Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Sex trafficking Prostitutie PornografieIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Angela SAINI"We believe that what science offers us is a story free from prejudice. It is the story of us, starting from the very dawn of evolution. Yet when it comes to women, so much of this story is wrong."(2)
"If you were the geek growing up, you’ll recognize how lonely it can be. If you were the female geek, you’ll know it’s far lonelier. By the time I reached my final years of school, I was the only girl in my chemistry class of eight students. I was the only girl in my mathematics class of about a dozen. And when I decided to study engineering at university, I found myself the only woman in a class of nine."(3)
[Schokkend. Schokkender is dat er op dat punt nog maar bitter weinig is veranderd. En nog schokkender is dat er nog steeds mensen zijn - Larence Summers lezing van 2005 komt weer langs - die denken dat dat biologisch gedetermineerd is.]
"The puzzle of why there are so few women in the sciences is crucial to understanding why, not because it tells us something about what women are capable of but because it explains why science has failed to rid us of the gender stereotypes and dangerous myths we’ve been laboring under for centuries.
Women are so grossly underrepresented in modern science because, for most of history, they were treated as intellectual inferiors and deliberately excluded from it. It should come as no surprise, then, that this same scientific establishment has also painted a distorted picture of the female sex."(8)
"Housework and motherhood aren’t the only things affecting gender balance. There’s outright sexism, too."(12)
"Another problem in parts of the sciences, the extent of which is only now being laid bare, is sexual harassment."(14)
"So here, in all the statistics on housework, pregnancy, child care, gender bias, and harassment, we have some explanations for why so few women are at the top in science and engineering. Rather than falling into Lawrence Summers’s tantalizing trap of assuming the world looks this way because it’s the natural order of things, take a step back. Imbalance in the sciences is at least partly because women face a web of pressures throughout their lives, which men often don’t face."(15)
"And in some branches of science, such as evolutionary psychology, theories can be little more than thin scraps of unreliable evidence strung into a narrative.
If studies seem sexist, occasionally it’s because they are. But then, it’s impossible not to expect that the very bias that kept women out of science for centuries might have affected the very blood and bones of their work — that it might have prejudiced science’s objectivity." [mijn nadruk] (24)
"For everyone who has faced the same situation, the same angry confrontation with a person who tells you that women are inferior to men, the same desperate attempt to not lose control but have at hand some real facts and a history to explain them, here they are. In this book I travel through the life stages of a woman, from birth through working life to menopause, to interrogate what science really tells us and the controversies around what remains uncertain."(28)
Het bekende biologische determinisme op dat punt - zogenaamd gebaseerd op wetenschap - begint al bij Darwin.
"Darwin is telling Kennard that women aren’t just intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes. It’s a rejection of everything Kennard and the women’s movement at the time were fighting for."(33)
Maar hij denkt er niet alleen zo over in zijn persoonlijke brieven.
"In The Descent of Man he argues that males gained the advantage over females across thousands of years of evolution because of the pressure they were under to improve in order to win mates. Male peacocks, for instance, evolved bright, fancy plumage to attract sober-looking peahens. And male lions evolved their glorious manes. In evolutionary terms, he implies, females can happily reproduce no matter how dull they are because they’re the ones that give birth. They have the luxury of sitting back and choosing a mate, while males have to work hard to impress them and compete with other males for their attention. In this vigorous competition for women over millennia, the logic goes, men have had to be warriors and thinkers. And this has honed them into finer physical specimens with sharper minds. Women are literally less evolved than men."(34)
"To be fair to Darwin, he was a man of his time. His traditional views on a woman’s place in society don’t run through just his own scientific works but also those of many other prominent biologists of the age. His ideas may have been revolutionary, but his attitudes to women were solidly Victorian."(35)
"When these prejudices met evolutionary biology, they turned out to be a particularly toxic mix, one that would poison scientific research for many decades. Prominent scientists made no secret that they thought women were the inferior half of humanity, the same way Darwin had. Indeed, it’s hard today to read some of the things that famous Victorian thinkers wrote about women and not be shocked."(39)
[Jawel, maar waar het om gaat is dat Darwin en anderen pretenderen dat hun visie op vrouwen een wetenschappelijke basis heeft. Aangetoond moet dus worden dat die basis er niet is en dat wetenschap hier gekleurd wordt door vooroordelen. Alleen maar geschokt zijn is niet genoeg.]
"Kennard and others in the women’s movement realized that the intellectual debate over the inferiority of women could only be won on intellectual grounds. Like the male biologists attacking them, they would also have to deploy science to defend themselves."(41)
[Precies. En die tegenbeweging komt er ook, met Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, en vooral Eliza Burt Gamble.]
