A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  61. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 2009), 449.

  62. Ibid., 448.

  63. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 350.

  64. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Summers is cited as having said that “the evidence for his speculative hypothesis that biological differences may partially account for this gender gap comes instead from scholars cited in Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s best-selling 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.” Daniel J. Hemel, “Sociologist Cited by Summers Calls His Talk ‘Uninformed,’ ” The Harvard Crimson, January 19, 2005, www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/19/sociologist-cited-by-summers-calls-his.

  65. Larry Summers, “Remarks at NEBR Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” January 14, 2005, www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php.

  66. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1st ed., 1871), 316–17.

  67. Angus J. Bateman, “Intrasexual Selection in Drosophila,” Heredity 2 (1948): 363.

  68. Ibid., 365.

  69. Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man: 1871–1971, ed. Bernard Campbell (Chicago: Aldine, 1972): 136–81.

  70. Patricia Adair Gowaty, Yong-Kyu Kim, and Wyatt W. Anderson, “No Evidence of Sexual Selection in a Repetition of Bateman’s Classic Study of Drosophila Melanogaster,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012): 11740–45, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1207851109. The authors note, “However, bias in the methodology is obvious in that mothers were statistically significantly less often counted as parents than fathers, a biological impossibility in diploid sexual species.”

  71. Patricia Adair Gowaty and William C. Bridges, “Behavioral, Demographic, and Environmental Correlates of Extra Pair Copulations in Eastern Bluebirds, Scialia sialis,” Behavioral Ecology 2 (1991): 339–50.

  72. Russell Bonduriansky and Ronald J. Brooks, “Male Antler Flies (Protopiophila litigate; Diptera: Piophilidae) Are More Selective Than Females in Mate Choice,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 76 (1998): 1277–85.

  73. Elisabet Forsgren, Trond Amundsen, Asa A. Borg, and Jens Bjelvenmark, “Unusually Dynamic Sex Roles in Fish,” Nature 429 (2004): 551–54.

  74. Robert R. Warner, D. Ross Robertsen, and Egbert Leigh, Jr., “Sex Change and Sexual Selection: The Reproductive Biology of a Labrid Fish Is Used to Illuminate Theory of Sex Change,” Science 190, no. 4215 (1975): 633–38.

  75. Marcel Eens and Rianne Pinxten, “Sex Role Reversal in Vertebrates: Behavioral and Endocrinological Accounts,” Behavioral Processes 51 (2000): 135–47.

  76. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,” in Feminist Approaches to Science, ed. Ruth Bleier (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986), 137.

  77. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  78. Michel Ohmer, “Challenging Sexual Selection Theory: The Baby Became the Bathwater Years Ago, but No One Noticed Until Now,” Discoveries: John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, no. 9 (Spring 2008): 16.

  79. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Concerning the Perceptions,” in General Treatise on Physiological Optics (1910), vol. 3, ed. James P. C. Southall (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 5.

  80. Peggy Seriès and Aaron Seitz, “Learning What to Expect (in Visual Perception),” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 24 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00668. The authors advocate an approach to expectation through Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference and Bayesian statistical inference.

  81. William Wright, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality (New York: Knopf, 1998), 80.

  82. Genetics and Human Behavior: the Ethical Context (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2002), 41.

  83. Héctor González-Pardo and Marino Pérez Alvarez, “Epigenetics and Its Implications for Psychology,” Psicothema 25, no. 1 (2013): 5.

  84. Bella English, “Led by the Child Who Simply Knew,” The Boston Globe, December 11, 2011.

  85. Myrtle McGraw, “The Experimental Twins,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment: Myrtle McGraw and the Maturation Controversy, ed. Thomas C. Dalton and Victor W. Bergman (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 110.

  86. Myrtle McGraw, “Perspectives of Infancy and Early Childhood,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 47.

  87. Quoted in Donald A. Dewsbury, “Introduction: The Developmental Psychobiology of Myrtle McGraw,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 213.

  88. Ibid.

  89. Paul Dennis, “Introduction: Johnny and Jimmy and the Maturation Controversy: Popularization, Misunderstanding and Setting the Record Straight,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 75.

  90. Dr. Langford, quoted in Myrtle McGraw, “Later Development of Children Specially Trained During Infancy: Johnny and Jimmy at School Age,” in Beyond Heredity and Environment, 94.

  91. Ibid., 98.

  92. Stephen M. Downes, “Heritability,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2015 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, forthcoming, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/heredity/.

  93. Jeremy C. Ahouse and Robert Berwick, “Darwin on the Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Is in Fashion—But Is Any of It True?” Boston Review, April/May 1998.

  94. Letter to the editor, New York Times, January 1, 2015.

  95. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 347.

  96. Ibid., 348.

  97. Richard Lynn, “Sorry, Men ARE More Brainy than Women (and More Stupid Too!) It’s a Simple Scientific Fact, Says One of Britain’s Top Dons,” Daily Mail, May 8, 2010.

  98. Scott H. Liening and Robert A. Josephs, “It Is Not Just About Testosterone: Physiological Mediators and Moderations of Testosterone’s Behavioral Effects,” Social and Personality Compass 4, no. 11 (2010): 983.

