According to Monica Potts of TAPPED possibly the first political/terror suicide bomber was a young Palestinian woman back in 1985. I’d add that back in 1991 a Tamal woman, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, blew up herself along with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. And since the year 2000 Chechen women have participated in suicide bombings in Russia.

All of which leads Potts to wonder why a quarter century later the New York Times still seems surprised that women could do such a thing. (I really like her concluding sentences, which I’ve italicized.)

[N]ote the inherent sexist tone in many of these stories in the way the women are assumed to have special motivations compared to male bombers, who aren’t any less troubled for wanting to blow themselves up than women are. 

Look at this paragraph from the Times story:

While there is no single reason that women decide to give up their lives, experts said they have usually suffered a traumatic event that makes them burn with revenge or question whether they want to live. In the case of the attacks in Russia, this could be the death of a child, husband or other family member at the hands of Russian forces, or a rape. Russian authorities have said the women are sometimes drugged.

You know what? I bet there’s no single reason men become suicide bombers either. When writers discuss the motivations of male suicide bombers, the explanations, rightly, tend to be macro — ideology, objection to the ongoing American wars or a result of the relative poverty and instability of the countries they hale from. The explained motivations of the women always tend to be some personal trauma or the result of sway held over them by men in their lives. The implication is that violence is unnatural to women, so something must be broken within them to explain it. The really dangerous implication is the converse: that violence comes naturally to men and is merely one of the ways they react to the material conditions in which they find themselves.

She said it here.

Note: As usual neither Potts nor I are playing the “no matter how destructive, self-destructive, or stupid, if a woman does it must be progress” card. More like the opposite, as in wow, it takes some pretty heavy-duty gender narratives to ignore 25 years of history.

And, like Potts, I’m really disturbed by the assumptions not just about what women shouldn’t “naturally” be capable of but also the assumptions about what men “naturally” are.

Finally, once again, it’s feminists like Potts rather than anti-feminists standing up against stereotypes of women and men.

Gwen of Sociological Images has a nice post about the

Jayna T. and V. sent in a number of commercials for home security systems. They point out that in all the commercials they’d seen (there are many, many, many more than what I have here), the intruders are men (White men, from what I can tell) and the person endangered is a White woman, either alone or with her daughter.

[multiple embedded videos illustrating the genre]

So they’re selling home security systems by playing on the idea of the vulnerable middle-class White woman, easily victimized in her home. Luckily, home intruders are easily frightened away by an alarm system and run for the hills.

She said it here.

It’s not exactly what you’d want to call progress, but wow are these ads different from maybe 10-15 years ago when basically the same scenarios (white women alone with their white daughters) with taglines like “you can’t be there to protect them 100% of the time” were pitched to prospective male customers.

But here’s the trick: it’s not progress even though the ads appear to be directly targeting independent and/or single head-of-household women instead of their middle-class-anxious, wife-as-unguarded-property male counterparts because recognizing demographic reality isn’t the same as respecting it.

Yes, compared even to the 1980s there are lots more middle-class households headed by women who are affluent and/or autonomous enough to make their own purchasing decisions. But the significant marker to applaud is the very real progress that’s led to a market demographic large enough for Brinks or Broadview to chose to exploit. The ads themselves, on the other hand, are merely exploitive. (Worse, actually, are their calculated plays on old stereotypes whereby all calls are answered by muscular, conventionally handsome white men who reassuringly say things like “I’m sending help right now” to the distraught but grateful victims.)

Mark Liberman of Language Log hasn’t yet read Louann’s Brizendine’s The Male Brain, but he’s already skeptical. With, evidently, good reason. After reading a review by Vaughn Bell at Mindhacks Liberman says it looks like…

...Dr. Brizendine’s new book is cut from the same cloth as her earlier one, The Female Brain. (See here, here and here for links to previous LL discussion.) Vaughan quotes this passage from [Brizendine’s] CNN piece

Our brains are mostly alike. We are the same species, after all. But the differences can sometimes make it seem like we are worlds apart.

The “defend your turf” area — dorsal premammillary nucleus — is larger in the male brain and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other males. And his amygdala, the alarm system for threats, fear and danger is also larger in men. These brain differences make men more alert than women to potential turf threats.

and notes that

Male and female humans are indeed the same species, but we are not a species which has a dorsal premammillary nucleus because it’s only been identified in the rat.

Furthermore, there is no reliable evidence that amygdala size differs between the sexes in humans and a recent study that looked specifically at this issue found no difference.

Liberman said it here.

In other words it’s approximately as disingenuous for Brizendine to bring up rats’ dorsal premammillary nuclei while discussing men’s and women’s brains as it would be for her to bring the venomous spurs of the male Australian platypus while discussing men’s and women’s ankles, or male moose antler placement in the context of human skulls.

---

You might want to follow the links back to Liberman’s post to see how various gay and lesbian commenters responded to Brizendine’s claim that testosterone forces men to stare at women’s breasts.

All that testosterone drives the “Man Trance“– that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can’t. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.

Actually, here’s one comment that refers to another

“Dierk’s reaction echoes mine. As I gay man, I can confidently say I’ve never been entranced by a woman’s breasts. “

Yeah, me neither. Brizedine flatters herself. Testosterone makes me look at her husband’s stubbly jawline, not her breasts.

---

Finally, though, Liberman repeats an excellent point he first raised in discussion of Brizendine’s earlier book, The Female Brain.

As I’ve watched the reaction to Louann Brizendine’s book over the past few months, I’ve concluded that “scientific studies” like these have taken over the place that bible stories used to occupy. It’s only fundamentalists like me who worry about whether they’re true. For most people, it’s only important that they’re morally instructive.

Actually while I completely agree with Liberman’s general premise — “scientific” studies like this really are the new bible stories — I think he’s got it almost exactly backwards on the whole “innate gender difference” genre. Because whereas bible stories generally really are meant to be morally instructive and uplifting, virtually all gender-difference stories are meant (and sought!) to justify or excuse the often highly-immoral status quo. It might not be the intent of authors either to uplift (bible) or downtrod (sociobiologists) but it certainly seems to be the intent of those who most-often pass them on.

And with that in mind The Male Brain is bound to be another best-seller.

---

Final question: Does Brizendine really imagine that human women are less territorial than men? Or less aware of territorial challenges? Has she never been in a school lunchroom? An office cubicle farm? A theater dressing room? A restaurant kitchen? Hello? Neither men nor women have a monopoly, or even a charter, in that department.

You know how when you have a nightmare you wake up and in a wash of emotion you go “thank goodness it was only a dream?”

Ever had one of those dreams where you wake up and in a wash of emotion go “oh no it was only a dream?”

I hate it when that happens (the latter, not the former.) How about you?