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PAN Discussion Group Wednesday March 29th  2006
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First a piece from Newsweek about new views on genetic differences between the genders

THE TRUTH ABOUT GENDER ,  By: Guterl, Fred, Newsweek (Atlantic Edition), , 3/28/2005, Vol. 145, Issue 13

The rift between the sexes just got a whole lot bigger. A new study has found that women and men differ genetically almost as much as humans differ from chimpanzees.

When it comes to gender differences, everybody's an expert. But George Lazarus is a bit more expert than most. Although he doesn't study the subject formally, as a pediatrician in New York City he sees a lot of children, who are, after all, far better than adults at expressing their essential natures. One girl's parents, for instance, set out to raise her without "gender bias" that might hinder her success later in life. When she turned 3, they eschewed dolls and gave her toy trucks instead. The girl went off to her bedroom to play. When the parents checked up on her, they found her tucking the trucks in bed for the night. "Shhhh!" she said. "They're sleeping."

It's a story that Larry Summers, the beleaguered president of Harvard University, might appreciate. Summers caused a firestorm when he suggested several weeks ago that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" might be the principal reason the university has fewer females in the sciences and engineering than males; he lost a vote of no confidence in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last week. Summers may be guilty of social indiscretion, but is he wrong, scientifically speaking? Does biology play no significant role in determining the talents and behaviors of men and women?

Considering the importance of the question, few studies have addressed it. Nevertheless, in recent years, scientists have been finding that the biological rift between men and women is larger than previously thought. To an extent few would have believed a few years ago, the center of gravity of scientific opinion on gender has begun to shift--and it's making everybody uncomfortable.

One of the most intriguing findings concerns the genetic differences between men and women. A study published last week in the journal Nature puts this difference at about 1 percent. Considering that the genetic makeup of chimpanzees and humans differs by only 1.5 percent, this is significant. "You could say that there are two human genomes, one for men and one for women," says Huntington Willard, a geneticist at Duke University and coauthor of the article. The study did not spell out exactly which genes do what. Rather, its results were like looking at the innards of two almost identical clocks and finding that in fact each has an altogether different arrangement of gears.

Scientists have long known that a person's sex is determined by two chromosomes, or bundles of genes--a woman inherits two X chromosomes, one from each parent, while a man inherits an X from mom and a Y from dad. For the past 40 years, scientists have thought that the extra X chromosome in females shuts down, while the other works alone. The Nature study, though, found that about 20 percent of the genes on the duplicate X chromosome--about 200 genes in all--remain active. Men, by contrast, have only one active X chromosome (plus a few genes on the puny Y chromosome). Not only are women genetically more complex and varied than men, they differ widely from one another.

Only a few years ago, scientists used to think that hormones were the primary mechanism of gender. The Y chromosome was assumed to do little but trigger a cascade of genes scattered among the other 22 human chromosomes, which ends with the production of the testes. Hormones still do a lot of the heavy lifting--with one crucial difference. Scientists have found that while hormones wreak havoc on just about every part of adolescent physiology, they have almost no effect on brain development. Studies of girls born in triplets, sandwiched in the womb between two brothers, show that although the girls acquire some masculine traits due to a heavier-than-normal dose of testosterone, their brains are unaffected. Genetic variations, on the other hand, have a huge impact on the brain. Down-syndrome boys, born with extra genes from chromosome 21, are cognitively impaired. When it comes to the brain, genes rule.

How, then, do female brains differ from male brains? Scientists are only beginning to address this question. So far, it seems clear that men and women think differently in significant ways. When navigating a maze, men tend to think spatially (go north for 200 meters and then turn left), while women look for landmarks. Brain scans of men and women engaged in rhyming words show that they use different brain circuits to perform the same task. Women also have 15 to 20 percent more gray matter (ordinary neurons) than men. And their white matter (long neurons that help the brain distribute its processing tasks) is concentrated at the juncture between the brain's left and right hemispheres, and may help women use both sides of their brain for language-related tasks.

There's also anecdotal evidence. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a college entry exam, women consistently score lower than men on the mathematics portion. (They do better on language skills, but still score slightly lower than men.) And then there are things like the makeup of the Harvard faculty. Such real-world evidence, of course, doesn't tell us what is cause and what is effect. To what extent does environment--education, upbringing, nutrition, exposure to stress, chemicals and so forth--play a role? Are boys slower to develop verbal skills because of their genes, or because they spend more time playing with trucks than talking with their friends?

Is Larry Summers right or wrong? At the moment, there's too little data to say. Even when scientists eventually come to understand the genetic clockwork, there's a good chance the answer won't be quite so simplistic. Individuals vary so widely in ability that any aggregate difference between men and women won't likely affect the ambitions of any aspiring scientist or playwright. Besides, genes can confer both advantages and disadvantages. The chances are pretty good that we haven't yet measured them all.

FEMALE TRAITS             MALE TRAITS

Cooperative               Aggressive

Prone to autoimmune       Prone to heart disease

  disease

Navigate by landmarks     Navigate by spatial reasoning

Mature earlier            Mature later

Better on language        Better on math than

  than math tests          language tests

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Next a piece from Scientific American with more info about the different physiology of men and women; funnily enough, size doesn’t matter!

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000363E3-1806-1264-980683414B7F0000

His Brain, Her Brain     Scientific American April 25, 2005

On a gray day in mid-January, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, suggested that innate differences in the build of the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science. His remarks reignited a debate that has been smoldering for a century, ever since some scientists sizing up the brains of both sexes began using their main finding--that female brains tend to be smaller--to bolster the view that women are intellectually inferior to men.

To date, no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic distinction in math, physics or engineering. And the brains of men and women have been shown to be quite clearly similar in many ways. Nevertheless, over the past decade investigators have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical and functional variations in the brains of males and females.

These inequities are not just interesting idiosyncrasies that might explain why more men than women enjoy the Three Stooges. They raise the possibility that we might need to develop sex-specific treatments for a host of conditions, including depression, addiction, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, the differences imply that researchers exploring the structure and function of the brain must take into account the sex of their subjects when analyzing their data--and include both women and men in future studies or risk obtaining misleading results.

Sculpting the Brain

Not so long ago neuroscientists believed that sex differences in the brain were limited mainly to those regions responsible for mating behavior. In a 1966 Scientific American article entitled "Sex Differences in the Brain," Seymour Levine of Stanford University described how sex hormones help to direct divergent reproductive behaviors in rats--with males engaging in mounting and females arching their backs and raising their rumps to attract suitors. Levine mentioned only one brain region in his review: the hypothalamus, a small structure at the base of the brain that is involved in regulating hormone production and controlling basic behaviors such as eating, drinking and sex. A generation of neuroscientists came to maturity believing that "sex differences in the brain" referred primarily to mating behaviors, sex hormones and the hypothalamus.

That view, however, has now been knocked aside by a surge of findings that highlight the influence of sex on many areas of cognition and behavior, including memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and the brain's response to stress hormones. This progress has been accelerated in the past five to 10 years by the growing use of sophisticated noninvasive imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can peer into the brains of living subjects.