"Evolutionary theory, despite what Charles Darwin had written about women, actually offered great promise to the women’s movement. It opened a door to a revolutionary new way to understand humans. “It meant a way to be modern,” says historian Kimberly Hamlin, whose 2014 book From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America charts women’s responses to Darwin. Evolution was an alternative to religious stories that painted woman as man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behavior and virtue were challenged." [mijn nadruk] (45)
"Although not a scientist herself, through Darwin’s work Gamble realized just how devastating the scientific method could be. If humans were descended from lesser creatures, the same as all other life on earth, then it made no sense for women to be confined to the home or subservient to men."(46)
"Her criticisms were passionately laid out in a book she published in 1894 called The Evolution of Woman, an Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. “It was shocking,” says Hamlin. Marshalling history, statistics, and science, this was Gamble’s piercing counterargument to Darwin and other evolutionary biologists. She angrily tweezed out their inconsistencies and double standards."(47)
"He had also failed to notice, Gamble wrote, that the human qualities associated more commonly with women—cooperation, nurture, protectiveness, egalitarianism, and altruism—must have played a vital role in human progress. In evolutionary terms, drawing assumptions about women’s abilities from the way they happened to be treated by society at that moment was narrow-minded and dangerous. Women had been systematically suppressed over the course of human history by men and their power structures, Gamble argued. They weren’t naturally inferior. They just seemed that way because they hadn’t been allowed the chance to develop their talents."(48)
"Eliza Burt Gamble’s message, like that of other scientific suffragists, proved popular. Their provocative message was that women had been cheated out of the lives they deserved, that equality was in fact their biological right."(49)
"While the political battle was a success [de strijd van de suffragettes voor het stemrecht van vrouwen - GdG], the war to change people’s minds was taking much longer. “Gamble’s ideas were praised in reform magazines and her writing style was generally praised, but the scientific and mainstream press balked at her conclusions and at her pretensions to write about ‘science,’” says Hamlin. The Evolution of Woman was quite widely reviewed in newspapers and academic journals, but scarcely left a dent on science. “They were just like, ‘Those silly women and their silly ideas.’”" [mijn nadruk] (50)
[Uiteraard, mannen en die dikke plank voor hun kop.]
"Parts of science remained doggedly slow to change. Evolutionary theory progressed pretty much as always, learning few lessons from critics such as Albert Wolfe, Caroline Kennard, and Eliza Burt Gamble."(52)
"In the century after Gamble’s death, researchers became only more obsessed by sex differences, how they might pick them out, measure and catalogue them, enforcing the dogma that men are somehow better than women."(53)
En dan worden de sekshormonen ontdekt die opnieuw allerlei vooroordelen over mannen en vrouwen moeten onderbouwen op een 'wetenschappelijke manier'.
"Testosterone became associated with what were believed to be manly qualities, such as aggression, physical power, high intellect, and virility.(...) the female hormones to femininity and childbearing. Under their effect, it also said, women “would tend to develop a more passive and emotional, and less rational, attitude towards life.”"(59)
"Reasoning in this way, scientists assumed the sex hormones belonged uniquely to each sex. Male hormones — androgens — could only be produced by men, and female hormones — estrogen and progesterone — could only be produced by women. After all, if they were the key to manliness and womanliness, why would it be any other way?
An interesting experiment in 1921 hinted at the possibility that all the assumptions that scientists were making about sex hormones might be wrong."(61)
"Just when endocrinologists thought they were getting a grip on what the sex hormones did, this threw everything into confusion. And it raised an interesting dilemma: If estrogen and testosterone determined femaleness and maleness, then why did both sexes naturally have both? What, then, did it even mean to be born male or female?"(61)
"It took a while for scientists to accept the truth: that all these hormones really did work together in both sexes, in synergy. Oudshoorn has described how important a shift this was in the way that science understood the sexes. Suddenly a spectrum opened up on which men could be more feminine and women more masculine, instead of opposites."(62)
"The entire notion of what it meant to be a woman or a man was up for grabs. Researchers in other fields began to explore the boundaries of sexual and gender identity. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, started writing at about the same time about masculine and feminine personalities, and how culture rather than biology might be influencing which ones people had."(63)
"We arrive at today. Lingering stereotypes about sex hormones remain. But they are being constantly challenged by new evidence."(65)
De kwestie van het aborteren en doden van meisjesbaby's in culturen waar het krijgen van jongens het allerbelangrijkst gevonden wordt.
"In 1994 the Indian government outlawed sex selection tests, but unscrupulous independent clinics and doctors still offer them for a fee, in private and under the radar."(70)
[Alles voor het geld. En ook hier weer artsen die helemaal meegaan in totaal verkeerde normatieve opvattingen.]
"However well hidden the selective abortions, murders, and abuse of mothers and their girls, the countrywide statistics don’t lie. Reality is laid bare in the grotesquely uneven sex ratios."(72)
"The effects that society can have on gender differences are profound, but none quite so profound as the taking of life altogether. What makes the mortality figures even more shocking is that, contrary to assumptions about women being the weaker sex, a baby girl is statistically more robust than a baby boy. She’s naturally better built to live. As scientists start to explore the female body in truer detail, they are learning just how powerful a girl’s survival edge is — even in a world that doesn’t always want her."(73)
"For more than a century, scientists have painstakingly studied our anatomy, even collected thousands of liters of horse urine to root out the chemicals that make men more masculine and women more feminine. Their search for sex differences has shown no boundaries. But when it comes to why women might be more physically robust than men — why they are better survivors — research has been scarce. Even now, only scraps of work here and there point to answers." [mijn nadruk] (80)
"One explanation for this gap is that higher levels of estrogen and progesterone in women might be protecting them in some way."(82)
"If there are deep-seated biological sex differences in health, and the differences aren’t largely due to society and culture, then scientists need to go deeper inside the body to find them."(90)
"Richardson warns against this focus on genetics as an umbrella explanation for sex difference because of how it blurs away the effects of society and culture, as well as other biological factors. Age, weight, and race, for example, are known to have a huge impact on health. Hormones are important, too. She notes that the body of genetic evidence when it comes to sex differences paints an overwhelming picture of similarity." [mijn nadruk] (100)
"The debate about just how deep the dividing line is between women and men continues to rage inside the scientific community. It has been fueled most recently by anger over exactly the opposite problem: the habit of medical researchers to leave women out of tests for new drugs, because their bodies were thought to be so similar to men’s."(100)
"In 2011 health researcher Annaliese Beery at the University of California, San Francisco, and biologist Irving Zucker at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study looking into sex biases in animal research in one sample year: 2009. Of the ten scientific fields they investigated, eight showed a male bias. In pharmacology, the study of medical drugs, the articles reporting only on males outnumbered those reporting only on females by five to one. In physiology, which explores how our bodies work, it was almost four to one.
