finsalscollons 2008-09-24
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
To be fair, the book has some valid points. For example, it admits that differences between male and female behaviour have a biological cause besides a cultural one. It teaches some bits of information which are useful to know. For example, about the female hormonal cycle. I won't explain about the lack of scientific rigueur of this book because this has been beautifully done in the reviews by David H. Peterzell and Linda Hirshman. I wanted to add something new.
This is one of the most sexist books I have read in a long time. The subtext of this book, the idea which is hammered once and again throughout the book can be summarized like that: "The female brain is superior in everything with respect to the male brain, except for sexual desire and aggression"
Even more outraging is the view of the author towards men who are depicted like some kind of Neandhertals, clearly inferior creatures who are unable to understand the subtleness and goodness of women and are only able of aggression and disruptive behavior. Let's see an example from page 21 :
"So why is a girl born with such a highly tuned machine [her brain] for reading faces [...]? This is the result of millenia of [...] evolutionary hardwiring that once has - and probably still has - real consequences for survival. If you can read faces [...], you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, aggressive male is going to do. And since you're smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman - or cavemen".
Look how men are depicted. Bigger, aggressive people who want to attack women. Even more, to defend from such a threat, women have to band with each other. Hello? Is it anything inside the author's brain? Have you seen band of females to protect from males anywhere in the world?
The ones who have ALWAYS protected females from danger have been MEN. When a thief enters a home, it is the male who is going to see what happens while the woman tries to stay in a safe place. When a band is trying to attack a local village, it is the local men who get their guns and go out to face the danger, while women stay in their homes. When an army is trying to invade a country, armies composed of men protect their women for being invaded and submitted. Men die for women to be safe. But the author has such a negative view of men that indulges in a fantasy of women banding themselves, which is absurd and has never happened.
This could be only a mistake, but the book is full of derogatory language against men. "[The boys] would break anything [the girls] have created. The boys pushed the girls around, refused to take turns and would ignore the request of a girl to stop or to give the toy back" (page 11), "[Boys don't use language to get consensus the way girls do but] use language to command others, get things done, brag, threaten, ignore a partner's suggestion and override each other's attempts to speak. It was never long after Joseph's arrival on the playground that Leyla ended up in tears" (page 22). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
On the contrary, women are depicted as a nearly angelical creatures. "If you are a girl, you are programmed to make sure you keep social harmony" (page 21). Hello? Has somebody worked in an office full of women and see the meanness, intrigues and subtle backstabbing that they have in their social interactions? And what about a woman in a divorce court? Girls are not always mean and boy are not always good but it is certainly not the other way around either.
After reading this book, I can't help wondering why over the last five decades women, who make up roughly 50 percent of the world's population, have claimed only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, 8 percent in literature and 0 percent in economics. Why is this? If women are so superior to men, if men are only able to obsess about sex and proceed to aggression (because "they are marinated by testosterone") and are superated in any other aspect by women?
(During that period Jews, who were an oppressed minority and who comprise less than 0.5 percent the world's population, have claimed 32 percent of the Nobel Prizes for medicine, 32 percent for physics, 39 percent for economics and 29 percent of all science awards.)
If you are reading this, nearly everything that you see right now has been invented (and done) by a man. Your computer, your Internet, the Web, your room, the electrical power and so on. Maybe men are not that useless and dumb after all, are we?
I am really sorry for the author's son. It won't be easy for him to grow up with a mother who has so much contempt towards boys.
So if you are a feminist eager to feel superior to men, please buy this book and you will be reassured in your beliefs.