These imaging experiments reveal that anatomical variations occur in an assortment of regions throughout the brain. Jill M. Goldstein of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues, for example, used MRI to measure the sizes of many cortical and subcortical areas. Among other things, these investigators found that parts of the frontal cortex, the seat of many higher cognitive functions, are bulkier in women than in men, as are parts of the limbic cortex, which is involved in emotional responses. In men, on the other hand, parts of the parietal cortex, which is involved in space perception, are bigger than in women, as is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that responds to emotionally arousing information--to anything that gets the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing. These size differences, as well as others mentioned throughout the article, are relative: they refer to the overall volume of the structure relative to the overall volume of the brain.

Differences in the size of brain structures are generally thought to reflect their relative importance to the animal. For example, primates rely more on vision than olfaction; for rats, the opposite is true. As a result, primate brains maintain proportionately larger regions devoted to vision, and rats devote more space to olfaction. So the existence of widespread anatomical disparities between men and women suggests that sex does influence the way the brain works.

Other investigations are finding anatomical sex differences at the cellular level. For example, Sandra Witelson and her colleagues at McMaster University discovered that women possess a greater density of neurons in parts of the temporal lobe cortex associated with language processing and comprehension. On counting the neurons in postmortem samples, the researchers found that of the six layers present in the cortex, two show more neurons per unit volume in females than in males. Similar findings were subsequently reported for the frontal lobe. With such information in hand, neuroscientists can now explore whether sex differences in neuron number correlate with differences in cognitive abilities--examining, for example, whether the boost in density in the female auditory cortex relates to women's enhanced performance on tests of verbal fluency.

Such anatomical diversity may be caused in large part by the activity of the sex hormones that bathe the fetal brain. These steroids help to direct the organization and wiring of the brain during development and influence the structure and neuronal density of various regions. Interestingly, the brain areas that Goldstein found to differ between men and women are ones that in animals contain the highest number of sex hormone receptors during development. This correlation between brain region size in adults and sex steroid action in utero suggests that at least some sex differences in cognitive function do not result from cultural influences or the hormonal changes associated with puberty--they are there from birth.

Inborn Inclinations

Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

To address this question, Melissa Hines of City University London and Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University turned to monkeys, one of our closest animal cousins. The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. This divergence, and indeed all the anatomical sex differences in the brain, presumably arose as a result of selective pressures during evolution. In the case of the toy study, males--both human and primate--prefer toys that can be propelled through space and that promote rough-and-tumble play. These qualities, it seems reasonable to speculate, might relate to the behaviors useful for hunting and for securing a mate. Similarly, one might also hypothesize that females, on the other hand, select toys that allow them to hone the skills they will one day need to nurture their young.

Simon Baron-Cohen and his associates at the University of Cambridge took a different but equally creative approach to addressing the influence of nature versus nurture regarding sex differences. Many researchers have described disparities in how "people-centered" male and female infants are. For example, Baron-Cohen and his student Svetlana Lutchmaya found that one-year-old girls spend more time looking at their mothers than boys of the same age do. And when these babies are presented with a choice of films to watch, the girls look longer at a film of a face, whereas boys lean toward a film featuring cars.

Of course, these preferences might be attributable to differences in the way adults handle or play with boys and girls. To eliminate this possibility, Baron-Cohen and his students went a step further. They took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student's face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby's sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object. This difference in social interest was evident on day one of life--implying again that we come out of the womb with some cognitive sex differences built in.

Under Stress

In many cases, sex differences in the brain's chemistry and construction influence how males and females respond to the environment or react to, and remember, stressful events. Take, for example, the amygdala. Goldstein and others have reported that the amygdala is larger in men than in women. And in rats, the neurons in this region make more numerous interconnections in males than in females. These anatomical variations would be expected to produce differences in the way that males and females react to stress.

To assess whether male and female amygdalae in fact respond differently to stress, Katharina Braun and her co-workers at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, briefly removed a litter of Degu pups from their mother. For these social South American rodents, which live in large colonies like prairie dogs do, even temporary separation can be quite upsetting. The researchers then measured the concentration of serotonin receptors in various brain regions. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, or signal-carrying molecule, that is key for mediating emotional behavior. (Prozac, for example, acts by increasing serotonin function.)

The workers allowed the pups to hear their mother's call during the period of separation and found that this auditory input increased the serotonin receptor concentration in the males' amygdala, yet decreased the concentration of these same receptors in females. Although it is difficult to extrapolate from this study to human behavior, the results hint that if something similar occurs in children, separation anxiety might differentially affect the emotional well-being of male and female infants. Experiments such as these are necessary if we are to understand why, for instance, anxiety disorders are far more prevalent in girls than in boys.

Another brain region now known to diverge in the sexes anatomically and in its response to stress is the hippocampus, a structure crucial for memory storage and for spatial mapping of the physical environment. Imaging consistently demonstrates that the hippocampus is larger in women than in men. These anatomical differences might well relate somehow to differences in the way males and females navigate. Many studies suggest that men are more likely to navigate by estimating distance in space and orientation ("dead reckoning"), whereas women are more likely to navigate by monitoring landmarks. Interestingly, a similar sex difference exists in rats. Male rats are more likely to navigate mazes using directional and positional information, whereas female rats are more likely to navigate the same mazes using available landmarks. (Investigators have yet to demonstrate, however, that male rats are less likely to ask for directions.)

Even the neurons in the hippocampus behave differently in males and females, at least in how they react to learning experiences. For example, Janice M. Juraska and her associates at the University of Illinois have shown that placing rats in an "enriched environment"--cages filled with toys and with fellow rodents to promote social interactions--produced dissimilar effects on the structure of hippocampal neurons in male and female rats. In females, the experience enhanced the "bushiness" of the branches in the cells' dendritic trees--the many-armed structures that receive signals from other nerve cells. This change presumably reflects an increase in neuronal connections, which in turn is thought to be involved with the laying down of memories. In males, however, the complex environment either had no effect on the dendritic trees or pruned them slightly.

But male rats sometimes learn better in the face of stress. Tracey J. Shors of Rutgers University and her collaborators have found that a brief exposure to a series of one-second tail shocks enhanced performance of a learned task and increased the density of dendritic connections to other neurons in male rats yet impaired performance and decreased connection density in female rats. Findings such as these have interesting social implications. The more we discover about how brain mechanisms of learning differ between the sexes, the more we may need to consider how optimal learning environments potentially differ for boys and girls.

Although the hippocampus of the female rat can show a decrement in response to acute stress, it appears to be more resilient than its male counterpart in the face of chronic stress. Cheryl D. Conrad and her co-workers at Arizona State University restrained rats in a mesh cage for six hours--a situation that the rodents find disturbing. The researchers then assessed how vulnerable their hippocampal neurons were to killing by a neurotoxin--a standard measure of the effect of stress on these cells. They noted that chronic restraint rendered the males' hippocampal cells more susceptible to the toxin but had no effect on the females' vulnerability. These findings, and others like them, suggest that in terms of brain damage, females may be better equipped to tolerate chronic stress than males are. Still unclear is what protects female hippocampal cells from the damaging effects of chronic stress, but sex hormones very likely play a role.

The Big Picture

Extending the work on how the brain handles and remembers stressful events, my colleagues and I have found contrasts in the way men and women lay down memories of emotionally arousing incidents--a process known from animal research to involve activation of the amygdala. In one of our first experiments with human subjects, we showed volunteers a series of graphically violent films while we measured their brain activity using PET. A few weeks later we gave them a quiz to see what they remembered.

