Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation by Fred Magdoff & Chris Williams

Author:Fred Magdoff & Chris Williams [Magdoff, Fred & Williams, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Political Ideologies, Communism, Post-Communism, Socialism, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781583676318
Google: UGffCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1583676295
Goodreads: 35941443
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-05-28T23:00:00+00:00

WOMEN AND BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

The same can be said for the systemic inequalities experienced by women. Since its publication in 1992, John Gray’s best-selling book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. The book portrays psychological differences between the sexes as being so extreme, they appear to originate from vastly different sources, which then manifest in behaviors that are incomprehensible to the other gender. Examples of supposedly fundamental psychological differences Gray gives include how when stressed, men retreat “to their cave” and women “need to talk.”

In her bestselling 2006 book, The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist and founder of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic in San Francisco, reports that many differences between male and female behavior can be attributed to hormones: “What we’ve found is that the female brain is so deeply affected by hormones that their influence can be said to create a woman’s reality. They can shape a woman’s values and desires, and tell her, day to day, what’s important.”11

Brizendine conducts a series of case studies reflecting nearly every stereotype about men and women and said she was surprised to discover just how affected women’s behavior was by the presence or absence of certain hormones. She argues that not understanding the effects of hormonal cycles is itself dangerous because women end up blaming themselves. She notes, crucially, that 80 percent of women are only mildly affected by hormone fluctuations, and that “a hormone alone does not cause a behavior. Hormones merely raise the likelihood that under certain circumstances a behavior will occur.”12

There have been other studies like Brizendine’s that propose that the divergent ways that men and women interact with the world are a matter of differences in brain chemistry. For example, in 2013, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania mapped the neural connections in the brains of hundreds of males and females aged eight to twenty-two. A reporter describing the research suggested that the scientists found that “stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.”13

The study’s chief researcher, Ragini Verma, commented to the Guardian’s science correspondent that the team’s results “surprisingly” validated gender stereotypes. Yet, despite all the much-hyped claims of differences in cognition assigned to gender, they are repeatedly found to be trivial and socially constructed such that “our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable.”14

Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University, commenting on the University of Pennsylvania study, noted that the authors act “as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain—they even provide a diagram—but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain.”15

Bringing together ideas about the construction of race and gender and the social suppositions they rest on, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling argues,

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