It’s an issue that runs through other corners of science, too. In research on the evolution of genitals (parts of the body we know for certain are different between the sexes), scientists have also leaned toward males. In 2014 biologists at Humboldt University in Berlin and Macquarie University in Sydney analyzed more than three hundred papers published between 1989 and 2013 that covered the evolution of genitalia. They found almost half looked only at the males of the species, while just 8 percent looked only at females. One reporter described it as “the case of the missing vaginas.”"(102)
"This tendency to focus on males, researchers now realize, may have harmed women’s health. “Although there were some reasons to avoid doing experiments on women, it had the unwanted effect of producing much more information about how to treat men than women,” Arnold explains." [mijn nadruk] (103)
"Another problem is that women may respond differently from men to certain drugs. Medical researchers in the mid-twentieth century often assumed this couldn’t be a problem."(104)
"Digoxin and zolpidem highlight the pitfalls of including sex as a variable in medical research. Besides average body weight and height, women also have on average a higher percentage of body fat than men. And they generally take longer to pass food through their bowels. Both are things that might affect how drugs behave in their bodies. But they are also factors on which men and women overlap. Many women are heavier than the average man, for instance. It’s not always the case that the sexes belong in two separate categories.
What also counts is the experience of being a woman, socially, culturally, and environmentally. “Both sex and gender are important factors for health,” reminds Janine Clayton. Ideally, then, people should be treated according to the spectrum of factors that set them apart. Not just sex, but also social difference, culture, income, age, and others."(111)
[Maar hetzelfde geldt voor huidskleur, voor leeftijd - denk aan medicatie voor kinderen of voor ouderen - en dat ook nog eens in combinatie met sekse. Het is bijzonder ingewikkeld.]
De VS en de EU eisen inmiddels van de instanties die ze voor onderzoek subsidiëren dat ze rekening houden met die seksekwestie.
"For women’s health campaigners and researchers like Janine Clayton and Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, this is a victory. To have females equally represented in research is something they’ve spent decades fighting for. Male bias, where it exists, is being swept away. Women are being taken into account. Maybe we will finally understand just what it is that makes women on average better survivors and why men seem to report less sickness.(...)
Once we start to assume that women have fundamentally different bodies from men, this quickly raises the question of how far the gaps stretch. Do sex chromosomes affect not just our health but all aspects of our bodies and minds, for example? If every cell is affected by sex, does that include brain cells?"(113-114)
En dan kom je natuurlijk op de kwestie van de aangeboren verschillen tussen mannen en vrouwen waarover zoveel politieke standpunten zijn ingenomen.
"Researchers like those at Birkbeck College have realized that one of the most effective ways for scientists to sift nature from nurture, the biological from the social, is by studying children so young that they haven’t yet been exposed to society’s heavily gendered ways."(120)
Het onderzoek van Simon Baron-Cohen van 2000 leidde tot controverse.
"The paper claimed to prove for the first time that there were noticeable and important sex differences in the way newborn babies behaved. (...) Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and London School of Economics philosopher Helena Cronin have both deployed it to argue that innate differences between the sexes exist. (...) Its basic message is that the “female” brain is hardwired for empathy, while the “male” brain is built for analyzing and building systems, like cars and computers. People may show varying degrees of maleness and femaleness in their brains, but as the adjectives helpfully suggest, men on average tend to have “male” brains while women tend to have “female” ones."(121-122)
Daarbij gebruikte hij de 'preferential looking' - methode bij netgeboren babies.
"In the published paper, Jennifer Connellan, Simon Baron-Cohen, and their colleagues argued that this was overwhelming evidence that boys are born with a stronger interest in mechanical objects, while girls tend to have naturally better social skills and more emotional sensitivity.(...) In 2003 he published The Essential Difference, a book written for the general public that lays bare what he sees as fundamental gaps between how men and women think."(125-127)
"Simon Baron-Cohen was always aware that he was wading into divisive territory. He writes near the start of The Essential Difference that he delayed finishing it for years because he thought the topic was too politically sensitive. He makes the defense often made by scientists when they’re publishing work that might be interpreted as sexist — that science shouldn’t shy away from the truth, however uncomfortable it is. It’s a claim that runs all the way through work by people who claim to see sex differences. Objective research, they say, is objective research."(130)
Een ander onderzoek:
"Even though not everyone was comfortable with Goy and McEwen’s findings, their line of research continued. It took its biggest leap with the controversial idea that the brain’s entire structure might be shaped by testosterone levels in the womb, making men and women fundamentally different from birth — affecting not just sexual behavior but other behaviors as well."(133)
"In 1984 Geschwind and Galaburda published a book titled Cerebral Dominance, spelling out how their evidence supported the concept that men’s brains were profoundly steered in a different direction by testosterone. And this is the very research that Simon Baron-Cohen has called upon in developing his own theory about empathizing female brains and systemizing male brains."(134)
"Geschwind’s eminence in his field made it easy for his theory to be published in important journals, even when it turned out that the evidence for it was worryingly thin."(135)
"In 2010 Cambridge University psychology professor Melissa Hines, who has carried out some of the world’s most influential studies on sex and gender and is heavily referenced in Baron-Cohen’s own papers, wrote in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that thousands of experimental studies on nonhuman mammals show testosterone levels in the womb really do have an effect on behavior later on.(...)