We discovered that the number of disturbing films they could recall correlated with how active their amygdala had been during the viewing. Subsequent work from our laboratory and others confirmed this general finding. But then I noticed something strange. The amygdala activation in some studies involved only the right hemisphere, and in others it involved only the left hemisphere. It was then I realized that the experiments in which the right amygdala lit up involved only men; those in which the left amygdala was fired up involved women. Since then, three subsequent studies--two from our group and one from John Gabrieli and Turhan Canli and their collaborators at Stanford--have confirmed this difference in how the brains of men and women handle emotional memories.

The realization that male and female brains were processing the same emotionally arousing material into memory differently led us to wonder what this disparity might mean. To address this question, we turned to a century-old theory stating that the right hemisphere is biased toward processing the central aspects of a situation, whereas the left hemisphere tends to process the finer details. If that conception is true, we reasoned, a drug that dampens the activity of the amygdala should impair a man's ability to recall the gist of an emotional story (by hampering the right amygdala) but should hinder a woman's ability to come up with the precise details (by hampering the left amygdala).

Propranolol is such a drug. This so-called beta blocker quiets the activity of adrenaline and its cousin noradrenaline and, in so doing, dampens the activation of the amygdala and weakens recall of emotionally arousing memories. We gave this drug to men and women before they viewed a short slide show about a young boy caught in a terrible accident while walking with his mother. One week later we tested their memory. The results showed that propranolol made it harder for men to remember the more holistic aspects, or gist, of the story--that the boy had been run over by a car, for example. In women, propranolol did the converse, impairing their memory for peripheral details--that the boy had been carrying a soccer ball.

In more recent investigations, we found that we can detect a hemispheric difference between the sexes in response to emotional material almost immediately. Volunteers shown emotionally unpleasant photographs react within 300 milliseconds--a response that shows up as a spike on a recording of the brain's electrical activity. With Antonella Gasbarri and others at the University of L'Aquila in Italy, we have found that in men, this quick spike, termed a P300 response, is more exaggerated when recorded over the right hemisphere; in women, it is larger when recorded over the left. Hence, sex-related hemispheric disparities in how the brain processes emotional images begin within 300 milliseconds--long before people have had much, if any, chance to consciously interpret what they have seen.

These discoveries might have ramifications for the treatment of PTSD. Previous research by Gustav Schelling and his associates at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany had established that drugs such as propranolol diminish memory for traumatic situations when administered as part of the usual therapies in an intensive care unit. Prompted by our findings, they found that, at least in such units, beta blockers reduce memory for traumatic events in women but not in men. Even in intensive care, then, physicians may need to consider the sex of their patients when meting out their medications.

Sex and Mental Disorders

ptsd is not the only psychological disturbance that appears to play out differently in women and men. A PET study by Mirko Diksic and his colleagues at McGill University showed that serotonin production was a remarkable 52 percent higher on average in men than in women, which might help clarify why women are more prone to depression--a disorder commonly treated with drugs that boost the concentration of serotonin.

A similar situation might prevail in addiction. In this case, the neurotransmitter in question is dopamine--a chemical involved in the feelings of pleasure associated with drugs of abuse. Studying rats, Jill B. Becker and her fellow investigators at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor discovered that in females, estrogen boosted the release of dopamine in brain regions important for regulating drug-seeking behavior. Furthermore, the hormone had long-lasting effects, making the female rats more likely to pursue cocaine weeks after last receiving the drug. Such differences in susceptibility--particularly to stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamine--could explain why women might be more vulnerable to the effects of these drugs and why they tend to progress more rapidly from initial use to dependence than men do.

Certain brain abnormalities underlying schizophrenia appear to differ in men and women as well. Ruben Gur, Raquel Gur and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have spent years investigating sex-related differences in brain anatomy and function. In one project, they measured the size of the orbitofrontal cortex, a region involved in regulating emotions, and compared it with the size of the amygdala, implicated more in producing emotional reactions. The investigators found that women possess a significantly larger orbitofrontal-to-amygdala ratio (OAR) than men do. One can speculate from these findings that women might on average prove more capable of controlling their emotional reactions.

In additional experiments, the researchers discovered that this balance appears to be altered in schizophrenia, though not identically for men and women. Women with schizophrenia have a decreased OAR relative to their healthy peers, as might be expected. But men, oddly, have an increased OAR relative to healthy men. These findings remain puzzling, but, at the least, they imply that schizophrenia is a somewhat different disease in men and women and that treatment of the disorder might need to be tailored to the sex of the patient.

Sex Matters

in a comprehensive 2001 report on sex differences in human health, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences asserted that "sex matters. Sex, that is, being male or female, is an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing and analyzing studies in all areas and at all levels of biomedical and health-related research."

Neuroscientists are still far from putting all the pieces together--identifying all the sex-related variations in the brain and pinpointing their influences on cognition and propensity for brain-related disorders. Nevertheless, the research conducted to date certainly demonstrates that differences extend far beyond the hypothalamus and mating behavior. Researchers and clinicians are not always clear on the best way to go forward in deciphering the full influences of sex on the brain, behavior and responses to medications. But growing numbers now agree that going back to assuming we can evaluate one sex and learn equally about both is no longer an option.

And what about the sociology of gender, say in the nature of marriages..

The Happiest Wives

John Tierney. NY Times. .: Feb 28, 2006

Freud confessed that his "thirty years of research into the feminine soul" left him unable to answer one great question: "What does a woman want?" Modern feminists have been arguing for decades over a variation of it: What should a woman want? This week two sociologists from the University of Virginia are publishing the answer to a more manageable variation. Drawing on one of the most thorough surveys ever done of married couples, they've crunched the numbers and asked: What makes a woman happy with her marriage?

Their answer doesn't quite jibe with current conventional wisdom. Three decades ago, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said it was better for wives to focus on

homemaking and husbands to focus on breadwinning, but by the 1990's, only a third embraced the traditional division of labor. The new ideal - in theory, not in practice - became a partnership of equals who split duties inside and outside the home.

This new egalitarian marriage was hailed by academics and relationship gurus as a recipe for a happier union. As wives went off to work and husbands took on new jobs at home, couples would supposedly have more in common and more to talk about. Husbands would do more "emotion work," as sociologists call it, and wives would be more fulfilled. That was the theory tested by the Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, who analyzed a survey of more than 5,000 couples. Sure enough, they found that husbands' "emotion work" was crucial to wives' happiness. Having an affectionate and understanding husband was by far the most important predictor of a woman's satisfaction with her marriage. But it turns out that an equal division of labor didn't make husbands more affectionate or wives more fulfilled. The wives working outside the home reported less satisfaction with their husbands and their marriages than did the stay-at-home wives. And among those with outside jobs, the happiest wives, regardless of the family's overall income, were the ones whose husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the money. These male providers-in-chief were regarded fondly by even the most feminist- minded women - the ones who said they believed in dividing duties equally. In theory these wives were egalitarians, but in their own lives they preferred more traditional arrangements.

"Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement

from their husbands," Wilcox says. "But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom."

