1 | 1 | | Biology has frequently been invoked to sanction social inequalities, not least those |
| 2 | | associated with sex. A century ago, measures of head size and speculations about |
| 3 | | physiology were used to make the case that women were intellectually incapable of |
| 4 | | higher learning and physically unable to tolerate the strain of it. While these fallacies |
| 5 | | have long since been discredited, the invocations they represent remain alive, finding |
| 6 | | expression nowadays in the language of psychology, split-brain theory, endocrinology, |
| 7 | | genetics and sociobiology. Various scientists would have it that the structure of women's |
| 8 | | brains renders them, on average, less adept than men at spatial relations and |
| 9 | | mathematics; that they are victimized by their hormones into moodiness, passivity and |
| 10 | | volatility under stress; and that they have been fated by evolution to play social roles |
| 11 | | subordinate to those of men. |
2 | 12 | | In Myths of Gender, an instructive and provocative book, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a |
| 13 | | developmental geneticist at Brown University, scrutinizes these claims and concludes |
| 14 | | that most of them are just so many scientifically baseless manifestations of the status quo. |
| 15 | | They owe their origins in the main to unconscious bias, she holds, for in the socially |
| 16 | | charged area of sex differences 'it is inherently impossible for any individual to do |
| 17 | | unbiased research'. |
3 | 18 | | A debatable assertion, one would think, but in conformity with it Mrs |
| 19 | | Fausto-Sterling feels duty-bound to declare her own biases - which are those of a |
| 20 | | feminist - and to describe her book as unavoidably 'a scientific statement and a political |
| 21 | | statement'. Must we then expect from her merely a set of mirror-image myths? Not at all, |
| 22 | | she contends, because by shining a feminist light into the 'unlit corners of other people's |
| 23 | | research' she is able to see what is otherwise obscured. As a matter of fact, a good deal in |
| 24 | | this book renders her contention persuasive. However, one must add that her treatment |
| 25 | | also depends heavily on her sharp and knowledgeable scientific intelligence, and that in |
| 26 | | places her feminist searchlight produces more glare than illumination. |
4 | 27 | | Mrs Fausto-Sterling is particularly concerned with the reliability of observations |
| 28 | | used to support the idea that some psychological and behavioral characteristics are |
| 29 | | gender-specific and, more important, with whether those characteristics can be attributed |
| 30 | | to biological origins. According to her review of the evidence, sex differences on tests of |
| 31 | | spatial visualizing skills are small and do not demand explanation by a theory linking |
| 32 | | them to the chromosomes that determine sex - which is just bad genetics - or a highly |
| 33 | | speculative theory of sex differences in the specialization between the brain's right and |
| 34 | | left hemispheres. Spatial visualization may be an acquired skill, one traditionally fostered |
| 35 | | among boys, who play with blocks and take mechanical drawing courses, and |
| 36 | | traditionally not encouraged among girls. |
5 | 37 | | Mrs Fausto-Sterling's critique of the notion that sex-related hormones make for |
| 38 | | social destiny takes up a major portion of this book. She demonstrates that the ways |
| 39 | | hormones work are extremely complicated and that, by extension, facile hormonal |
| 40 | | explanations of sexual differences in temperament and behavior are simplistic and |
| 41 | | probably wrong. She finds no reason to believe the contention that testosterone programs |
| 42 | | males for aggressiveness or the commonplace that women's hormones condemn them |
| 43 | | once a month during their fertile years to wild mood swings and a physical debilitation |
| 44 | | bordering on incapacity. |
6 | 45 | | Mrs Fausto-Sterling has provided an excellent manual of the issues that must be |
| 46 | | considered in any scientific treatment of human behavior, whether sexually specific or |
| 47 | | not. Myths of Gender is not - and does not pretend to be - the last word on human sex |
| 48 | | differences. It does demonstrate the powerful merits of the precept that virtually no |
| 49 | | human social behavior can be attributed to any single biological cause and that, as Mrs |
| 50 | | Fausto-Sterling puts it, 'an individual's capacities emerge from a web of interactions |
| 51 | | between the biological being and the social environment'. |
| | | |
| | | Daniel J. Kevies in The New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1985 |