But then, monkeys and humans are not the same. Making the leap from animals to people is critical to proving whether testosterone really does shape our own complicated minds in the same ways. If there is a similar difference, is it small, as it is in other mammals? Or is it large, in the way that Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge University suggests it is in his controversial empathizing-systemizing theory of male and female brains? Where does the truth lie?" [mijn nadruk] (137-138)
"The fact that research is replicated is crucial. A lot of work in the field of psychology, even the most widely reported on in the press, hasn’t been. If a number of independent scientists come to the same conclusions based on different studies across a broad range of people, then it’s far easier to be confident about the results." [mijn nadruk] (146)
"In 2010, Hines repeated this exercise using more recent research. She found that only the tiniest gaps, if any, existed between boys’ and girls’ fine motor skills, ability to perform mental rotations, spatial visualization, mathematics ability, verbal fluency, and vocabulary. On all these measures, boys and girls performed almost the same." [mijn nadruk] (151)
"Even studying the tiny minority of girls who have been exposed to higher than usual levels of androgens, adds Hines, while it does tell us something about sex differences, doesn’t tell us that these differences are particularly big.(...) Beyond gender identity and toy preference, on pretty much every other behavioral and cognitive measure that scientists have investigated (in a field that has left few stones unturned), girls and boys overlap hugely. Indeed, almost entirely. In a study by Hines exploring color preferences, for example, she found infant girls also had no more of a love of pink than boys did.(...) When it comes to intelligence, too, it has been convincingly established that there are no differences between the average woman and man." [mijn nadruk] (152-153)
"Not long after her and Simon Baron-Cohen’s study on newborns preferring faces or mobiles was published in 2000, people began to question their research."(157)
Methodisch klopte er weinig van. Connellan die het onderzoek voor Baron-Cohen uitvoerde gaf dat zo veel jaren later toe, aldus Saini. Baron-Cohen ontkent nog steeds elk probleem aan het onderzoek. Zijn latere onderzoeken naar de relatie tussen de hoeveelheid testosteron tijdens de zwangerschap en bepaalde mannelijke eigenschappen leverden ook niets op.
"Anne Fausto-Sterling ... believes that Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of male and female brains makes little sense. Connecting testosterone levels before birth to behavioral sex differences later on, she says, “is just this huge explanatory leap, and it leaves me uncomfortable because I don’t think it’s much of a scientific explanation when you make such a big leap. . . . We do see the differences, and I don’t disagree with that finding. What I disagree with is leaping to the idea that that this means it is something innate or inborn,” she adds. “I do think that if you just jump to the prenatal. . .you miss a whole developmental window when something very important and very social is going on.
Fausto-Sterling belongs to a vanguard of biologists and psychologists who see the nature versus nurture question as old-fashioned. “There is a better way of looking at the body and how it works in the world, and understanding the body as a socially formed entity, which it is,” she explains. Men and women may be different, but only in the same way that every individual is from the next. Or, as she has also put it, “that gender differences fall on a continuum, not into two separate buckets.””" [mijn nadruk] [mijn nadruk] (166)
[Dat lijkt mij ook. Die aanpak van Baron-Cohen is een vorm van simplistisch determinisme en gebaseerd op seksistische vooroordelen.]
"Instead of the binary categories we have now, Fausto-Sterling believes that every individual should be thought of as a developmental system — a unique and ever-changing product of upbringing, culture, history, and experience, as well as biology. Only this way, she argues, can we truly get to the heart of why women and men across the world appear to be so different from each other, when studies into mathematics ability, intelligence, motor skills, and almost every other measure consistently tell us they’re not.
If toy preferences don’t emerge until at least age one and other differences reveal themselves even later, she suggests, then what else could be happening up until age one? One line of research that hasn’t been fully explored, for example, is counting exactly how many toys babies are given in the first year of life, and what kinds of toys they are. “I can say that boys see more boys’ toys and girl see more girls’ toys, but honestly there is no data to show that,” she says." [mijn nadruk] (168)
"Work like hers, while in its early days, reinforces that countless little thumb marks are in the ball of dough that is a developing child. Hormonal effects on the brain or other deep-seated biological gaps aren’t necessarily the most powerful reason for the gaps we see between the sexes. Culture and upbringing could better explain why boys and girls grow up to seem different from each other. And if this is the case, a change in culture or tweaks to upbringing might reverse the differences."(170)
[Ook van het al lang bekende gegeven dat mannen meestal grotere hoofden hebben en iets meer hersenvolume zijn vanuit seksistische vooroordelen allerlei verkeerde conclusies getrokken. Zoals dat vrouwen minder intelligent zouden zijn. Een en ander werd eind 19e eeuw al onderuitgehaald door vrouwen die onderzoek deden naar die kwestie - zoals Helen Hamilton Gardener -, maar die werden weer eens door de mannelijke establishment uitgelachen. Inmiddels is dat punt beslist. Gardener had het toen al goed gezien.]