These results, of course, are just averages. Plenty of people are happy with different arrangements - including Nock, who makes less than his wife and does the cooking at home. He says that nontraditional marriages may be a strain on many women simply because they've been forced to be social pioneers. "As society adjusts to women's new roles," he says, "women may become happier in egalitarian marriages." But I'd bet there's a limit to egalitarianism. Consider what's happened with housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960's through the 80's, wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990's, though, the equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much of the work at home. That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when they're living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners. Similarly, there's a gender gap in enthusiasm for some outside jobs. Men are much more willing to take a job that pays a premium in exchange for long hours away from home or the risk of being killed. The extra money doesn't seem as important to women. In a more egalitarian world, there would be more wives mining coal and driving trucks, and more husbands cooking dinners and taking children to doctor's appointments. But that wouldn't be a fairer world, as Nock and Wilcox found. The happiest wives in their study were the ones who said that housework was divided fairly between them and their husbands. But those same happy wives also did more of the work at home while their husbands did more work outside home. Nock doesn't claim to have divined the feminine soul, but he does have one answer to Freud's question.

"A woman wants equity," he says. "That's not necessarily the same as equality."

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One of many blog responses  to Tierney….

What Does John Tierney Want?

A valid question about a guy who starts a column rehashing poor Freud's inability to answer the question what women want. I even have an answer to this much easier question, the one about Tierney's wants: He wants to spread a certain way of thinking about women and feminism, one which makes us all throw up our hands in despair and to acknowledge that there is no understanding those poor little ladies. On the one hand they say that they want fairness and equality, on the other hand what they really want is a man to take care of them and to boss them around.

Tierney is glib in his misogyny, glib indeed. 

Ho, ho! Take that, you nasty feminists! You will never get equality because women (that amorphous mass which thinks with one mind and one set of emotions) don't really want it! And yes, we can measure happiness across individuals. It's easy! And no, nobody's happiness is based on how far away they are from the prevailing social norms, nope. And none of us boys are at all biased in talking about this research.

Well, I beg to disagree. Let's have a look at the two researchers of the study. Mr. Wilcox's research focuses on the influence of religious belief and practice on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood. He has published articles on religion, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Mr. Nock is the author of books and articles about the causes and consequences of change in the American family. He has investigated issues of privacy, unmarried fatherhood, cohabitation, commitment, divorce, and marriage. His most recent book, Marriage in Men's Lives won the William J. Good Book Award from the American Sociological Association for the most outstanding contribution to family scholarship in 1999.

These guys are into studying traditional marriage, and I'd be very surprised if their findings didn't accord with their premises. So.

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The role of Gender in the classroom…

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2004

The Other Gender Gap

Maybe boys just weren't meant for the classroom

The women's movement has taught us many things, one of the well as they might.

Three decades ago reformers' attention was focused on the "higher education gap" - the fact that not as many girls went on to college, graduate school, and professional school as boys. Advocates of equality between the sexes fought hard to create gender-specific education programs, fair admissions policies, and professional societies for women. Their efforts were rewarded: from 1970 to 2000 the number of women attending college rose by 136 percent, graduate school by 168 percent, and professional school by 853 percent.

Yet soon the higher-education gap opened again - but this time girls were on the other side of it. In the late 1970s more girls than boys began to enroll in college, and the disparity has since increased. Today women make up approximately 56 percent of all undergraduates, outnumbering men by about 1.7 million. In addition, about 300,000 more women than men enter graduate school each year. (The gap does not particularly affect professional school; almost as many women as men attend.) In short, equal opportunity brought an unequal result

The advance of girls relative to boys might well have been predicted from patterns in K-12 schooling, where girls have long been outperforming boys on several measures. In both primary and secondary school girls tend to receive higher marks than boys. Since the inception, in 1969, of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a standardized exam given to nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-olds), girls at all grade levels have scored much higher, on average, than boys in language skills, and about the same in math. (True, college-bound boys have long outperformed girls overall on the SAT, but it is likely that boys' average scores are statistically elevated by the fact that roughly 10 percent fewer of them take the exam - and those who opt out tend to be lower achievers.) It is hardly surprising, then, that once various cultural barriers were removed, girls began entering college at a greater rate.

The continuing advance among girls has thrown a spotlight on the stagnation of boys. During the past decade the percentage of boys who complete high school (about 70), enter college (about 40), and go on to graduate school (about eight) has risen only slightly or not at all. And this despite the fact that the economic payoff of higher education has never been greater. Whereas girls continue to demonstrate that society has not yet reached any "natural" limit on college-attendance rates, boys have somehow gotten stuck. If boys and girls have roughly equal abilities, then why aren't they doing equally well?

From kindergarten on, the education system rewards self-control, obedience, and concentration - qualities that, any teacher can tell you, are much more common among girls than boys, particularly at young ages. Boys fidget, fool around, fight, and worse. Thirty years ago teachers may have accommodated and managed this behavior, in part by devoting more attention to boys than to girls. But as girls have come to attract equal attention, as an inability to sit still has been medicalized, and as the options for curbing student misbehavior have been ever more curtailed, boys may have suffered. Boys make up three quarters of all children categorized as learning disabled today, and they are put in special education at a much higher rate (special education is often misused as a place to stick "problem kids," and children seldom switch from there to the college track). Shorter recess times, less physical education, and more time spent on rote learning (in order to meet testing standards) may have exacerbated the problems that boys tend to experience in the classroom. It is no wonder, then, that many boys disengage academically. Boys are also subject to a range of extrinsic factors that hinder their academic performance and pull them out of school at greater rates than girls. First among these is the labor market. Young men, with or without high school diplomas, earn more than young women, so they are more likely to see work as an alternative to school. Employment gives many men immediate monetary gratification along with relief from the drudgery of the classroom.

But boys' educational stagnation has long-term economic implications. Not even half the boys in the country are taking advantage of the opportunity to go to college, which has become almost a prerequisite for a middle-class lifestyle. And languishing academic attainment among a large portion of our population spells trouble for the prospects of continued economic growth. Unless more boys begin attending college, the nation may face a shortage of highly skilled workers in the coming decades.

The trouble with boys is not confined to the United States; boys are being outperformed by girls throughout the developed world. The United Kingdom and Australia are currently testing programs aimed at making education more boy-friendly. Single-sex schools, single-sex classes, and gender-specific curricula are all being tried. Here the United States lags: there are several local initiatives aimed at boys, but nothing on the national level - perhaps owing to a residual anxiety over the idea of helping boys in a society where men for so long enjoyed special advantages.

So do you need one of each to be a correctly gender-typed person? A book review

Boys Will Be Boys ,  By: Flanagan, Caitlin, Atlantic, 10727825, Nov2005, Vol. 296, Issue 4

The latest in the ever growing field of "You go, girl!" studies

RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN

By Peggy Drexler, Ph.D., with Linden Gross Rodale

Peggy Drexler, Ph.D., is a renowned gender scholar at Cornell who has also held a prestigious post at Stanford. Raising Boys Without Men is the result of her "groundbreaking study" into "maverick moms" - lesbians and "single mothers by choice" who are raising sons. It turns out that boys raised by women without men are actually better off than boys raised by mothers and fathers. They may fuck you up, your mum and dad, but two mums can make a "head-and-heart boy" out of you.

