Guest Post by John Stossel
The media keep telling us: There’s no difference between male and female brains.
I don’t believe it. Many of you must be skeptical, too. Seventeen million people watched my old ABC show on sex differences, almost as many as watched “Game of Thrones.”
Nonetheless, people now fill auditoriums to hear neuroscientist Gina Rippon talk about her new book that claims “New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds.”
Rippon says it’s important to tell people that sex isn’t an important indicator in how brains work so we don’t fall prey to stereotypes. “You don’t want an idea that this (difference) is something that’s natural,” she says in my new video.
“It’s not natural,” I ask, “that in school, more boys want to play football and more girls want to do ballet? I want to run and bang into people.”
“Actually, girls might want to run and bang into people, but because there’s an image that girls don’t do that, they’re stopped from doing that,” she replies.
But in my reporting, I’ve covered research that shows innate differences.
In one experiment, students were blindfolded and then walked through tunnels running underneath a college campus. When the women were asked the direction of a college building, they weren’t so sure. One said: “How would I know? I’m blindfolded!”
Men, however, tend to have better spatial awareness and retained a sense of which direction they’d moved.
On the other hand, women have a better memory for detail.
In one test, students were told to wait in a cluttered room and later asked what was in that room.
Women often gave long answers like, “There were envelopes, university envelopes, a thing of Clearasil, a Bazooka Joe comic…”
Men were more likely to say, “I don’t know … some stuff.”
Of course, maybe they’d been molded by our sexist society — conditioned to do what’s expected of men and women.
But I reminded Rippon that even tests on infants find differences. Baby boys look longer at objects, such as tractor parts. Infant girls stare at faces.
“A third of the girls actually seem to respond more to the tractor parts,” said Rippon.
When I pointed out that meant two-thirds of the girls did not, Rippon said that the experiment should be redone “with a bigger set of newborns.”
Maybe. But scientists shouldn’t keep redoing experiments until they get results they like.
Some female scientists acknowledge that men’s and women’s brains are different.
“You can tell, looking at brains, whether they belong to a male or a female 80% of the time,” says evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman.
Also: “Cultures around the world show very similar differences between men and women. Men are more likely to seek status; women are more likely to take care of children. Women are more likely to stay in the home; men are more likely to do dangerous, aggressive things like go to war.”
I suggest that perhaps the sexes are alike and all cultures have imposed similar biases.
“Look at nonhuman animals, monkeys: They don’t have culture, yet there’s still very large differences between males and females,” she responds.
Among scientists, that’s common opinion. The Journal of Neuroscience Research says 70 studies found differences. Boys, for example, are more likely to be autistic, to be colorblind and to have speech problems.
Even Gina Rippon says, “I’m definitely not a brain difference denier.”
But her media coverage suggests she’s discovered that male and female brains are the same.
“It’s an incredibly alluring message,” says Fleishman with a laugh. “It’s really sad that it’s not right!”
Of course, science shouldn’t seek an alluring message. It should just be about the truth.
But the truth doesn’t stop politicians from demanding absolute equality in all things — even if men and women have different interests.
“Saying that men and women have different aptitudes isn’t sexism. It’s a statement about the true nature of the world,” says Fleischman. “If we keep saying that those differences … are because of sexism, nobody’s going to end up happy with what they’re doing, and we’re going to keep making laws to remedy what’s actually the result of freedom.”
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All husbands need to control the thermostat , the teevee remote and the money…or more specifically the credit card.
Losing control means the house runs too hot, the teevee stays on HGTV and the card gets maxed out over and over.
This is truth .
In my house, it stays too cold (hot flashes) and the TV stays on Hallmark. I stay in my shop or my office and mind my own business.
My 18 month old granddaughter looks intently at my face. I have a grandson on the way (literally any day now), and I will compare, intensely, their differences.
This is the first chance I’ll have to do this since 1 of my sisters had all girls, 1 brother had all girls and my other brother and sister had all boys.
It’s a testament to the absurdity of our current culture that this is even a thing. Anyone with a clue and without a social justice axe to grind can spend two minutes at a playground populated by toddlers and easily see that on average boys are on average much more aggressive, much more physically powerful and much less cautious than girls.
