Читать книгу Gender Theory in Troubled Times - Rachel Alsop - Страница 16

We … often behave and talk as if the sexes are categorically different: men like this, women like that. … In toy stores sex-segregated product aisles … assume that a child’s biological sex is a good guide to what kinds of toys will interest them. … When we think of men and women in this complementary way it is intuitive to look for a single powerful cause that creates the divide between the sexes. … Wouldn’t it make sense if testosterone … makes men like this, while its minimal presence in females helps to make women like that? … This is Testosterone Rex: that familiar, pervasive and powerful story of sex and society. Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones and behavior, it offers a neat and compelling account … [But] Testosterone Rex is wrong, wrong, and wrong again. (Fine 2017: 17–22)

The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case. We are at the point where we need to say, ‘Forget the male and female brain; it’s a distraction, it’s inaccurate.’ … It is now a scientific given … that the brain is moulded from birth onwards and continues to be moulded through to the ‘cognitive cliff’ in old age when our grey cells start disappearing. So out goes the old ‘biology is destiny’ argument. (Gina Rippon, quoted in Fox 2019)