Drexler asserts that the most important element in predicting how a child turns out is not the number or gender of his parents but their economic status. Since most maverick moms are relatively affluent and highly educated, their sons are less likely to end up in trouble - legal, educational, or emotional - than are those of the general population. This essential truth trumps almost all arguments against gay and single-by-choice parenthood. What's left are religious objections and distaste for a lifestyle, and those are hardly the basis for public policy.

No sooner, however, is the reader nodding in agreement than Drexler kicks the book into high gear: not since the SCUM Manifesto have we had such a comprehensive accounting of the low-down rottenness of men. A household with a dad in it is a place where "competition, dominance, and control" are the mainstays. Men, if roused to emotion, become like "wounded rhinos" - verbally or physically aggressive. Dads demand too much of sons, expect athletic excellence, bully them. "Not having a dad has let Henry off the hook," one lesbian mom reports; "he doesn't do well if he's pushed into things." The book is full of bad dads, from Austin Powers's crappy father (who missed a school event) to Ward Cleaver, whose crimes are beyond number. (Most feminists consider the producers of Leave It to Beaver'to be Burbank's answer to Leni Riefenstahl.)

Like Gunsmoke's Miss Kitty, maverick moms affect a jaded familiarity with male behavior, but the little rascals succeed in shocking their delicate mothers time and again. One mother gives her son a toy hair dryer for Christmas and then is horrified when he pretends it's a gun instead of a styling aid. Two brothers are so full of aggro that they desperately gnaw their toast into guns and start shooting. Occasionally, male problem-solving techniques give the moms a happy surprise. One son gave a broken washing machine a hard kick (a prelude to gnawing it into a rocket launcher?) and - shazam! - the thing cut back on and has been working ever since. Like boys the world over, these ones tend to brood silently over baseball cards and ball games. Of course, nothing makes a woman go bananas like a man who won't talk, so the poor kids have to yak, yak, yak about their feelings or they'll never get to see the bottom of the ninth.

Drexler believes not that gender is a construct, layered on by the culture, but that differences between the sexes are genetic. This is entirely correct - but Drexler takes the idea a step further. She believes that because masculinity arises naturally, boys don't need an actual father on the premises to shape or inform it. In her opinion, maleness is a bit like Jiffy Pop - put the thing on the stove, give it a shake now and then to keep it from overheating, and voilà: let's eat!

Raising Boys Without Men is as much a work of advocacy as objective research. As such, it's the latest entry in the ever growing field of "You go, girl!" studies. There is nothing a woman can do that is so fundamentally self-centered that it won't be met with a cackle of "You go, girl!" from a female somewhere on the planet. It's a way of transforming an essentially selfish act into one of liberation, and thereby protecting it from male criticism.

I've decided to stop cooking and let the kids nuke potpies for dinner.

You go, girl!

I made my husband clean the whole house.

You go, girl!

I stopped dating losers and got myself inseminated.

You go, girl - and here's a ground-breaking study to prove you're doing the little shaver a world of good!

The boys in the study pine for their fathers. Drexler notes that they share a peculiarly intense fascination with father-son athletes from the world of professional sports, and that they have an outsize interest in superheroes. Those who have ongoing relationships with their "seed daddies" mourn piteously when the men fail to take a fatherly interest in them. A humane assessment of these impulses would be that boys want fathers, but when the world does not mete them out (because of either tragedy or maternal intention), good mothers can ease the pain and do what widows and abandoned women have done throughout time: raise their sons as best they can, often with great success.

But this is "You go, girl!" territory, and no quarter can be given to any fact that might suggest the women are slighting their children. None of these boys is exhibiting "father hunger," Drexler reports; it's only natural "to long for what you don't have." Not having a father is a bit like not having a skateboard - kind of a bummer, but at least you don't have to worry about head injuries.

One could logically conclude from this report that the very worst situation for a boy would be to have two fathers raise him - but I'm sure Drexler doesn't mean that. It's straight men she's afraid of, and it's been open season on them for such a long time that her preposterous book is unlikely to raise a ripple beyond its intended audience. Yet the book and its conclusions are not without consequence beyond the tightly circumscribed world she describes.

We are all building a culture together, and it is one with a remarkably consistent message. From the shady groves of our elite universities to the Hollywood offices of Interscope Records, a chorus of powerful voices is telling us that men don't need to stand by their women and children anymore. Male rappers delight in this notion because there is sexual power to be gained by impregnating many women. Feminists like it because it allows them to enjoy the delights of being a mother without the hassles of being a wife.

The ramifications of this new attitude are going to be grave. Belittle men's responsibilities to their families, raise boys to believe that fatherhood is not a worthy aspiration, and the people who will suffer are women and children. For the past forty years women have been insisting that they be able to enjoy the same sexual freedoms as men (You go, girl!), and to become single mothers by choice (ditto!). Surprise, surprise: men have been more than happy to comply. Someday American women may realize that the great achievement of civilization wasn't Erica Jong's zipless fuck of yesteryear. It was convincing men that they had an obligation to contain their sexual energies within marriage and to support - economically and emotionally - the children they created in that marriage. You go, June Cleaver!

According to Raising Boys Without Men, not having a father is a bit like not having a skateboard - kind of a bummer, but at least you don't have to worry about head injuries.

*****************************************************************************

And an interview with a guy who has explored some of the political manifestation of gender…

Stephen J. Ducat Dissects "Anxious Masculinity," Making Sense of America's Strutting, in a Psychoanalytic Kind of Way

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Like a jilted lover out to prove his masculinity with a series of new conquests, our Bush regime today seem always out to prove something. They will fight any war (with or without allies). They will ram through legislation (with or without the democrats on board). They will eliminate supportive social programs (since only wimps need "safety nets"). In other words, their America is a John Wayne/Rambo/Terminator figure. But why? Recently Stephen J. Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor, talked with BuzzFlash about where this delusional and destructive mindset comes from, and how it manifests itself in our country's domestic and foreign policies. When you think about it, the right wingers have played our fears and fantasies darned well, exploiting fear on the one hand and our hopes and dreams on the other. Perhaps "anxious masculinity" played out on the world stage does help explain the right wing's virulent attitude towards Hillary Clinton, and their determination to slur Vietnam war hero John Kerry as "French." As George Lakoff has commented, "It is crucial to notice and understand the central role of a certain version of masculinity in American politics. Ducat's book helps enormously."

Stephen J. Ducat is a clinical psychologist in private practice and a professor at the New College of California. He is a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.

* * *

BuzzFlash: In your book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, & the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, you argue that the current positions and attitudes of the Republican Party and Bush Administration can best be viewed through a certain lens that we traditionally associate with the he-man, the virile figure--you call it the phallus. Briefly, how would you define "anxious masculinity?"

Stephen J. Ducat: In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one's opponent especially important. This femiphobia--this male fear of being feminine--operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism.

BuzzFlash: You're drawing a parallel between the extreme right wing in the United States and the Islamic fundamentalists, in that they are both highly fearful of overbearing feminine influence?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Femininity, for male fundamentalists, is seen as a contaminant, and there is an attempt to repudiate those aspects of one's self that seem feminine. This is something that fundamentalists around the world share. As I argue in the last chapter of my book, there is a surprising affinity between Christian fundamentalists in this country and the extreme Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere, when it comes to this kind of devaluation, repudiation and fear of the feminine.

