Echidne of the Snakes gently twists the blade
I was reading about a recent study on depression and new dads when I came across this:
It’s quite shocking,” says neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco and author of The Male Brain, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “What doctors need to be alerted to is that they’re treating a family unit.”
Louann Brizendine’s first book was about the female brain. You should read a few critiques of it, especially the ones I recommend here and here, before you find yourself impressed by that title “neuropsychiatrist.”
Louann Brizendine’s ideas about “male” and “female” brain dichotomies aren’t so much a problem of, say, ignorance or stupidity (she’s both learned and intelligent) but of limited scope. You’re gonna call me a rebel here but it boils the fact that even if men and women really were not only not the same species but entirely different life forms evolved on completely separate planets BUT!!! nevertheless were completely interdependent for reproducing their kind AND!!! had been interdependent for hundreds of thousands of generations THEN!!!
Well… actually we’re all from the same planet and we’re the same species and most of the real difference, while, well, real aren’t particularly significant BUT!!!
Even if we were from different planets it’s pretty much going to be true that an organizational shift from gestating offspring to incubating and interacting with offspring is gonna happen.
And to the extent those organisms, even if they really were from other planets, engage in multi-level non-sequential process management based on the same kinds of combinations of neural- and endocrine-based biological signaling human men and women use?
Well yeah, despite any superficial differences, or even very deep ones, then assuming they have any ongoing interactions at all with their offspring and each other they’re going to have to make a lot of very sudden changes. Changes that, given the complexities of not just the biological and physiological but social, interpersonal, and cognitive as well, are going to create a series of dissonant states that, depending on the individual organisms, their health, their own expectations, the expectations put on them, are going to be of indeterminate intensity and duration.
Or, if you’re talking about people, as I am, Echidne is, and even Brizendine is, they’re going to have to make a lot of adjustments, some of which are hormonal, none of which they’re likely to be fully prepared for (even, in my own first, second- and third-hand experience, if they’ve been through it before.)
But just to be fair to Brizendine and all the rest of the Mars/Venus cohort, that would be true for aliens from opposite planets, true for species from opposite genera. Heck it would even be true even if it was the Iron Man movie’s Tony Stark and his house computer Jarvis!
So yeah. If Brizendine wants to be really helpful here she could drop the “male brain” and “female brain” mythology and write her next book on “the family brain.”
Geez!