"Upon this observation lies the latest battleground in the gender wars. Having failed to show that brain size makes any difference, scientists like the Gurs have instead turned their attention to composition."(181)
Daarvoor wordt nieuwe technologie gebruikt. En ja hoor, de hersenen van mannen zaten qua witte materie en de verbindingen daar anders in elkaar dan die van vrouwen.
"What really captured the world’s attention was what the scientists suggested their data might tell us about how men and women behave. An earlier behavioral study the Gurs and their colleagues carried out on the same group of people, published in 2012, claimed to see “pronounced sex differences, with the females outperforming males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests, and males performing better on spatial processing and motor and sensorimotor speed.” They argued that their new wiring diagrams, produced using the power of diffusion tensor imaging, could explain some of these differences."(185)
"At the time the paper was released, the media were aided by a press release sent out by the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, designed to translate the findings into terms the public might better understand. This release made claims that went far beyond what the paper actually said. It stated that the brain-wiring differences shown by the Gurs and their colleagues indicate that men are better at carrying out a single task while women are better at multitasking. Ruben Gur himself admits to me that he hasn’t seen any scientific evidence to support this claim, and he’s not sure how it made it into the press release.
But at the time, when researchers spoke to reporters, they went even further. One of the paper’s coauthors, Ragini Verma, an associate professor working in biomedical image analysis at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Guardian, “I was surprised that it matched a lot of the stereotypes that we think we have in our heads.” She added, “Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved—they will listen more.” She told the Independent, “Intuition is thinking without thinking. It’s what people call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of skill which are linked with being good mothers.”
Characterizing the sexes in this way is sometimes euphemistically phrased as women and men “complementing” each other. Different but equal. They’re useful in their own ways, just not at the same things. It’s an idea that runs through some religious texts, but was also popular during the Enlightenment in Europe, as thinkers then grappled with how a woman’s role in society should be defined. The eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among many intellectuals — male and female — who argued against women’s equality on the basis that they weren’t the same physically or mentally, but each designed for their own separate spheres. The notion of complementarity thrived through to the Victorian era and ultimately became epitomized in the 1950s middle-class suburban housewife. She fulfilled her natural role as wife and mother, while her husband fulfilled his role as breadwinner. According to Ruben Gur, his findings reinforce this idea that women complement men." [mijn nadruk] (187-189)
Die opvattingen worden zeker vandaag de dag door anderen aangevochten.
"She [Gina Rippon, professor in 'cognitive neuroimaging' - GdG] is one of a small but growing number of neuroscientists, psychologists, and gender experts scattered across the world who are desperately batting away claims that brains show significant sex differences. In the twenty-first century, she is fighting Helen Hamilton Gardener’s old war."(190)
"Rippon wasn’t the only one raising her eyebrows at some of these brain studies. Functional magnetic resonance imaging produces pictures that can be easily skewed by noise and false positives. The best resolution it can reach is a cubic millimeter or so, and with many machines, it’s considerably less. This may sound like a tiny volume, but is in fact vast when it comes to an organ as dense as the brain. Just one cubic millimeter can contain around a hundred thousand nerve cells and a billion connections. Given these limitations, people inside the scientific community began to be concerned that they might be reading too much into brain scans. All over the world, what started as quiet criticism became a crescendo." [mijn nadruk] (193)
"The problem has at least been recognized. Even so, Gina Rippon believes that sex difference research continues to suffer from bad research because it remains such a hot-button topic. For scientists and journals, a sexy study on sex difference can equal instant global publicity.
The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she adds. But they’re not the ones that get published."(195)
"In her 2010 book Delusions of Gender, psychologist Cordelia Fine coins the term “neurosexism” to describe scientific studies that fall back on gender stereotypes, even when these underlying stereotypes are themselves unproven. Ruben Gur’s 2014 study on sex differences in white matter between men and women, Gina Rippon tells me, is among those that deserve to be described as “extremely neurosexist.”"(196)
"For Gina Rippon, this has become a tiresome battle. “There are people like Larry Cahill who call us ‘sex difference deniers,’ but it’s the same kind of attack that gets put on feminism at each stage, or whatever wave you think you’re in,” she tells me. “I’m not paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, but there is a very strong, quite powerful backlash in this area. It’s kind of acceptable in an odd way, which is not true if you’re talking about race or religion.”"(203)
"But all this still leaves one unanswered question: If the brains of women and men aren’t so different, then why do researchers like Ruben Gur and Larry Cahill keep seeing sex differences?"(207)
"Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire at University College London discovered that the mental feat of memorizing the layout of twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks, known as “The Knowledge,” could be changing the size of a cabbie’s hippocampus, a region associated with memory. This piece of research had enormous implications. It helped confirm an idea that scientists had already been developing since the 1970s, particularly through animal studies: that the brain isn’t set in stone in childhood but is in fact moldable throughout life.
“These changes are terribly tiny, but they are measurable,” says Paul Matthews. Studying musicians, basketball players, ballet dancers, jugglers, and mathematicians has confirmed that brain plasticity is real. In the context of sex difference research, it also raises an important question: If intense experience and learning a new task can shape a person’s brain, could the experience of being a woman shape it as well? Could plasticity therefore explain the sex differences that are sometimes seen in the brain?
According to Gina Rippon, psychologist Cordelia Fine, and gender scholars Rebecca Jordan-Young in New York and Anelis Kaiser in Bern, Switzerland, plasticity is a phenomena that has been oddly ignored when people talk about sex differences in neuroscience." [mijn nadruk] (208-209)
[Ja, daar kunnen die deterministen niet goed tegen.]