  99. For these findings, discussion, and numerous other studies, see Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 81–98.

  100. David M. Stoff and Robert B. Cairns, ed., Aggression and Violence: Genetic, Neurobiological, and Biosocial Perspective (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 317.

  101. Jordan W. Finkelstein et al., “Estrogen or Testosterone Increases Self-Reported Aggressive Behaviors in Hypogonadal Adolescents,” Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism 82, no. 8 (1997): 2433–38. See also J. Martin Ramirez, “Hormones and Aggression in Childhood,” Aggression and Violent Behaviors 8 (2003): 621–44.

  102. Cristoph Eisenegger et al., “Prejudice and Truth About the Effect of Testosterone on Human Bargaining Behavior,” Nature 463 (2010): 356–59. For an account of hormones and their ideological uses in science, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women. (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For a critique of sex difference in brain studies, see Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  103. Michael Naef, quoted in “Testosterone Does Not Induce Aggression,” University of Zurich News Releases, December 8, 2009.

  104. Richard Alleyne, “Testosterone Makes People More Friendly and Reasonable,” The Telegraph, December 9, 2009.

  105. Wouter De la Marche et al., “No Aggression in Four-Year-Old Boy with an Androgen-Producing Tumor: Case Report,” Annals of General Psychiatry 4, no. 17 (2005), doi: 1186/1744-859X-4-17.

  106. Allan Mazur, “Dominance, Violence and the Neurohormonal Nexus,” in Handbook of Neurosociology, ed. David D. Franks and Jonathan H. Turner (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 367.

  107. Lee T. Gettler, Thomas W. McDade, Alan B. Feranil, and Christopher W. Kuzawa, “Longitudinal Evidence that Fatherhood Decreases Testosterone in Human Males,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 39 (2011): 16194–99.

  108. For dopamine
release in placebo, see R. de la Fuente Fernández, S. Lidstone, and A. J. Stoessl, “Placebo Effect and Dopamine Release,” Journal of Neural Transmission, Supplementa 70 (2006): 415–18. For sham surgery report, see Raine Sihvonen et al., “Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy Versus Sham Surgery for Degenerative Meniscal Tear,” The New England Journal of Medicine 369 (2013): 2515–24.

  109. Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein, “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication,” Prevention and Treatment 1, article 0002a (2008), doi: 10.1037/1522-3736.1.1.12a.

  110. Fabrizio Benedetti, “The Opposite Effects of the Opiate Antagonist Naloxone and the Cholecystokinin Antagonist Proglumide on Placebo Analgesia,” Pain 64, no. 3 (1996): 535–43.

  111. Fabrizio Benedetti et al., “Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Placebo Effect,” The Journal of Neuroscience 25, no. 45 (2005): 10390–402.

  112. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, London (1664), 185–6.

  113. Anne Harrington, introduction to The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Anne Harrington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5.

  114. Robert Ader, “The Role of Conditioning in Pharmacotherapy,” in The Placebo Effect, 138–65.

  115. Perpetus C. Ibekwe and Justin U. Achor, “Pyschosocial and Cultural Aspects of Pseudocyesis,” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 50, no. 2 (2008): 112–16.

  116. Juan J. Tarin and Antonio Cano, “Endocrinology and Physiology of Pseudocyesis,” Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology 11 (2013): 39.

  117. T. Tulandi, R. A. McInnes, and S. Lal, “Altered Pituitary Hormone Secretion in Patients with Pseudocyesis,” Fertility, Sterility 40, no. 5 (1982): 637–41.

  118. Deidre Barrett, “Trance-Related Pseudocyesis in a Male,” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (1988), doi:10.1080/00207148808410516.

  119. Jean-Martin Charcot, quoted in Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 194.

  120. See Onno Van der Hart and Rutger Horst, “The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 4 (1989). For another more recent perspective on Janet, see John F. Kihlstrom, “Trauma and Memory Revisited,” in Memory and Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Blackwell, 2006), 259–91.

  121. P. W. Halligan, B. S. Athwal, D. A. Oakley, and R. S. J. Frackowiak, “The Functional Anatomy of a Hypnotic Paralysis: Implications for Conversion Hysteria,” The Lancet 365 (2005): 986–87.

  122. V. Voon, C. Gallea, and M. Hallet, “The Involuntary Nature of Conversion Disorder,” Neurology 74, no. 3 (2010): 223–28.

  123. For a summary of findings on physiological differences among personalities that goes back to research in the nineteenth century, see Philip M. Coons, “Psychophysiological Aspects of Multiple Personality Disorder,” Dissociation 1, no. 1 (1998): 47–53. For a more recent description with a case study, see Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach, 7th ed., ed. David Barlow and V. Durand (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015), 201–7. For a wholly skeptical position, see H. Merklebach, G. J. Devilly, and E. Rassin, “Alters in Dissociative Identity Disorder: Metaphors or Genuine Entities?” Clinical Psychological Review 22, no. 4 (2002): 481–97.

