Echidne of the Snakes raises and issue dear to my heart: the obsession some people have with “proving” the gender status quo.

There’s no field called ‘the study of gender or sex similarities’. No fledgling assistant professor will make tenure or get promoted by publishing an article which points out that men and women really are rather similar in some characteristic. Just imagine the sensation that would be caused by a book titled Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia. Snores.

She said it here.

It occurs to me that what’s weird about researching sex differences is that so many sex differences are so freaking obvious! Like, gee, the metabolic requirements for growing eight to eleven pounds of incredibly complex new human being, and modifying and sustaining the associated maternal organs during and after pregnancy have functional impacts on other body systems including (temporarily) cognitive functions? Or that kicking a man in the groin will induce higher subsequent risk-avoidance behavior than in women? Do tell!

Some of those differences are even genetic. (The Y chromosome codes for critical-to-fetal-male-differentiating increased testosterone… and hairy ears. The X chromosome not so much. Case closed.)

Problem is no matter how much research you do you’re only going to further refine the good… oh… let’s be generous and say five percent of human biology and behavior can be explained by innate gender differences in the first place. Leaving…

The other 95 percent of commonalities that are generally overlooked. Overlooked not least by the absolutely unexamined assumptions that men and women are as different as night and day, Mars and Venus, or the deceptively convincing black and white symbols of yin and yang.

There’s a possibly-apocryphal but instructively popular anecdote about construction of one of the early cyclotrons. These are large circular machines, dozens, sometimes hundreds of feet in diameter back then, with tons of magnets that physicists use to accelerate subatomic particles to high speeds. Controlled collisions of such particles can reveal quite a lot about the nature of matter, but in order for such machines to function properly they have to be circular. Really, really, millimeter-perfect circles.

Anyway, the story goes that builders of the cyclotron measured everything meticulously at every step, using micrometers to insure that each part was aligned perfectly with its neighbor. When they turned it on… nothing happened. So they got out their micrometers again and measured and adjusted, measured and adjusted, eliminating even the fractional variations they found. And when they turned it on… nothing happened again! So out came the tools, this time even more precise… and… again nothing happened.

And, the story goes, a janitor/carpenter/passerby/kid got a stick, a string, and a pencil put the stick in the middle of the big ring, tied the string and the pencil together, and traced a big circle and found… the measured-by-millimeters circle was actually more than a foot out of round.

The point of my little digression being that, like the alleged cyclotron builders, gender-difference researchers who spend months looking for minute (or even possibly imaginary structural differences in features of the brain) might ask themselves if our brains are really so different why is it so hard to distinguish them, even with really sophisticated instrumentation, from all the parts that aren’t different…

...when the social-sciences equivalent of a stick and a string can tell you that the genes for growing noticeable-to-passers-by boobs, in combination with other individuals with genes for growing bigger muscles, in combination with social structures that historically have treated people with boobs as exchangeable commodities might explain more than you (well, not you but too many others, evidently) want to hear about the basis of significant gender differences in people with very, very similar brains?

Echidne adds,

Why does any of this matter? First, because these studies are always a defense of the status quo. That status quo is always “the worst of times and the best of times” for women; the worst because the studies have established that women really can’t (and don’t even want to be) be equal with men due to all those hard-wired (by some prehistoric electrician) sex differences, and the best because the current arrangements in the society are the best women really can hope for. But of course the status quo of the different-humors theory was different from the status quo of the late nineteenth century which is different from the status quo of today.

Second, bad just-so theories about the difference between men and women affect more than what people talk about at cocktail parties. They affect the culture and its norms, and they affect the beliefs, aspirations and self-confidence of girls and boys yet not born.

Hear, hear. Despite the decidedly non-catchy title Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia would actually be a much more interesting book! Just for starters, it would start to explain how and why men, women, and those in between use the same parts of their brains to respond to differential environmental and social inputs.

There are a million different possibilities but, this being ostensibly a sex blog… and since “sex sells,” such a book might contain inquiries into (nonexistent as far as I know) studies into how heterosexual male college students react when they’re considerably outnumbered on campus by increasingly sexually-assertive heterosexual women. It might contain data about women’s reactions to partners who are sexually cooler than they are. It might compare and contrast stereotypical beliefs against the realities of men who have a hard time having orgasms and women who come “prematurely…” and lose interest before their partners are done. And in general it might spend a lot of time looking at (also next to nonexistent as far as I know) studies explaining how men, women, and people in between respond to situations where their socialized gender conditioning is screened or filtered out.

Again, I’m not saying men and women are identical — see genes for boobs, hairy ears, above. And so I’m not saying explorations of the similarities would turn up only similarities. I’m just saying I expect science to try and tell us stuff we don’t know, not to reinforce what we do. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, a great way to do that would be to begin with the assumption that we’re the same instead of different and see what comes out of that.