"This idea has in turn been woven into an even bigger and more radical new theory that might explain how the small sex differences we occasionally see in brain composition might emerge. Rippon, Fine, Jordan-Young, and Kaiser have argued that biology and society are “entangled”—that they work in concert with each other, through mechanisms like plasticity, to create the complicated picture we call “gender.” Their ideas are supported by a growing body of evidence on how gender differences shift over time."(210)
"So if a young boy happens to be given a building set rather than a doll to play with, the stereotype of males having better spatial skills is physically borne out. Society actually ends up producing a biological change.
On the flip side, exposing someone to bad stereotypes can impair their performance. In one controversial study that Miller and Halpern cite, women who are reminded of negative stereotypes about female abilities in math go on to perform worse on math tests. “Removing stereotype threat can improve both men’s and women’s academic achievement,” they write."(212)
"Anne Jaap Jacobson, a philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now based at the University of Houston, has coined the word neurofeminism to describe this alternative approach to brain science, which attempts to root out stereotypes and look at brains objectively. “A lot of the research starts off with the assumption that various people call ‘essentialism.’ That men and women are essentially different, that the differences are really sort of basic,” she tells me."(217)
"Hrdy’s work into what primate behavior can tell us about human evolution, one scientist tells me, reduced her to tears. For Hrdy’s groundbreaking ideas on women, she’s been described as the original Darwinian feminist."(223)
"When male primatologists went into the field, they would often focus on aggression, dominance, and hunting, Hrdy tells me. Females were routinely overlooked. They were believed to be passive, sexually coy, and generally at the mercy of stronger, larger males."(224)
"Hrdy believes that being a woman in her field is one reason she noticed behavior that hadn’t been recognized before. She was driven to investigate what others may have chosen to overlook."(228)
"Trying to get her male colleagues to see primates from a female’s perspective, though, was a battle."(229)
[Het bekende verhaal. ]
"All this evidence suggests that cooperative breeding is an old and universal feature of human life, not a recent invention. And there are good reasons why."(238)
"The maternal instinct in humans is not an automatic switch, which is flicked on the moment a baby is born.
This is Sarah Hrdy’s radical proposition. All over the world, mothers are known to admit that it takes time for them to fall in love with their babies, while some never do. In some unfortunate cases, mothers deliberately neglect and even kill their newborns. This may seem utterly unnatural. After all, we assume the maternal instinct is as strong and immediate in humans as it is in any other creature. It’s considered a fundamental part of being a woman. So much so that those who don’t want children or reject their own are sometimes considered odd. But the reality, observes Hrdy, is that it’s more common for mothers not to form an immediate attachment to their offspring than we like to believe." [mijn nadruk] (241)
"If we are natural cooperative breeders — a species in which alloparents are part of the fabric of families — it’s unreasonable to expect women to manage without any help. For Hrdy, a feminist, this line of research also has obvious political implications. It reinforces why lawmakers shouldn’t outlaw abortion and force women to have babies they feel they cannot raise or do not want. It also highlights how important it is that governments provide better welfare and child care for mothers, especially those who don’t have support at home.
The weight of evidence does at least seem to be in favor of the idea that humans didn’t evolve to raise their children single-handedly. Child care was not the sole responsibility of mothers." [mijn nadruk] (243)
"If in our evolutionary history, caring for children is something that would have been done not just by mothers but also by fathers, siblings, grandmothers, and others, the traditional portrait we have of family life starts to crack. A nuclear family with one hands-on father certainly isn’t the norm everywhere. In a few societies, for example, children even have more than one “father.”"(248)
"This all points to the possibility that living arrangements among early humans could have taken any number of permutations. Monogamy may not have been the rule. Women, if they weren’t tied to their children all the time, would have been free to go out to get food and perhaps even hunt. The Victorian ideal that Charles Darwin based his understanding of women upon — mother at home, taking care of the children, hungrily waiting for father to bring home the bacon — is left out in the cold." [mijn nadruk] (249)
En zo bleek er ook nogal wat af te dingen op het beeld dat mannen de jagers waren en zo de cultuur voortbrachten in de vorm van communicatie en geereedschappen en zo verder. Een beeld dat mannen hadden verzonnen, uiteraard.
"The picture all this leaves us with is very different from that of the sedentary, weak, and dependent woman that some evolutionary biologists have painted in the past."(263)
"We sometimes imagine sexual equality to be a modern invention, a product of our enlightened, liberal societies. In actual fact, anthropologists have long known that the way women are treated throughout the world wasn’t always like this."(271)
"This all points to the possibility that the way the Palanan Agta used to live may have been usual in our past. Historical investigations have always failed to uncover good evidence for matriarchal societies, in which women hold the reins of power. But that doesn’t mean humans weren’t egalitarian."(274)
Het onderzoek “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers” (1978, 1982, 1989) van Clark en Hatfield wordt besproken.
"They recruited [in het oorsponkelijke onderzoek van 1978 - GdG] a bunch of young volunteers from an experimental psychology class, none of them too bad looking but none wildly attractive either, to approach people across campus and repeat the same pickup line. This was followed by one of three requests: to go out on a date, to go to their apartment, or to go to bed with them.