BuzzFlash: You discuss "anxious masculinity" as exhibited by right wing America, the Bush Administration, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush. Why "anxious?" Is it that their masculinity has got to be constantly reproven?

Stephen J. Ducat: Yes. In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It's a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it's so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It's quite Sisyphean--you know, you can never quite get there. You're always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination--either in a personal or a global context--can never be a permanent condition. It's a relational state. It's dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you're not going to be manly tomorrow unless you've got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

BuzzFlash: Then peace is a threat to anxious masculinity?

Stephen J. Ducat: It's a threat because of its link to the feminine. In fact, I have a chapter on the 19th Century, when there was enormous debate about whether the U.S. should embark on the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. In a number of editorial cartoons, peace itself was personified as female.

BuzzFlash: You cite examples in your book of how your psychoanalytical approach applies to the political world in a very specific way. First of all, let's take the efforts by the Bush Administration to portray Kerry as "French." Should we assume that this was a way of saying he's feminine?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. It's a rather transparent code word for being feminized. I also saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman. That's what they wanted to do. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the "Breck girl." And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, "economic girlie-men." The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips. Real men, you know, don't worry about the losers in the new global Darwinian economy.

This theme was echoed by a number of people, including Zell Miller, who said that not only was Kerry suspiciously French, but he would even let Paris decide when America needs defending. There was the implication that, if Kerry were ever to run the White House, he would imperil the masculinity of all men by turning the U.S. into a kind of submissive bottom in the global contest for supremacy, the deferential housewife in the family of nations.

Cheney basically echoed the same themes, referring to Kerry as sensitive, faint-hearted, weak, wobbly, soft. Since the reign of Bush, even the notion of negotiation or diplomacy, or international cooperation became very suspect. For many Republicans, collaboration raises enormous femiphobic anxieties, even if they're collaborating--and perhaps especially if they're collaborating--with Democrats. GOP strategist Grover Norquist once said that bipartisanship is another name for date rape. So that tells you about his anxiety, I think.

BuzzFlash: To cooperate, then, is to give up one's masculine prerogative to assert oneself as a male leader?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. In the world they live in, you're either a top or a bottom. Mutuality, democracy, equality--that makes no sense to them.

BuzzFlash: Well, as Jon Stewart said recently in the context of the John Gannon/Jeff Guckert scandal in Washington, if you're on top, you're not gay. That may explain the inner circle acceptance of gays within the Republican Party, in spite of the gay-bashing national political line they give to their followers.

Stephen J. Ducat: The Republican homosexuals, especially if closeted, are not only treated as honorary heterosexuals; they become honorary homophobes, as the most recent scandal illustrated.

BuzzFlash: Well, you know, Matt Drudge is gay and yet engages in homophobia. Ken Mehlman, who is the head of the RNC, is reportedly gay and was a leader of the homophobic charge. There are numerous Congressman who have been outed and Senators who are known as gay, and yet who stick to the homophobic line. It's a strange permutation of anxious masculinity, but maybe, as Jon Stewart said, if you're on top, you're not gay.

Stephen J. Ducat: He has intuited something that is actually pervasive across cultures and across historical time--that in male-dominant cultures, homosexuality is only taboo when it's perceived as feminizing. This has its foundation in ancient Greece, where it didn't really matter with whom you had sex. What mattered was what position you occupied in the relationship of domination. If you were a penetrator, you were an unambiguous guy. If you were penetrated, you were virtually a woman. That dynamic operates in American prisons, and you can see it in some Middle Eastern cultures. It's really a question of domination.

BuzzFlash: So with Gannon, who said on his web sites, you know, that he was a military guy, a Marine, and always on top, he's acceptable because he's a man's man?

Stephen J. Ducat: Yes.

BuzzFlash: He's not penetrated; he penetrates.

Stephen J. Ducat: That's right. Militarystud.com.

BuzzFlash: Let's turn to a second real-world example of your theory, and someone you talk quite a bit about. I'm referring to Hillary Clinton. In The Wimp Factor, you include a cover from the infamous American Spectator. It's got a rather unflattering drawing of Hillary Clinton, and it's titled "Boy Clinton's Big Mama."

Stephen J. Ducat: That's right.

BuzzFlash: You also have a chapter called "Vaginas With Teeth and Castrating First Ladies -- Fantasies of Feminine Danger From Eve to Hillary Clinton." Clearly, she evokes something in the right that was on an atomic scale in terms of negative reaction. Is it that she represents the embracing and smothering mother, the woman who overpowers the man, who is not submissive to the man, but thinks for herself, thinks about her own future, is self-sufficient to a great degree? Do these characteristics threaten anxious masculinity to such an extent that she was like the nuclear bomb to them psychologically?

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Her being perceived as a powerful and, most troubling, a self-authorizing woman, was regarded as profoundly threatening and evoked a kind of misogynist dread and revulsion exceeding even that generated by Eleanor Roosevelt. What's interesting about this, and what makes it an example of political irrationality, is that she's not that liberal. I mean, she's pretty much a centrist, as was her husband.

BuzzFlash: They are considered, both of them, aligned with the DLC, or the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. But Hillary Clinton has been seen alternately as a castrating woman, the engulfing mother, or a phallic, penetrating woman. Some people may feel I'm kind of going over the top with Freudian metaphors, but I'm not making it up. One of the covers of Spy Magazine actually put a penis on her.

BuzzFlash: You also have that cover in the book. You draw a distinction between the terms "penis" and "phallus." Whereas penis refers to a part of the male anatomy, the phallus is a mythical concept of maleness, which can never really be attained by a human male, but nonetheless it is the motivation behind much of the Bush Administration and the right wing perspective.

Stephen J. Ducat: Absolutely. Of course, a phallus is mythic, a permanently erect monolith of manly power and omnipotence. It's a signifier of untrammeled growth, invulnerability, and freedom from dependency. Someone basking in the aura of the phallus is then seen as someone who has it all, who's lacking nothing, who doesn't need anyone. The penis, on the other hand, of course, is a fragile, vulnerable organ and it's only momentarily hard.

This is why political campaigns work so hard at presenting their male candidates as phallic. But the interesting thing about the phallus as a symbol is that it moves around, unlike the penis, it isn't really attached. This is something I document in the representations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. For a while, Hillary was literally portrayed as having the phallus. There were cartoons of her using a men's urinal, and cartoons of her dressed as a man. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was an interesting development precisely because it shifted the phallus from Hillary to Bill. In fact, the popularity of both Bill and Hillary Clinton went up dramatically as a result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which may seem kind of paradoxical for some.

BuzzFlash: That's one of the most fascinating analyses of your book, the theory that, in essence, the Republicans really backfire. The whole impeachment effort was an impeachment in search of a reason to impeach. And Whitewater didn't work. Travelgate didn't work. So they finally tried to create perjury and all sorts of major crimes out of a sex act. In an ironic way, you point out, it really blew back in that we had wimpy Ken Starr and his staff prosecuting a President who had been seen by many on the right as very subservient to his wife. But suddenly, like the Olympic torch, the phallus had been passed to him--he suddenly was a man's man.

Stephen J. Ducat: Some of the same right-wing publications that had portrayed him as castrated, as feminized, later portrayed him as this lusty philanderer, a ravenous stud muffin, thinking that would make him look bad. But in spite of all the criticism he got, his popularity actually went up as a result of it. And of course, Hillary could now be viewed as the wounded woman standing behind her man.

