Any Other Girls Confused by the "Extreme Male Brain" Theory?

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I'm with you. I choose to wear dresses when I go to work or to an event, because I like dressing feminine and because it's more professional-looking.

I think that if male traits exist inside a female body then they're not just male traits. Personally I find the theory offensive.

If the foundation of a theory has ingrained sexism in the language used to define it, then it makes sense to expect people to dispute it on that basis. I don't know why scientists get so committed to keeping the original formulation of an idea when it becomes divisive or confusing over time.

If you call it Male Brain, people will think male brain. Duh.

I've read the breakdown of Cohen's theory many times now, and from what I gather, the EMB idea -- looked at in its full context -- has more to do with preference for systemizing rather than the traits of cultural femininity that OP mentioned.

An autistic woman will likely be much more systematic than a typical female, but not to the extent of a male. Concrete examples of this application include interest in systems for a woman, but usually within the realm of people. For instance, I like studying neuroscience, genetics and epigenetics, theology, sports strategies, and the like. These are systematic, but they are human-based endeavors: the brain is what makes a human think, genetics and epigenetics relate to people, theology is systematic religion governing human morality and views of the deity, sports are played by people, and so forth.

I find it more difficult to systemize _completely apart_ from a human connection, such as the kinds of systemizing found in many STEM fields. As such, I'll probably never build a boat or other machine -- either in coming up with the conceptual design for one, or applying it. The further removed the system is from humanity, the harder it is for me to concentrate or understand.

Nonetheless, compared to the typical woman, I have far fewer social graces, find interpersonal cues harder to interpret, come across as very tactless and distant, and will study human systems for far longer and break it down with much more logic than Susie the Empathetic Nurse or Elementary Teacher.

This isn't to say that no women engineers or machine builders/designers exist, mind you. They are just statistically much smaller in number.

You have to look at the research which went into the theory, which is still quite contraversal after quite a few years. Much of the basis for theory comes from studies in spontantious toy choice. If you follow the research from children, to babies using eye tracking then girls usually chose toys which have faces over toys which are considered systematic, they also play or look at the doll type toys for longer than the boys. Social engineering was blamed on the results, even in the research used with babies. The research was repeated with monkeys with exactly the same result, I have seen some of the videos so I can validate this. If you look at the research form Genevia (The Genevia test) You will see how poorly men perform recognising emotion and mental states compared to women.

Latest research (Simon Baron Cohen et al.) shows that there is increased levels of testosterone in the womb of some mothers of autistic children. I discussed this with one of Simons reserchers a few years back, an American lady called Alexia from memory and asked the question about twins who were not identical where only one child was autisitc. She told me that even in identical children they were genetic differences and that these differences change over time and that some children were paticulalry suspectable to the the increased levels.

I was also aware that there was research into girls who were diagnosed with Aspergers and the levels of testosterone present and if they were hairier than NT females. This lady told me that early findings said that they were, thus adding weight to the theory (I know this is going to be recieved very badly so don't shoot the messenager please)

Simon it has to be said gets a fair amount of stick from his collegues, a friend of mine had a very public row with him so I need to be careful what I say about him. One of the silent wispered stabs at Simon is that he was a world view and then looks for the evidence to support it, closely followed by he his desperate to find causation and quite fancies a Nobel peace prize.

I believe more in the "Intense World Theory" than in the "Extreme Male Brain Theory."

The reason: I experience the world, sometimes, as "intense." Even more so when I was younger.