The results were stark. Even though men and women were equally likely to go on a date with a stranger, none of the women would sleep with one. Three-quarters of the men, on the other hand, were willing to have sex with a woman they didn’t know. When the psychologists repeated the experiment in 1982, the results were almost the same."(279-280)
" ... it became a classic. After all, it neatly confirmed what everyone thought they already knew about sex and the sexes. Men are naturally polygamous and just fighting nature when they become tied into long-term relationships. Women are monogamous and always looking for the perfect partner." [mijn nadruk] (280)
"It confirmed Darwin’s long-standing theory that males in species like these [fruitvliegjesonderzoek - GdG] are more promiscuous and less discriminating, while females are pickier and more chaste."(283)
"Sexual selection theory, revamped for the twentieth century, rapidly became a tool to explain women’s and men’s relationship habits. Bateman’s theories, once almost forgotten, were transformed into a fully blown set of universal principles, cited hundreds of times and considered solid as a rock. On that rock now rests an entire field of work on sex differences."(290)
Herhaling van soortgelijke opvattingen bij mensen als Robert Trivers in 1972 - bij wie de evolutionaire psychologie start -, Don Symons in 1979, David Buss in 1994, later in 1998 Steven Pinker.
"Pinker has described Don Symons’s book as “groundbreaking” and Robert Trivers’s work as “monumental.” He was also among those who stood up for Harvard University president Lawrence Summers when he suggested that innate sex differences might explain the shortfall of top female scientists."(292)
"But not everyone is convinced this is true. Today there is a huge body of research that flies in the face of Bateman’s principles. It has been building up for many decades."(295)
Er is allerlei onderzoek dat laat zien dat bij allerlei dieren de vrouwtjes ook meerdere partners zoeken, 'promiscue' zijn, etc. Veel diersoorten zijn helemaal niet monogaam bijvoorbeeld.
"Far from being passive, coy, and monogamous, females of many species have been shown to be active, powerful, and very willing to mate with more than one male.
However, the shift has been slow to come in part because of huge amounts of resistance along the way. In his 1982 review of Sarah Hrdy’s book The Woman That Never Evolved — which presents more evidence contradicting the image of the coy, chaste female — anthropologist Don Symons raised his eyebrows, especially at her suggestion that, like the female langurs at Mount Abu, evolution might favor females that are sexually assertive and competitive. “In promoting her view of women’s sexual nature, Hrdy provides dubious evidence that this nature exists,” Symons wrote, dismissively.
According to Sarah Hrdy, this hostility toward viewpoints like hers hasn’t gone away."(298)
[Tja, wat is er nieuw? ]
Hetzelfde geldt voor mensen.
"“Around half of societies say female infidelity is either common or very common,” says Brooke Scelza, a human behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles."(299)
"All this, says Scelza, punctures the biological model of the coy, chaste female. Working with the Himba, who have a sexual culture so different from her own, has taught her that the rules about how women and men behave in relationships have far more to do with society than biology. The Himba aren’t a breed apart. They’re just culturally different. “It’s not that they don’t have love. It’s not that sex has replaced love in this society. They feel jealous. But the cultural norms that are in place prevent men from really being able to act upon it,” she explains. “If he was, for example, to hit his wife or something like that, which in some places in the world is completely an acceptable response, there would be a backlash. He would probably end up having to pay a fine and be punished for that action.”" [mijn nadruk] (306)
"As more evidence rolls in, researchers have started to further question the scientific orthodoxy that females are generally more passive and chaste than males. Even the famous 1978 experiment on the campus of Florida State University — which found that men were overwhelmingly more open than women to casual sex with strangers — has been repeated, with surprising results."(307)
Ook op Bateman's fruitvliegenonderzoek kwam fundamentele kritiek.
"Indeed, it’s possible to argue that if ever there was proof that females aren’t naturally chaste or coy, it’s the extraordinary lengths to which some males go to keep them faithful."(320)
[Goed gezien, en dat geldt ook voor mannen en vrouwen bij mensen.]
"Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate guarding as anyone has ever seen.
The practice has been absorbed into some cultures so fully and for so long that women now have little choice but to give it their full cooperation. Without it, they risk being ostracized. Girls put pressure on each other to be cut, like they did when Wardere was six years old. Mothers take their own daughters to be cut, like Wardere’s did. And female elders do the cutting. “It’s all instigated by women. Men have nothing to do with it. But who are they doing it for? That’s the question,” she tells me. “It’s all about control. They don’t trust you with your own body.”"(329)
"Female genital mutilation is only one way in which a woman’s sexual agency is repressed. There have been countless others throughout history."(330)
"Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that all this — the systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia — is what really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female. (...) Her point is reinforced by the ways in which women are treated around the world. Besides horrific practices like female genital mutilation, few places exist that don’t exercise a moral double standard."(332-333)
"By this logic, if orgasms aren’t a vestige of male physiology and women really can have strong sex drives, then there must be another explanation for women being perceived as innately chaste and modest. Mary Jane Sherfey believed that something was holding women back from being the powerful sexual creatures they were born to be. This something was human culture."(338)
"Just when in human history societies might have shifted from being fairly egalitarian to no longer equal is hard to pin down."(340)
"Female sexuality had been suppressed for so long that scientists didn’t even question whether this modesty and meekness might not be biological at all.(345)"
"Even if humans once lived egalitarian lives long ago, was male domination of women inevitable? That’s the question our complicated history and biology leave us asking. Does the biological drive that men have to guard females, combined with the fact that they’re on average bigger and have greater upper body strength, mean that human societies would have always ended up with men in charge? Is patriarchy hardwired into our biology?"(345)
Weergave van onderzoek naar primaten, de tegenstelling chimpansee - bonobo.
