bloodygranuaile: (good morning)
[personal profile] bloodygranuaile
Well, this has been quite a week for consuming media that pisses me right the fuck off! Largely because I am a miserable glutton for punishment when I'm ill.

Anyway, I had been intending to read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference for a while, but wanted to wait for a time when I didn't mind giving myself apoplexy. I knew it was about bad science, and bad science pisses me right the fuck off, particularly when bad science is held up over good any-sort-of-knowledge-from-other-fields because it's, like, sciencier. (My favorite example, where by "favorite" I mean "I almost fell out of my chair due to sheer appalled-ness when I first heard of it," is the study conducted a year or two ago that was widely reported as "proving" the "biological" and "evolutionary" basis for why pink is a girl color, when, in fact, pink as a girl color was invented by department stores in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, pink was considered a "more decided and manly color" than docile, feminine blue.) In addition to debunking some very crappy evo-psych, Fine also gives an excellent overview of the current field of neuroimaging--a field that, while it certainly can be useful and is quite scientifically exciting, is still in its infancy and prone to error--and relates it to some rather terrifying behavioral research (that nobody's ever heard about, because behavioral research isn't exciting enough to make the corporate news) indicating that people's ability to detect blatant nonsense goes right out the window when accompanied with a picture of a brain scan or a couple of words of neurobabble. Some of the overreaches in interpretation of "differences in brain activity" that show up on various imaging studies are seriously mindboggling, especially when you consider that we don't actually have perfect knowledge of what every tiny part of the brain does, and that you can get a response that shows up on an MRI by showing emotionally distressing photographs to a dead salmon.

If you don't get around to ever reading this book and you aren't as interested as I am in nitpicking bad science, here are the three major things I think you should know and remember:
1. Never take seriously any claims made by Louenn Brizendine.
2. Never take seriously any claims made by Simon Baron-Cohen.
3. Never take seriously any claims made by Leonard Sax.

These are the three most notorious hacks in the field of popularizing pseudoscientific neurononsense. Brizendine in particular is so bad that she caught the attention of Mark Liberman, the guy who runs LanguageLog, a linguistics blog with no particular focus on gender (except the grammatical kind) or even other social sciences. Liberman heard Brizendine's claim that women speak 20,000 words per day and men speak 7,000, and, being a professional studier of language and its use, wondered where she had gotten that number and why he had never heard it before. It turns out, that number is basically a pop psych urban legend--it is not the result of any study whatsoever. (Actual studies show that men and women both talk a lot, about 16,000 words per day for college educated persons. Also, anyone who thinks men only speak seven thousand words per day has never met...well, pretty much any of the men that I've ever met.) Appalled at this lack of scholarly rigor, the otherwise gender-uninterested Liberman found himself writing a massively long and fascinating series of posts at LanguageLog exhaustively fact-checking Brizendine's research and finding it somewhere between "riddled with errors" and "absurdly academically dishonest". (Another reason to adore LanguageLog! He suffers so we don't have to!)

While her takedowns of bad evopsych and the semi-religious treatment given to pictures of brains are awesome, I think my favorite part of the book is the gentle scorn heaped upon passive, ill-thought-out, Larry Summers-style "gender-neutral parenting," where educated, intelligent, well-intentioned, white upper-middle-class parents with approximately no sociological imagination and, apparently, no familiarity with any social sciences whatsoever, half-assedly give their little girl a truck or refrain from beating the shit out of their son if he looks at a Barbie, self-congratulatorily label it "gender-neutral parenting," and then act all surprised when their child develops a recognizable gender identity and decide it must be biological. Fine lays out the problems with this kind of thinking in way the fuck kinder terms than I will: too many people who really ought to be smarter than that, considering their incredibly educated and privileged positions in life, nevertheless subscribe to the ridiculous Western rugged-individualism myth that we aren't affected by our environments, we totally are who we are and got where we've gotten all by ourselves by the power of our own personal awesomeness, we don't have a culture (or at least our culture doesn't affect us) because culture is for those weird, weak, uncivilized other people and we're too smart for that. This irrational belief in our imperviousness to the entirety of our own life experiences frequently becomes modified when said privileged rugged individuals have children, to the now equally self-centered belief that children are ruggedly individualistic and utterly impervious to all life experiences except the influence of parents. Combined with the even more irrational belief that the only kind of parental behavior is conscious and deliberate parental behavior, highly educated parents reach the bizarre conclusion that anything their child says or does that they didn't deliberately set out intending to teach them must be completely biological. I'll be right back; I have to go vomit from laughing so hard.

Since nice white people are likely the primary audience for this book, Fine doesn't rip soi-disant "gender-neutral" parents a new one with the mockery she does the bad social scientists and popularizers. Instead, she lays out a detailed list, in the form of a nice nonthreatening thought-experiment, of some of the ways gender is communicated to small children on a daily basis. Then she lays out an even more interesting list of the steps Sandra Bem (the psychologist who invented the Bem Sex Role Inventory) and her husband took to attempt to actually gender-neutrally rear their children. (After setting out this list, even Fine cannot help but have a few laughs at the expense of other "gender-neutral" parents.) From then she goes into a lot of really fascinating psychological studies about both parents and children's responses to perceived gender cues. My main takeaway from this is that I can never have children because I don't have the stamina to consciously do the opposite of all the long list of things we're trained to unconsciously do when we gender children for the entirety of another person's life, but I am the sort of person who would totally beat myself up just about forever when I found myself doing things "wrong"; ie, in keeping with discernible gender norms.

(Before you ask, and also because my Mom reads this blog (hi, Mom!): no, I am not upset with my parents about gendering me as a child. I don't think they ever claimed to raise me "gender-neutral," just "not sexist," which I think they did a good job of. The degree of work it would take to gender-neutrally raise a child is flat-out impossible, and since socialization is absolutely required for a child's brain development and the development of, for example, verbal skills, there has to be a trade-off between exposure to dysfunctional gender norms and, y'know, being isolated. I was raised with a deliberate, healthy, and I think pretty effective dose of earnest 90's girl-power feminism starting at a very early age, and I had some of my own personal forms of misfit-ness that I think helped keep me positioned somewhat "outside" certain aspects of femininity (and, as I got older, develop some self-awareness of my own internalizations of dysfunctional cultural tropes, even if getting over them is quite another issue). I think some of this distance definitely was "paid for" in social skills, so Louenn Brizendine can take her blather about my brain being biologically hardwired to read people's body language and shove it. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm still working really hard on interpreting any sort of body language as anything other than "This person will think it is weird if I talk to them.")

Overall, I must say I found the book to be excellently done--a wide variety of very complex research is rendered accessible to reasonably intelligent laypersons, and Fine's writing style is witty and much gentler in tone than in substance (certainly much gentler than anything I say about similar topics; bad science puts me in Sneering Disdainful Elitism mode turned up to 11). She pops a lot of stubbornly pernicious cultural myths with science and humor, and with bonus humorously bad science from the Victorian era. So read this book, and next time someone tries to be all like "I know this isn't politically correct, but such-and-such gendered behavior hasn't been completely disappeared from society even though ladies can vote and wear pants now, therefore SCIENCE," you can be like "No, actually, SCIENCE" except your science will be not totally bogus.
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