Oh, but two year olds have been trained by the sexist, patriarchal system to behave in ways counter to their biological nature? Right.
Such nonsense would never even be considered by a rational society.
My wife has an engineering degree. She was always the more empathetic of us, the most emotional, and the most cautious towards any risk (said the risk-taking, cold and calculating, emotionally detached one).
But then she got cancer. The surgery, radiation and chemo were bad enough (she still says sometimes she has “chemo brain”, and lacks firm recall of memories that happened before the disease). But the “maintenance meds” she was on for a decade worked by destroying every milligram of ESTROGEN that her body produced. And since puberty, her brain SWAM in an estrogen sea for four decades – which was cut off OVERNIGHT.
Now she watches Rachel Maddow and similar tripe and CANNOT immediately see it as nonsense – I fear the sudden cutoff and subsequent denial of estrogen has affected her rational discrimination in favor of emotional evaluation. She can still see whether a given insurance deal is better or worse than a current one, but she cannot “let go” of the Russiagate fraud, and now the impeachment hoax – it’s as if she wants them to be true, so they must be. It doesn’t seem to matter that Mueller was a washout – it’s because Trump somehow “got to him”, or “suppressed / ignored the truth”. It doesn’t matter that Pelosi, Schumer, etc. got rich on Congressional salaries – that doesn’t indicate corruption. It doesn’t matter how many retractions and outright lies the NYT gets caught in – they are trying to report the news, and haste causes inaccuracies.
In short, I fear she is turning into an NPC – just like millions of others who NEVER had the education, cunning or simple street smarts to recognize when they have been conned. The kind of people who keep re-electing Pelosi, Schumer, Cummings (until yesterday when he died), Nadler, Schiff, various RINOs as well….
Yikes, I don’t know how I would deal with that if my wife went bolshevik. I am glad we are of the same mindset (well, except for building 7 and the moon landings)
“her brain SWAM in an estrogen sea for four decades”
It’s the cougar syndrome, the irrational estrogen in white women gives way to the wild testosterone and they go boy crazy one last glorious time before the lights go out.
Latinas do not have that problem because they have a 50/50 summer blend of estrogen and testosterone from puberty, they are hot and irrational at the same time.
I think there is something to the relationship of women’s mental health and surgical menopause.
Was it Carlin who said, Think of how crazy the average woman is and realize half of them are crazier than that.
Was talking to the Blonde Indian from Oklahoma just last eventide. She is one of those women who gag at the sight of a scar (mine are NOT visible except the neckline or if my head is shaved… which does happen).
So, I tell her how many inches of scars (34.5 total) I now have on my formerly Pensacola Beachworthy bod and she exclaims: “Gross! Can I see?”
For part of my adventures this summer, I took some really clever pink and blue stuffed animals into the red white and blue rock escapades. And, the kids discovered that red and blue make purple.
They also learned that once you make purple, you cannot extract the red or blue again.
That is an important thing to learn about mixing things together. Some things can never be undone.
Or unsaid.
But, they can be forgotten or left behind.
I had surgical menopause TWO TIMES. One of my ovaries exploded basically (I know, tmi…) and the surgeon left a piece of one* and it regenerated!
So, I had to have a followup hysterectomy following my emergency hysterectomy. Nick got a double dose of Hormone Cray Cray.
*Okay, I actually went back to the original surgeon/gynecologist who did the emergency surgery and showed her the piece she missed in an ultrasound image.
She arranged for her partner to perform the follow-up hysterectomy as soon as possible, which I appreciated, but I really felt like I should have gotten one for free.
I stopped reading at Blonde Indian…
Hahahaha!
Is the lead singer 40?
Do cougars have an a minimum age limit?
The ‘professionals’ that do these studies are frauds with PhD’s. They can’t prove what they claim is true. All they have are opinions that they learned from their fraudulent teachers of their professional nonsense.
If you can’t prove something is empirically true, then you need to shut up. If all you have is some opinion on a topic then your guess is as good as mine and you need to shut up.
These fraudulent degrees should be rescinded. The practitioners of psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and all the other basket weaving ‘professions’ should go out and do honest work that can be measured empirically.