"A common mistake is to assume that males naturally dominate because they’re larger."(361)
"In the end, this is where the die seems to fall when it comes to male dominance over females. Female cooperation makes the difference. This doesn’t answer the question of whether male domination was always the biological norm for our species, the way it is for chimpanzees, but it does offer a perspective on the battle for equality today."(363)
"The hormonal and physical changes associated with menopause, as well as the shift it marked in their life and status as mothers, had impacts on the mental health of many older women. Some cases were documented with medical fascination."(365)
"If fertility represented youth and health, society assumed, then infertility was exactly the opposite. It wiped out the entire point of being female. It turned a woman into something else. And this was reflected in the ways older women were treated, especially by science and the medical profession." [mijn nadruk] (368)
"At the same time, other scientists have turned their attention to the bigger, broader evolutionary question of why women experience menopause at all. Does it serve a purpose, which has some biological logic to it? Or is it like wrinkling and gray hair — an unavoidable aspect of aging, a disease of deficiency — that mark the body’s inevitable decline? Why then do all women experience it, but some men seem to be able to keep reproducing until they die?"(375)
"When a phenomenon as important as menopause happens in humans, we almost always find it in other species, too, particularly among our primate relatives, like chimpanzees and the other great apes. But with menopause, that’s not the case. It’s freakishly unusual.(...) A long postmenopausal life is so rare that, as far as we know, humans share it with only a few distant species, including killer whales, which stop reproducing in their thirties or forties but can survive into their nineties."(376)
"The focus on grandmothering also casts menopause in a new light, suggesting that it isn’t some biological blip or routine curse of old age, but that it’s there for a distinct evolutionary purpose: to allow women to safely continue caring for their children as they grow older and perhaps also be there for their grandchildren. The old image of the useless crone is replaced by a useful woman. Rather than being a burden on society, retreating into a quieter life, she is front and center. She is propping up her family. For the sixty years since Williams first shared this thought, researchers have been searching for the evidence to prove it."(380)
"Hawkes discovered that the Hadza grandmothers and other senior women, including aunts, helped daughters raise more and healthier children. They were vital to reproduction even if they weren’t themselves having babies. Grandmothers, she suggested, were also the reason women were able to have shorter intervals between babies. They stepped in to help before other children became independent. Her landmark scientific paper on the subject, published with her colleagues in 1989, was titled “Hardworking Hadza Grandmothers.” More work by Hawkes and her team has since revealed just how industrious they are. Women in their sixties and seventies are described as working long hours in all seasons, bringing back as much food or even more than younger women in their families."(383)
"A common counterargument to the grandmother hypothesis, known as the “extended-longevity” or “life-span–artifact” hypothesis, is that menopause must be a by-product of our increased life expectancy."(384)
Punt is alleen dat het hier om gemiddelden gaat die suggereren dat er vroeger geen oudere postmenopausale vrouwen waren, maar het is aangetoond dat dat wel het geval is.
"The grandmother hypothesis hasn’t gone unchallenged. At least a dozen competing ideas have come along over the years, each with its own drawbacks and merits."(391)
"“Let’s assume mating is not random,” evolutionary biologist Rama Singh tells me over the phone from McMaster University in Canada. It sounds as though he’s smiling, aware of just how provocative his comments are going to be.
As both of us know, his is the most controversial countertheory to the grandmother hypothesis. “We know that men, young and old, prefer younger women. So in the presence of younger women, older women will not be mating as much,” he explains. If they aren’t having sex, his argument goes, they don’t need to be able to reproduce. In summary, older women become infertile because men don’t find them attractive. One reporter has described this account as putting the “men” in “menopause.”" [mijn nadruk] (395)
"Many, however, have challenged his view of nature. Indeed, Singh, Morton, and Stone’s hypothesis has been mocked in scientific circles."(396)
"The problem for everyone in this field is that the data are both scarce and messy. We can’t know for sure how people lived many millennia ago."(403)
"As far back as the 1970s American anthropologist Marcha Flint studied communities in Rajasthan in India, where women saw old age very differently. They told her it was a good thing, giving them a new social standing in their communities and more equality with men. Flint described negative American attitudes to menopause, in contrast, as a “syndrome.” When menopause is seen as a curse rather than a blessing, women feel naturally less happy about it and also seem to report more symptoms."(407)
Over Ashley Montagu's The Natural Superiority of Women van 1952. Een man nog wel.
"As I learned later, this wasn’t Montagu’s only controversial piece of work. He was a prolific author who had lectured at Princeton and became something of an intellectual celebrity in the postwar years, appearing on American chat shows. When Hitler was committing atrocities against Jews in Europe, he wrote about the fallacy of the biological idea of race. In his writings on women, he compared their subjugation to the historic treatment of black people in the United States. He campaigned against genital mutilation long before it was the high-profile issue it is today."(409)
"And today, as women across the world fight for more freedoms and equality, there are again violent efforts to hold them back.(...) “The sustained assault on abortion access is showing no signs of abating,” a news release by the institute warned in January 2016.
Similarly, despite enormous efforts to raise awareness, female feticide in South Asia and female genital mutilation in Africa remain endemic. The spread of religious fundamentalism, which emphasizes female modesty, is also seeing the promise of female sexual freedom decaying right before our eyes."(413-414)
"Resistance from certain corners is so powerfully toxic that it threatens to overturn the progress that’s been made."(415)