07/10/03

His and Hers

Carolyn See

Washington Post

'The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain' by Simon Baron-Cohen Reviewed by Carolyn See

We "know" men and women are different; we know it in our collective consciousness, our collective gut. It's the stuff of "Mars and Venus" and myriad advice columns in the newspapers and weeping wives on "Oprah" flanked by stone-faced, shifty-eyed husbands. Women like the ballet, men like cars. Women chat on the phone, men zone out on TV sports. Ninety percent of the murders in America are said to be committed by men. (I suppose women do 90 percent of the retail shopping.)

For 20 years, Simon Baron-Cohen has been doing research on gender differences (and autism) but hesitated, he writes in this fascinating book, to mention his theories in public until 1997, because it would have been so impolitic in our climate of gender political correctness. His hypothesis, stated on page one of The Essential Difference, is that male and female brains are different -- not better or worse than each other, just different: "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems." Yet toward the end of this study, the author writes that he "would weep with disappointment if a reader took home from this book the message that 'all men have lower empathy' or 'all women have lower systemizing skills.' " The operative word here, I think, is "weep." Baron-Cohen's concern, after proving the validity of his hypothesis, seems to be for mutual respect between the sexes.

He has come up with a fascinating crazy-quilt of studies to prove our sexual differences. From the very first day of life, for instance, given two different images to stare at in the crib -- one a smiling woman, the other that same face snipped up and made into an abstract mobile -- female babies focus on the face, male babies on the mobile.

Baron-Cohen's point is that these differences are not culturally based -- although they may be reinforced by the culture. They are biological, he says, perhaps genetic in origin. They are, in fact, "hard-wired" in us all. This may not be the best news for feminists, who have worked so hard and so long for "equality."

The phrase "separate but equal" certainly has an odious history. But what if, in fact, men and women really are equal but separate, separate but equal? Put more personally, what if my ex-husband, who never met my eye and conversed mainly in monologues or tirades (but he was darling!) wasn't trying to drive me crazy? What if he was just wired that way? What if Prince Charles wasn't just being a mannerless churl when, on being asked whether he loved Princess Di, answered with a question about the existence of love? What if men are indeed "wired that way"?

Reading this bracing study is a lot like drowning; i.e., your whole life passes in front of your eyes. Scene after scene floats up from one's twenties, one's thirties. Suddenly, after years, the scenes make sense. "A woman is a gadget you screw in the bed and it does all the housework," a guy told me once, kidding on the square. But what if that made sense to him? What if he saw the world in terms of systems instead of humans? What if he was wired that way?

Baron-Cohen also hypothesizes an "extreme male brain," which we tend to perceive as autistic. (Four out of five autistics are male; in our new epidemic of autism, as many as one in 87 boys is born with the syndrome.) The autistic child has trouble meeting the gaze of others, is disinclined to talk and often socially clueless. His strong suits are a love of recurring patterns and an extraordinary ability to concentrate. The author suggests that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein -- both socially inept but able to discover previously unknown systems -- were autistic, possessing "extreme male" brains. (Andy Warhol has been said to have Asperger's, a disorder sometimes linked to autism -- Andy Warhol, my ex-husband's cousin. And this book interested me in the first place because I have an autistic grandson.)

I thank Simon Baron-Cohen more than I can say for having written this book. It has explained a good part of my own life to me; it's made men achingly human to me. But I have to respectfully question half of his hypothesis, the part about the female brain being hard-wired for empathy. Or at least I wish he'd reworded it, as in "women are more curious about humans; men are more curious about systems." The word "empathy" suggests that after you've put yourself in someone else's place you feel the need to help him or her, even, at times, to put his or her needs before your own. This is an idea that goes back at least to the time of Adam. It's an idea, a wish, I feel certain, that springs directly from the "male" brain.

I don't have studies to draw on. I base my conclusions on my own thoughts, conversations with female friends, and most important, the avalanche of novels -- both "light" and "literary" -- written by women since the '20s, when Julia Peterkin beat out Hemingway for the Pulitzer Prize. Women tend to be devoted to their children, but they're not necessarily interested in "helping" men through their lives, in serving them or sacrificing for them or even sympathizing with them. (Often, though I hate to say it, and it tends to be invisible to men, women think about themselves.) What a wonderful thing it would have been if the author had worked with a female collaborator who could have shone as bright a light on women as he has on men.