Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ]
01 Mar 2007, 6:03 pm
I found this review of Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference on Amazon:
Quote:
Should the title fail to express Baron-Cohen's certainty about gender differences, the Cambridge Univ. professor of psychology and psychiatry lays out his controversial thesis on page one: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems." Defending this bold view is a tough but engaging battle, one that's alleviated by Baron-Cohen's disclaimer that his conclusions refer to statistical majorities rather than "all men" and "all women," but exacerbated by his habit of simultaneously skirting and employing gender stereotypes. His copious evidence ranges from the anecdotal to the anthropological, and from the neurological to the case study (the author and his research team conducted many of these studies). Not all his support fully convinces: e.g., the music-classifying habits of novelist Nick Hornby's High Fidelity protagonist isn't confirmation of the male brain's predisposition to systems-building. After acknowledging cultural and social influences on gender differences, Baron-Cohen "surfs the brain" (and offers evidence from a number of studies, both human and animal) to establish a biological link. But if male rats navigate their way through mazes more easily than female rats, does that mean men are better at directions than women? His speculations on how binary brain types have evolved over the eons, which have the male brain co-opting traits like power and leadership, leaving the female brain with gossip and motherhood, may ruffle a few feathers. Perhaps the most refreshing section of this cerebral volume is devoted to what he calls "extreme" examples of the male brain-autism and its cousin, Asperger's syndrome. The author of previous autism books, including Mindblindness, Baron-Cohen offers curious lay readers a provocative discussion of male-female differences.
What I find ironic about this is that while reading the descriptions of male and female brain types, I kept thinking "wow, gee, really? They needed studies to find this stuff out?" But when I got to the section on autism I thought it presented a pretty stiff picture of what autism and AS is, in that the people he described as being at the "high functioning end" of AS sounded to me like people I would consider oddballs, relative to me and other people I've known with AS. He sort of unconsciously used it as a dumping point (although he was pretty insightful and understanding for the most part). So I read this review and see that this person had issues with the PC-ness of what I would have just taken for granted, but was "refreshed" by the section on autism which for me was painful to read. Now, I think this is pretty much symbolic of our position in relation to neurotypical people. The best analogy I can think of is to the famous Kurosawa movie Rashomon, where four people recount the same event in four completely different ways, in part because of how they interpreted it and in part because of how they rationalized it. Coming from a person with a lifelong tendency to think of empathy as overrated or subversive, I thought he gave it too much credit, if anything. The reviewer here simplifies it to the point of it sounding misogynistic, but he explains it far beyond the point of motherhood and gossip. What's more likely is that the "truth" is some kind of superimposition, like in Rashomon.
On the other hand, I think I'm still closer to being right.
