| |  | Books The Female Brain |  | | | | | | | | | | Rating:  - Educational, though too much over-simplification
Having spent many years studying human psychology in both an academic setting and practical, hands-on settings, I can say that there is some value in this book. That said, I think it makes vast conclusions that are not so useful. For example, no one could seriously argue that there are a few general differences between men and women in, for example, what they find attractive in the opposite sex. (That's why you don't see men wearing lipstick in order to draw in the ladies.) However, in some many areas she seems to have a very black and white point of view. Women are like this, while men are like that, individual variabilities be damned.In fact in the real world there is no reason why women can't be math or philisophical geniuses (and indeed many are). There's no reason why men can't be nuturing, and again many are. I recommend the works of Deborah Tannen as being better scholarship and research.
Rating:  - Should read this a long time ago
Best book in a long time.I give it to everybody now and they love it and agree, "Why didn't somebody give this to me when I was 20?"Can't go wrong, great buy, great read.
Rating:  - Challenging the Standard Sociological Model
I was trained as a sociologists to believe that gender differences were socially constructed.Turns out the science does not support this viewpoint....and gender is an important factor in our brains evolved.Would like to read about my brain...but being having two daughters and a lovely wife it is good to get some insight inside the heads of the folks I live with.Highly recommended.
Rating: - The reviewer's page does not fit with the book!!!
When I entered the page to write my review of what I perceived as an easy and interesting science book, I was more than surprised by the author's blog section: "Thank you for reading and using my book in your life. I have heard from many of you out there who are reading "The Female Brain"-a soldier in his bunk in Iraq [...]-a truck driver in the Midwest who just had his wife leave him after twenty-eight years and wants to know how to get her back-and many others of you who are finding answers to questions about female emotions [...], choosing who to love and marry"[???...] "I have heard from many men that they wish they had had the information in this book when they were younger-one 82-year-old man wrote saying it would have "saved me from many mistakes with women in my life". I hope you will write to me too[...]"
Am I in the wrong book page? This blog of the author does not fit with the book I have read and is completely misleading. This sounds more like a "self-help" book with some "clichés" about differences between sexes. The statements above were definitely not printed on any of the book's covers (nor did I have the impression that the content of the book was aimed at helping you to find a partner). The book is definitely presented as a science book; it is named "the female brain", not "Mars and Venus demistified". Are the author's hormones to blame for this radical change?
As I read the book, I found it interesting and entertaining. What interested me most was how the different genetic information contained in the Y and X chromosomes inffluences the development of the unborn babies' brains. This information affects the relative size of some of parts of the brain with implications on future sex differences. The inffluence of hormones during a woman's life cycle is also very interesting. The levels of hormones and other substances in the brain vary according with the sex. This might not be 100% deterministic, but I am sure it has a great inffluence on moods and probably attitudes.
I liked the book and I would have rated it with 4 stars until the author herself made me completely distrust everything inside it.
Rating:  - Male bashing disguised as pseudoscience
To be fair, the book has some valid points. For example, it admits that differences between male and female behaviour have a biological cause besides a cultural one. It teaches some bits of information which are useful to know. For example, about the female hormonal cycle. I won't explain about the lack of scientific rigueur of this book because this has been beautifully done in the reviews by David H. Peterzell and Linda Hirshman. I wanted to add something new.
This is one of the most sexist books I have read in a long time. The subtext of this book, the idea which is hammered once and again throughout the book can be summarized like that: "The female brain is superior in everything with respect to the male brain, except for sexual desire and aggression"
Even more outraging is the view of the author towards men who are depicted like some kind of Neandhertals, clearly inferior creatures who are unable to understand the subtleness and goodness of women and are only able of aggression and disruptive behavior. Let's see an example from page 21 :
"So why is a girl born with such a highly tuned machine [her brain] for reading faces [...]? This is the result of millenia of [...] evolutionary hardwiring that once has - and probably still has - real consequences for survival. If you can read faces [...], you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, aggressive male is going to do. And since you're smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman - or cavemen".
Look how men are depicted. Bigger, aggressive people who want to attack women. Even more, to defend from such a threat, women have to band with each other. Hello? Is it anything inside the author's brain? Have you seen band of females to protect from males anywhere in the world?
The ones who have ALWAYS protected females from danger have been MEN. When a thief enters a home, it is the male who is going to see what happens while the woman tries to stay in a safe place. When a band is trying to attack a local village, it is the local men who get their guns and go out to face the danger, while women stay in their homes. When an army is trying to invade a country, armies composed of men protect their women for being invaded and submitted. Men die for women to be safe. But the author has such a negative view of men that indulges in a fantasy of women banding themselves, which is absurd and has never happened.
This could be only a mistake, but the book is full of derogatory language against men. "[The boys] would break anything [the girls] have created. The boys pushed the girls around, refused to take turns and would ignore the request of a girl to stop or to give the toy back" (page 11), "[Boys don't use language to get consensus the way girls do but] use language to command others, get things done, brag, threaten, ignore a partner's suggestion and override each other's attempts to speak. It was never long after Joseph's arrival on the playground that Leyla ended up in tears" (page 22). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
On the contrary, women are depicted as a nearly angelical creatures. "If you are a girl, you are programmed to make sure you keep social harmony" (page 21). Hello? Has somebody worked in an office full of women and see the meanness, intrigues and subtle backstabbing that they have in their social interactions? And what about a woman in a divorce court? Girls are not always mean and boy are not always good but it is certainly not the other way around either.
After reading this book, I can't help wondering why over the last five decades women, who make up roughly 50 percent of the world's population, have claimed only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, 8 percent in literature and 0 percent in economics. Why is this? If women are so superior to men, if men are only able to obsess about sex and proceed to aggression (because "they are marinated by testosterone") and are superated in any other aspect by women?
(During that period Jews, who were an oppressed minority and who comprise less than 0.5 percent the world's population, have claimed 32 percent of the Nobel Prizes for medicine, 32 percent for physics, 39 percent for economics and 29 percent of all science awards.)
If you are reading this, nearly everything that you see right now has been invented (and done) by a man. Your computer, your Internet, the Web, your room, the electrical power and so on. Maybe men are not that useless and dumb after all, are we?
I am really sorry for the author's son. It won't be easy for him to grow up with a mother who has so much contempt towards boys.
So if you are a feminist eager to feel superior to men, please buy this book and you will be reassured in your beliefs.
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