Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Reviews tagging 'Sexual harassment'

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

4 reviews

suneaters's review

funny informative medium-paced

4.5

The beginning and ending of Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine are really strong. She has a witty and entertaining style of writing. The middle of the book is very repetitive and was hard to get through. Still, there was a lot of useful information breaking down the myth of "brain sex" and women just "naturally and biologically" not being good at math. There's a lot here that still applies to modern sexism. I saw some reviews complain trans people aren't mentioned enough, but this entire book takes down the myth that one's behavior can mean you are actually the other sex. Pay attention next time.

THE BRAIN SEX MYTH

Male and female brains are of course far more similar than they are different. Not only is there generally great overlap in ‘male’ and ‘female’ patterns, but also, the male brain is like nothing in the world so much as a female brain. (165)

There are some small differences on average if we group male and female brains, but in general these are so negligible as not to matter. Some male brains are more similar to female ones that other male ones, showing that these differences aren't a big deal and don't make you the other sex.

There is no reliable way to translate these brain differences into educational strategies. (166)

Besides, there's no way to use "brain differences" in most settings anyway, including education as demonstrated in the quote above.

A NEW ERA OF MODERN MISOGYNY

By which one must suppose they wou'd have their Readers understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats! (xix-xx)

So many prominent female figures from history are now having their femaleness dismissed. Their great deeds are taken as proof of their maleness (Hatshepsut, Joan of Arc, and more).

Indeed, subtle triggers for stereotype threat seem to be more harmful than blatant cues, which suggests the intriguing possibility that stereotype threat may be more of an issue for women now than it was decades ago, when people were more loose-lipped when it came to denigrating female ability. (32)

A similar confusion over sex identity surrounded Sally Haslanger, now a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she received a distinction in her graduate exams, ‘it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman. (40)

This is actual biological essentialism on steroids. From "men are naturally smart" to "if you are smart, you are male". This is pushed on women today even from supposed feminists.

For the easiest solution to the problem of being female in a setting in which women are made to feel that they are inferior and do not belong is to become as unfeminine as possible....The women also took up antifemale attitudes, denigrating other women as emotional, and ‘heaped scorn’ on women-focused programs and any work-related gatherings dominated by women. ‘By definition nothing important is going on in this room: In this company men hold the power’, was how one female engineer explained her policy of avoiding female work gatherings. The awful, intractable incompatibility of being a woman in a male-dominated SET workplace was starkly encapsulated by one woman quoted in the report who described how, more and more, she had developed a "discomfort with being a woman." (52)

This shows how discomfort with being female is promoted via living in a sexist society and how women who face discrimination become more and more uncomfortable with their sex as it is seen as marking them as "lesser". It also shows how women can take on anti-feminist viewpoints.

GENDER HURTS AND IT HURTS EARLY
Even children aren't exempt from gender roles and stereotypes. There's this idea that because children are young, they haven't internalized these yet, but that simply isn't true.

Your typical preschooler enjoys a detailed knowledge of gender roles, but remains a bit hazy regarding the hard, biological fact that males differ from females when it comes to the allocation of such items as penises, testicles and vaginas. (215)

Children are primed to see a girl cut her hair short and go "boy" or see a boy play with a doll and go "girl".

Children’s views about gender differences reach ‘peak rigidity’ between five and seven years of age. From then on, they increasingly understand that it is not only boys who like to be active, and make things and sometimes be nasty, and it is not only women who can be affectionate, cry, and clean and tidy the house. (231)

Of course they will accept that idea that not fulfilling a stereotype means you aren't your biological sex.

Yet even before they reach school, children can go well beyond the surface of gender associations and make inferences about nothing less than male and female inner nature itself. They also seem to learn, uncomfortably young, that females are ‘other’. (224)

What does this do to female children? How can we say children can know they are the wrong sex when even before their first day of school, children know women are other?

We’ve seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. (211)

Parents also treat unborn fetuses and very young babies differently depending on their sex. There's no moment from the time sex is discerned that gender roles and stereotypes aren't in play.

(In this carefully designed study, no gender differences in eye gaze were found in newborns although, interestingly, they did find gender differences in eye gaze in a follow-up three to four months later. This, they point out, suggests the possibility "that the gender-typed behavior pattern is not innate but, instead, learned in early infancy.") (115)

Even in parents who attempt a gender neutral method of raising children can fall victim to this.

