are completely different in boys.

According to Carr-Gregg, this "fact" about boy and girl brain structure "explains so much": including, apparently, why girls like pink and cuddle trucks, and boys rip the heads off Barbies.

As it happens, Barbie is not necessarily safe in the hands of a girl either. Agnes Nairn of the University of Bath found that girls are frequently violent towards their Barbies (the forms of abuse include pulling out hair, microwaving and burning, as well as decapitation). But even setting aside neurological and psychological laxities, the idea that the location of emotion and language processing in the brain can explain girls' colour preferences or boys' aversion to Barbie dolls simply makes no sense.

Unfortunately, we are unlikely to even notice. According to Yale psychologist Deena Skolnick Weisberg and her colleagues, neuroscientific explanations enjoy a "seductive allure". In an article to be published in The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Skolnick Weisberg shows how our normally accurate radar for nonsensical psychological explanations lets us down badly as soon as impressive-sounding neuroscientific terms creep into the picture.

When she added neuroscience to illogically circular explanations, people's ratings of how satisfied they were with the explanations tipped from negative to positive. In fact, even students on an introductory course in cognitive neuroscience were dazzled by neuroscience in just the same way.

Saddest of all for boys and men, these crowd-pleasing neuroscientific explanations can also subtly change the way we see our own nature. Biological, rather than socio-cultural, explanations of gender differences leave us more inclined to agree with stereotypes and to regard human nature as immutable, research has shown.

This "boys will be boys" attitude may result in us doing boys and men a great disservice.

Psychologists, journalists and science communicators should be wary of swallowing and regurgitating unexamined titbits about male neurological limitations. After all, what will happen if we let boys and men off the emotional hook in the classroom and at home because we think their brains simply aren't up to it? We run the risk of precipitating the fulfilment of that false prophecy.

Cordelia Fine is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at theAustralian National University and the University of Melbourne, and the author of A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.

Tags: sex difference, gender identity, sexual orientation, stress, depression, testosterone, psychology, gender differences, sex differences, essentialism, social constructionism, fetal brain, Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, Minds, Society, Neurosexism, create Difference