BuzzFlash: So it almost transformed them into a traditional couple, ironically.

Stephen J. Ducat: Right.

BuzzFlash: Suddenly, as you say, Hillary was the forgiving wife of the husband who had strayed.

Stephen J. Ducat: And Ken Starr, the voyeuristic prig, looked very much the pervert in this.

BuzzFlash: Now let me ask you to comment on another curious anomaly--these right-wing women and what you call the Phyllis Schlafly syndrome. These are highly powerful women who never really are with their families, but they preach subservience to their husbands and being home with their families all the time. I recall that in the book, What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank talked to someone who was very active in the Kansas legislature, who said she totally believed in submission to the husband and staying at home. But meanwhile, she was off in the legislature all year. What's going on with that?

Stephen J. Ducat: Well, you know, there are a lot of different kinds of right-wing women. There are under and middle class Christian fundamentalist housewives who seek desperately to be the compliant good wife, to stay at home, who have embraced their position of subordination as a virtuous condition. And there are those who I think are more hypocritical, the highly educated, upper class women like Ann Coulter who advocate a life of domestic docility for the under class sisters. Meanwhile, they're in the public eye and are as powerful and self-authorizing as any male politician. And by being part of the economic elite, they can buy their way out of certain difficulties by virtue of their class position, whether it's having wealthy husbands or enough money in their own right to get the health care they need, to get the reproductive care they need and so on.

BuzzFlash: I think you imply at one point that they're like the gay men on top. They're the females with phalluses in a lot of ways.

Stephen J. Ducat: Well, I think in some ways they are. This is something that is in the cultural imagination. In one of Bill Maher's shows, he joked that "this has been a tough week for conservatives since Ann Coulter admitted she had a penis." And everybody laughed, it was a joke that made sense to people because they already understood intuitively there's something phallic about her, about her repudiation of weakness and dependency, her disgust for anybody that needs help of any kind.

BuzzFlash: How does the logic of your theory extend to the welfare state? Grover Norquist has publicly stated that he would like to see the social service state starved and then drowned in a bathtub. The social service state that provides education, medicine for everybody, care for seniors, that's very feminine or very maternal.

Stephen J. Ducat: There's nothing essentially feminine about it, but it is perceived and constructed that way in the femiphobic mind. Republicans call it the nanny state. That's because care taking in this kind of universe is regarded as something feminine. Obviously there's nothing essentially feminine about care taking, but that's how it gets gendered in public discourse. A government that takes care of people is portrayed as maternal. And men anxious about their masculinity tend to be aversive of being taken care of by anything maternal. They repudiate that. In my book, I cite multiple examples of what can only be called a kind of transference to government--treating the government as if it were one's own engulfing mommy. There's a right-wing men's movement book called Surviving the Feminization of America, and the cover of the book is a picture of the Capitol dome, and a man is looking aghast at the dome because the top of it is replaced by a giant breast. So, we see quite concretely and dramatically in this image, the femiphobic terror of the "mommy state." I think this has a lot to do with the drive to undo the New Deal -- not only to undo the New Deal, but undo Theodore Roosevelt's progressive area.

BuzzFlash: This is almost pre-Enlightenment when you combine it with fundamentalist faith.

Stephen J. Ducat: Yes.

BuzzFlash: Why is this happening now? We seem to have the revenge of the barbarians. Rumsfeld, and the neo-cons said in their Project for a New American Century documents of the late nineties, that we should take over the world because we can.

Stephen J. Ducat: The only way you could take this stance is if you feel no connection to others. Other people exist in the world to be conquered and used and exploited. But I try to not be a psychological reductionist in my assessment. I think psychological factors are very important, but they're not the whole story. It's just that nobody has talked about them, so I wrote this book. But there are other factors that I think are really important to take into account. The right wing has been organizing 24 hours a day since the late seventies. Unlike the left, unfortunately, they have not leapt from crisis to crisis, or election to election. They have organized on local levels. They have elected school boards. They've formed enormous alliances. They've done fundraising. This organizing, the multiplicity of think tanks, the placement of pundits in key positions in the media, is paying off in terms of being able to seize the language and spin issues their way. That's something the people on the left really have to appreciate and replicate in their own way, creating an ongoing movement. We need to be unrelenting.

BuzzFlash: The Bush Administration has manipulated the fear factor, on the one hand, and offered images of unfettered masculinity on the other. Many women in the last election who might have felt more comfortable with an embracing, supportive national government nonetheless voted for the perceived masculine leader -- and I emphasize perceived, because there's a lot of smoke and mirrors here -- but the perceived national leader, the top gun, GI Joe which you have on the cover of your book.

Stephen J. Ducat: What you said about their ability to generate and play on people's fear is extremely important, and very much connected to what I talked about in my book. There were psychology experiments done where they generated fear, in experimental subjects, who then were actually more likely to support Bush. So, obviously, with the manipulation of terror alerts and so on they played Americans' anxieties like a fiddle. What I talked about in my book is a specific anxiety that is being played, which is men's terror of the feminine. Republican males have been motivated by this fear and have successfully exploited it in others.

BuzzFlash: On the back of your book is a graphic of the Homeland Security threat levels. There's low, then guarded, then elevated, high, and severe. Finally, the highest level is "feminine," with sparks coming out of it.

Stephen J. Ducat: Right.

BuzzFlash: This really reveals so much and connects so many dots by going a couple levels deeper and trying to figure out what's going on beneath the surface. This construct of anxious masculinity triumphing over threats from feminine forces, from dominant, smothering mothers or uppity wives, seems to explain so much about what's going on with the Republican Party. But then what do you make of someone like Condoleezza Rice in positions of power?

Stephen J. Ducat: He put a woman in a position of power to implement his policies and cushion him from information that he doesn't want to know about. And you have to keep in mind, as highly placed as Condoleezza Rice is, she is his underling. She does the bidding of the core group of neo-cons.

BuzzFlash: If you're a woman, we'll let you in the club as long as you act like the guy on top?

Stephen J. Ducat: As long as you support and act like the guy on top. Of course, having Condoleezza Rice in her position doesn't translate into anything meaningful for other women. I think Condoleezza Rice's advancement to her current position is evidence of how failure is no impediment to promotion in the Bush regime.

BuzzFlash: Loyalty to the hierarchy is what counts.

Stephen J. Ducat: It trumps absolutely everything. Her loyalty to the men in charge is really what matters.

BuzzFlash: Is this merely a stage we're going through? Hasn't anxious masculinity been with us since the beginning of personhood? Is this due to the thirty or forty year strategy of the right wing?

Stephen J. Ducat: I think a complex combination of factors determines this. Not all cultures and all historical periods evidence this kind of femiphobia. But we're seeing a number of factors, not the least of which is a kind of backlash against feminism and the ability of the Republicans to really define the words we use. There is no greater power than the power to define. If you can determine how people use language, you really are able to determine how they think. If you can fill the word liberal with the meaning that you want it to have, which nowadays is weak, feminine, cowardly, so much so that even liberals want to run away from it, then you've won an enormous battle for control. That sort of framing, as George Lakoff calls it, the kind of linguistic hegemony achieved by the right, has accomplished a lot. Femiphobia has always been a feature of most patriarchal societies, but certain historical events have brought them into the foreground. I think the defeat of the United States in Vietnam played a major factor. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "Vietnam syndrome." I think one way of reading this malady is as a condition of wounded masculinity.

