I give linklove to Scientific American — especially their blog — quite often, but I think after today, I might consider making my feelings more formal. Basically, I read a really questionable piece about sex and gender in the NYT today (Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes), Snip:
(…) It is no surprise that the male and female versions of the human brain operate in distinct patterns, despite the heavy influence of culture. The male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire. The most direct evidence comes from a handful of cases, some of them circumcision accidents, in which boy babies have lost their penises and been reared as female. Despite every social inducement to the opposite, they grow up desiring women as partners, not men.
“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.
Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.
Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”
Dr. Bailey believes that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.
Link.
So after the SciAm blog ripped the piece a new one (orifice, gender and orientation) in a post today, I want to like, totally rub my blog on theirs. So I will. SciAm’s Christopher Mims approaches the topic with way more reason, understanding, sensitivity about the complexities at hand, and no assumptions, making me wish he’d written the piece instead. Mims says,
Leaving aside women for a moment, whose gender identities are no doubt every bit as complicated to construct as those of men, when we consider that the construction of the male gender is dependent on quite a few developmental events, any one of which can turn out differently than it usually does and lead to an alternate gender identity (e.g., chromosomal abnormalities, problems at the onset of puberty that result from a malfunction of hormonal systems, masculinization / feminization of the brain in the womb due to maternal effects) I wonder how well (in the absence of controlled experiments on humans which, thankfully, aren’t allowed in civil society) we can make claims like “women have a sexual preference, but only men have a sexual orientation.”
Link.
I read the NYT article and choked on the second para — not even the issue Mims takes to task. The statement, “Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.” My reaction was personal — it’s such a classic generalization — is that if that were true, women (and those in relationships who typically end up in caretaker roles) might want to partner up with people who are capable not to take care of us, but because we want someone who can take care of themselves. Hello — I don’t date boys who have jobs because I want a baby (in fact, I am never having one). Let’s just say that I no longer date musicians anymore for a reason.
But besides my personal reactions, the NYT piece gave me a big knee-jerk rejection of the gender assumptions about women being “picky”, or some construct of a biological imperative in regards to our pursuit of sexual pleasure. I will never take these hack job articles seriously until they present both sides of the argument for sex — one that includes evaluation and discussion of the factors of sexual pleasure, not just making babies. Hysteria, which classified female arousal, desire and pleasure as a disease was a valid medical diagnosis on the books until the 1950s — does science and medicine still see female pleasure as a disorder so as not to allow fucking for fucking’s sake into the calculations? Or, is that when we’re “picky”? And includes in the hypothesis input for motivation on all sides, especially LGBT. You can’t tell me that women choose men to make babies, but choose women because they’re “picky” and that we have no sexual orientation. I mean shit, do these people know *any* lesbians?
Eeesh.