  124. B. Waldvogel and Ulrich A. Strasburger, “Sighted and Blind in One Person: A Case Report and Conclusions on the Psychoneurobiology of Vision,” Nervenarzt 78, no. 11 (2007): 1303–9.

  125. Heather Berlin, “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious,” Neuropsychoanalysis 13, no. 1 (2011): 5–31.

  126. David Morris, “Placebo, Pain, and Belief,” in The Placebo Effect, 202.

  127. Margaret Cavendish, quoted in Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 95.

  128. In The Rise of Embryology, Arthur William Mayer presents an often articulated view, which is that for Aristotle “the male semen” contributes “the immaterial or controlling force in generation” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939), 135. Another view is closer to my own understanding of the role of sperm in Generation of Animals. In On Intuition and Discursive Reasoning in Aristotle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 92 Victor Kal writes, “For this matter, sperm, is not potentially a living body, so that the soul cannot become an actual soul by the combination with sperm. Sperm can only transport the potentially sensitive soul. The sensitive soul does not gain actuality until it has joined what is potentially the body of a living being endowed with sense.”

  129. See Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, ed. Cynthia A. Freeland (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998). See also Deborah K. W. Modrak, “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature,” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 207–22. For a defense of Aristotle’s views on women, see Paul Schollmeier, “Aristotle and Women: Household and Political Roles,” Polis 20, nos. 1–2 (2003): 22–42. To get a flavor of the struggles over Aristotle, see Larry Arnhart, “A Sociobiological Defense of Aristotle’s Sexual Politics,” International Political Science Review 15 (1994): 389–415 and an opposing opinion by James Bernard Murphy, “Aristotle, Feminism, and Biology: A Response to Larry Arnhart,” International Political Science Review 15, no. 4 (1994): 417–26.

  130. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1146.

  131. Ibid.

  132. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 41.

  133. Henry Beighton, quoted in Schiebinger, 42.

  134. Ibid., 44.

  135. Paul Broca, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “Women’s Brains,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 152.

  136. Ibid.

  137. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 350–51.

  138. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875), 11.

  139. Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 27.

  140. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 355–56.

  141. Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist 6, no. 6 (2005): 581–92.

  142. David I. Miller and Diane F. Halpern, “The New Science of Cognitive Sex Differences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18, iss. 1 (2014): 37–45.

  143. The following is taken from a section on cognitive sex differences in a psychology textbook under the heading “Verbal, Reading and Writing Skills”:

  “Females consistently score much higher than males on tests of verbal fluency, reading comprehension, spelling, and, especially basic writing skills. Although you rarely read about the ‘gender gap’ in writing skills, researchers Larry Hodges and Amy Newell (1995) have pointed out, ‘The data imply that males are, on average, at a rather profound disadvantage in the performance of this basic skill.’ ” In Don H. Hockenbury and Sandra E. Hockenbury, ed., Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 2005). The same year the textbook was published, Janet Shibley Hyde’s meta-analysis, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” found the difference in language abilities between men and women to be so small, it made no statistical difference.

  144. For a paper that found strong effects of prenatal testosterone (T) on spatial skills, see Sheri A. Berenbaum et al., “Early Androgen Effects on Spatial and Mechanical Abilities: Evidence from Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia,” Behavioral Neuroscience 126 (2012): 86–96. For a paper that found T effects in spatial rotation but found them also to enhance nonrotation skills, see Carole K. Hooven et al., “The Relationship of Male Testosterone to Components of Mental Rotation,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 782–90. For a paper that found a link between T in puberty and mental rotation, see Eero Vuoksimaa et al., “Pubertal Testosterone Predicts Mental Rotation Performance of Young Adu
lt Males,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 37, no. 11 (2012): 1791–1800. For a careful overview of the data on testosterone, the variable findings, and brain research in general on sex differences, see also Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  145. David A. Puts et al., “Salivary Testosterone Does Not Predict Mental Rotation Performance in Men or Women,” Hormones and Behavior (2010), doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2010.03.005. The authors do not rule out the effects of T at organizational moments of development.

  146. R. De List and J. L. Wolford, “Improving Children’s Mental Accuracy with Computer Game Playing,” Journal of Genetic Psychology 163, no. 3 (2002): 272–82.

  147. Amanda Kanoy, Sheila Brownlow, and Tiffany F. Sowers, “Can Rewards Obviate Stereotype Threat Effects on Mental Rotation Tasks?” Psychology 3, no. 7 (2012): 542–47; Maryjane Wraga et al., “Stereotype Susceptibility Narrows the Gender Gap in Imagined Self-Rotation Performance,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5, no. 8 (2006): 813–19. Maryjane Wraga et al., “Neural Basis of Stereotype-Induced Shifts in Women’s Mental Rotation Performance,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 7 (2007): 12–19; See also, Matthew S. McGlone and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat, Identity Salience, and Spatial Reasoning,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 27, no. 5 (2006): 486–93.

  148. Thomas D. Parsons et al., “Sex Differences in Mental Rotation and Spatial Rotation in a Virtual Environment,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 555–62.