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bookwormmichelle's review against another edition
4.0
This was a very interesting little book. I have never felt I fit terribly well into gender categories myself. I'm not a special class or anything . . . I'm just not . . . girly. Giggling girls talking about makeup and hair and nail polish always seemed like aliens. Or, really, since there were lots of them and only one of me, clearly I was the alien. But I certainly didn't want to be a boy either--I'm not athletic and I don't like to play in the dirt. So . . . I'm an alien there too. I also get annoyed when I hear all the stuff people say . . . "Women will never be equal in tech jobs because their brains are different. Women will never be the top earners because they are not cutthroat enough." Bleh. That's so dumb. This is a good book for that. Joel argues there certainly ARE differences in males and females--it's just that those differences are a patchwork, many different traits, some of whom a given man or woman may be "female" in and some in which they may be "male" so the idea that there is a "female brain" and a "male brain" is really just not correct at all. This was plenty freeing to me, a female who like to read and bake but not do nail polish or makeup. This was very enlightening and I enjoyed all but the last chapter . .. . when the author says the right thing to do is to get rid of gender as a concept entirely. I'm pretty sure that's not going to work. I'd be pretty happy with enough room in the categories that I . . . don't feel like an alien anymore. I'm against aggressively gendering everyone from prebirth, I think. (Enough with the crazy insane gender reveal parties, everyone.) But I don't know that we'll ever get to a nongendered society.
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