Here was a mother – and, let’s not forget, not just any old mother, but the sort of feminist mother so beloved of unisex-parenting-gone-wrong stories – finding herself socializing her child into gender roles before he was even born. (193)

Nor does the use of gender-ambiguous animals or characters in books help to increase female numbers. This is because mothers almost always label gender-neutral characters in picture books as male. If it doesn’t look like a female, it’s male. I’ve tried labelling neutral animals and characters as female when reading to my children – it feels extremely unnatural, as you will discover if you try for yourself. (The reason is probably that we have a tendency to think of people or creatures as male unless otherwise indicated. In other words, as has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.) (223)

"Gender neutral" in a misogynistic society is "male", just like how if a character's race is not specified, it is assumed to be "white". That's why a gender neutral world is like a color blind one. The problem is not solved.

THE GENDER LIE
All these differences in men and women aren't because of some magical biological inclination towards femininity or being better or worse at schooling.

The take-home message of these studies is that we can’t separate people’s empathizing ability and motivation from the social situation. The salience of cultural expectations about gender and empathizing interacts with a mind that knows to which gender it belongs. (22)

Nothing is "hardwired" in our abilities or personalities due to our biological sex.

As cognitive neuroscientist Giordana Grossi points out, terms like hardwired – on loan from computer science where it refers to fixedness – translate poorly to the domain of neural circuits that change and learn throughout life, indeed, in response to life. (178)

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woweewhoa's review

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informative slow-paced

4.5

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stevia333k's review

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emotional funny informative reflective tense fast-paced

4.25

So this is a great book, and it gave me a lot of flashbacks about the sexism i faced as a kid. it gave me a lot of insight into how backwards the world i grew up in was (or how future tense i was). basically neurosexism is patriarchy trying to recuperate disability discourse in order to support segregation. the book describes this sort of backwardsness as a "half-changed world". basically fascists thought propaganda would maintain gender roles even though if people adhered to those they would starve to death from bullshit wages.

there were 2 points towards the end that were bullshit though:
- when the ideal of "gender neutral parenting" still keeps the stereotype of gender identity with genitalia, it's still sexist, it's still cissexist & it's still transphobic. like to say the least, it would be vulnerable to people who lose their genitalia or "2ndary sex characteristics" to injury, sickness, treatment, etc. (the genitalia doesn't break the stereotypes, it's merely 1 stereotype of many.)
- the penultimate paragraph shares a finding that "peak rigidity" about gender stereotyping hits at age 5 or 7, which is utter bullshit considering how tgnciq+ kids get targeted for bullying & such adults get targeted by sexist laws etc. There's even been a prison pipeline!

Children's views about gender differences reach "peak rigidity" between five and seven years of age.[17] From then on, they increasingly understand that it is not only boys who like ot be active, and make things and sometimes be nasty, and it is not only women who can be affectionate, cry, and clean and tidy the house. (The few children who don't come around to this insight often go on to have very successful careers writing popular books based on rigid gender stereotypes.)[18]
[17] Trautner, H.M., Ruble, D.N., Cyphers, L., Kirsten, B., Behrendt, R., & Hartmann, P. (2005). Rigidity and flexibility of gender stereotypes in childhood: Developmental or differential? *Infant and Child Development, 14*(4), 365-381
[18] This is a joke, rather than a scientific fact.

[There's more to this paragraph I'm going to just paraphrase to save on typing. She subtlely critiques this finding by saying these implicit stereotypings show up when the survivors get into positions of power, but frankly, I think this is too weak of a criticism (similar to how I think reducing gender stereotyping down to just genitals is anti-trans & anti-intersex, and gives too much wiggle room which neurosexism developed in), and ignores anti-bullying activism & the school to prison pipeline. Granted this book is from before 2007, but still.]

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nickdoris's review

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funny informative medium-paced

4.5

This is an incredibly researched book that takes a deep dive into the claim that there are “male brains” and “female brains” that have immutable consequences on the behaviors of their owners. She does a great job of showing how environmental conditions (especially society) can impact how people’s brains operate and even the wiring of said brains. I would love to give this book five stars but Fine seems to touch very little on gender nonconformity and same sex parenting, two areas that seem like they would provide helpful insights in the areas of gender and child socialization. Otherwise an eye opening book on gender ‘difference.’

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