BuzzFlash: We should point out Cheney and Rumsfeld were on watch at the White House at the time that the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.

Stephen J. Ducat: Yes. And George Bush the first, for whom the term "the wimp factor" was first coined, declared at the end of the Persian Gulf war in the nineties that this military adventure was the final cure for the Vietnam syndrome. What's interesting is that Republican regimes keep declaring this, so it obviously continues to haunt them. At the end of the Vietnam war, you had this giant imperial monster running away from these little guys in black pajamas. This, I think, constituted an enormous humiliation for those men in the American society that identified with a militarized nation-state. In the years thereafter, we saw a whole spate of revisionist Vietnam war films--you know, the Rambo movies, Chuck Norris movies, and so on. The plots were all virtually the same. You had these hyper-masculine, uber-menschen who weren't going to let the pencil-neck bureaucrats in Washington keep them from kicking Vietnamese ass. All the movies ignore the fact that the war itself was lost. This was an attempt on the part of the culture to try to compensate for the actual defeat. I think the lingering symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome were not a trivial factor in getting us into the current war in Iraq.

BuzzFlash: Stephen. Thank you so much for your time.

Stephen J. Ducat: It's been great talking to you.

And what about gender benders, people who move between camps socially sexually and physiologically. A book review

Title: Lost in the Male ,  By: Derbyshire, John, National Review, 00280038, 6/30/2003, Vol. 55, Issue 12

The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism,

by J. Michael Bailey

Sexual eccentricity raises difficult philosophical issues for conservatives. On the one hand, we have a core belief in the individual and his privacy. Since no form of activity is more private than sex, our instinct is to let people follow their inclinations, within obvious legal constraints against, for example, the corruption of minors. Further, we all have friends whom we know to be, or suspect of being, sexually odd in one way or another, and we do not want to say or write things that would hurt their feelings. On the other hand, conservatives remember what much of the rest of society has forgotten: that even the most private of acts can have dire public consequences, as witness the epidemic of bastardy that has ravaged the United States over the past 40 years, and also of course the AIDS plague, spread in this country mainly by promiscuous homosexual buggery. Religion, to which most non-Randian conservatives are at least well disposed, adds another complicating factor, since the sacred texts of all three major Western monotheistic faiths proscribe homosexuality in unambiguous terms.

These matters are therefore at the very crux of conservative thinking as it has developed in this country across the past half-century. In order to tackle them, it is helpful to have as much actual understanding of them as we can acquire. Michael Bailey's new book is a very useful addition to that understanding. The Man Who Would Be Queen has a narrow and well-defined scope: It is about feminine men. The author has also done research on masculine women, but decided, he tells us in his preface, that "masculine females deserve their own book

Part One of the book, subtitled "The Boy Who Would Be Princess," drives a stake through the heart of the "nurturist" theory of gender identity. How did I acquire my knowledge that I am a man? The nurturist would answer: "By indoctrination during childhood." Bailey refutes this both with statistics and with striking individual case studies. The most moving of the latter concerns a male baby whose lower parts were so deformed -- the condition is called "cloacal exstrophy" -- that he was surgically changed to a female soon after birth, given a girl's name, and raised as a girl. It didn't work. The boy knew he was male, and at age seven dropped the female name and role.

A few days later Jason said: "The day I became a boy was the happiest day of my life." He has said that many times since. He is the best player on his junior-high-school basketball team, and he has a girlfriend.

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret: You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back. All the phenomena Bailey writes about seem to be congenital, not learned. "Congenital" is not the same as "genetic," of course. Events at the fetal stage of development are believed to play some part. For example: On average, homosexual men have more older brothers than heterosexuals. It seems likely that this is in some way a consequence of the mother's immune system reacting to a succession of male fetuses.

Yet family-tree and identical-twin studies strongly suggest that there is a genetic component too. This presents a major puzzle for biologists, since it is hard to see how genes predisposing against ordinary reproductive roles could persist against the competitive pressures of natural selection. A number of ingenious theories, with names like "the kind gay uncle hypothesis," have been proposed to explain the survival of such genes. None of them is very convincing, though, and Bailey easily slaps them down, leaving us with what he calls "an evolutionary mystery."

In Part Two, Bailey's researches into male homosexuality yield many interesting findings. He has discovered, for example, by carefully controlled experiments, that there certainly is such a thing as a "homosexual voice." Volunteer listeners were able to distinguish male homosexuals by their voices alone, at levels far above random chance. This finding, though indisputable, is one of the few that have not yet been convincingly fitted into the large general truth about homosexual men, which is that they carry a mix of feminine and masculine traits. They are feminine in their career and entertainment preferences, in their desire for masculinity in their partners, and in a preference for the receptive role in sexual intercourse. (That last one creates obvious imbalances in their social lives, though Bailey says that the "1,000 bottoms looking for a top" complaint frequently heard at homosexual bars is an exaggeration.) On the other hand they are typically masculine in wanting younger partners, in their strong emphasis on physical attractiveness in partners, in indifference to babies, and in their acceptance of casual promiscuity.

Part Three is the book's most difficult section, because it deals with the rarest and most puzzling aspect of male effeminacy: According to Bailey, less than one man in 12,000 is transsexual, a condition defined simply by "the desire to become a member of the opposite sex," whether or not that desire has led to actual surgery. The striking finding here is that there are two quite distinct types of men who wish they were women, distinguished by the choice of erotic object. On the one hand there are "homosexual transsexuals," who desire masculine men -- heterosexual men, for preference -- and who dress and behave like women to attract them. And then there is the "autogynephilic transsexual," a man whose erotic attention is fixed on the idea of himself as a woman.

The strangeness of this latter type is captured nicely by the title of Bailey's chapter on them: "Men Trapped in Men's Bodies." An autogynephile is essentially a heterosexual man whose object of desire is an imaginary feminine creature which happens to be himself ... or herself, depending on how you look at it. Such a person was usually not effeminate as a child, has likely been married, and does not show typically homosexual preferences in career or entertainment choices. The historian and travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris, to judge from her autobiographical book Conundrum, belongs to this category. The consummation of sexual desire presents obvious difficulties for the autogynephile. Indeed, it is occasionally fatal: Around 100 American men die every year from "autoerotic asphyxia," which seems to arise from a conjunction of masochism and autogynephilia -- the two conditions are related in some way not well understood.

All of these types -- girlish boys, male homosexuals, transsexuals of both types -- are of course human beings, who, like the rest of us, must play the best game they can with the cards Nature has dealt them. No decent person would wish to inflict on them any more unhappiness than their mismatched bodies and psyches have already burdened them with. At the same time, there is circumstantial evidence that complete acceptance and equality for all sexual orientations may have antisocial consequences, so that the obloquy aimed at sexual variance by every society prior to our own may have had some stronger foundation than mere blind prejudice. Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male-dominated ones. The courts of at least two English kings offer support to this thesis, as does the postwar British Secret Service, and more recently the Roman Catholic priesthood. I should like to see some adventurous sociologist research these outward aspects with as much diligence and humanity as Michael Bailey has applied to his study of the inward ones.