Oh yeah, another thing about the “What Sex is Your Brain?” quiz that showed up on the BBC website earlier this month. One section, called “faces” presents you with sets of two, slightly digitally altered photos of individuals and asks you to indicate which face you prefer.
They also let you choose a set of men’s photos or a set of women’s. I chose women’s faces, and evidently in nine of the twelve pairs of photos I selected the side with the more “masculine” features.
Faces
This task looked at how you rate the attractiveness of a series of faces. The images you looked at were digitally altered to create slight differences in masculinity.
Your choices suggest you prefer more masculine faces.
Highly masculinised male faces possess more extreme testosterone markers such as a long, broad and lower jaw, as well as more pronounced brow ridges and cheekbones.
Interestingly, women’s preferences are said to vary across the menstrual phase. A more masculine face is preferred during the 9 days prior to ovulation, when conception is most likely.
A typical ‘attractive’ female face possesses features such as a shorter, narrower, lower jaw, fuller lips and larger eyes than an average face.
Are you surprised at what researchers think they can learn from your answers? Find out more.
I dunno. I’m not going to say that the characteristics they identify really are or aren’t masculine or feminine because they’ve studied the matter and I haven’t. I would have said, however, that the photos I preferred seemed to be looking out of the frames more directly, with chins more up, eyes less deferential.
While I was in a social theory program back in college a fellow student found a paper claiming that in conversation and especially in meetings men and women tended to look around differently, with men keeping their eyes level as while scanning from face to face, and women dropping their eyes to the table or floor in between. The paper she found created a bit of a sensation in the sense that, well, we were all obsessing about social theory and the sociology of small groups anyway and, unlike Hegel, that was something we could play with right in seminar. Sure enough, by the way, at least back in 1982/83 most men’s eyes tracked, most women’s eye dipped, and we made three kinds of hay out of what the exceptions might mean.
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So why bring up this post now, a follow-up to a previous post, one I’d started earlier this month and then sort of dropped? Here’s why…
I finally made it to Washington, D.C. this morning where I’m visiting my mother and other, mostly elderly relatives from her side of the family. And as with most elderly relatives there are old photos and one thing that just strikes me like lightning as I walk from room to room are the strong, confident, clear-eyed, chin-up women looking straight out of the frames: women with MAs and PhDs and MDs going back nearly a century and a half, women in sharp satin Victorian blacks, in painterly neo-classical garments, fingers artfully poised over massive tomes, and, later, brisk, portraits of professionals from the FDR administration, from book flyleaves, from graduation photos.
And yet for all this their faces, familiar to me, I realize, from infancy, are evidently “masculine,” and therefore I, for liking them well, can only have a “more feminine brain?”
I hate to bring this up again but mightn’t it be possible that everything about those women was feminine and the test’s assumptions flawed? Mightn’t it be possible that every thing about my brain is masculine, and it’s the definition of masculinity that falls short?
Over the weekend I started reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which, by the way, has a wonderful “cross burning deserts for you” declaration) but I’m thinking more of Hamlet’s response that “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Submitted by 852 (not verified) on Mon, 2006-08-28 17:01.
There may be some part of the brain that is defined as masculine or feminine and our morhphology is determine by sex hormones; but most of what we generally think of as masculine or feminine is from culture. Human have to rely more on learning than that of instinct. I think this is because our brains continue to delevop after birth. At some point necessities for survival, became symbols of what was masculine or feminine.
You were born into genrations of confident womem. They learned to be that way from their mothers and fathers. So why wouldn't you pick similar faces . Only culture has defined those faces as masculine.
[Right in one, five of nine and I'm about to post something right along those lines... again. It's not that there aren't differences -- there are -- it's that they're fewer and less significant than we (literally!) imagine. Thank you. --fl]
Submitted by 852 (not verified) on Tue, 2006-08-29 07:12.
this was a very interesting test. honestly, of the male faces presented, none of themever made me start salivating. i did come out as prefering very masculine faces, but the ones that looked more 'feminine' to me also seemd very 'young' looking and i have never been one to find a fellow significiantly younger than me attractive. it's that desire for a fellow with some life experience.
also on the finger measuring thing i found that rahter interesting since, if one is measuring properly, that can't be fudged by personal preference. my ratio came out quite male and the whole brother thing intrigues me since i am adopted. just don't knwo what to make of that. something in utero i can never account for or just a fluke? the world may never know.
i was also off the chart, male in the rotating objects, blew the guys out of the water on that one even. then again i was off the chart female in spotting the difference. blew the average woman out of the water on that one.
all that to say, overall i came right down the middle as neither strongly male/nore female.....did i just sprout a penis to become a hermaphrodite or loose gonads and vagina to become neuter?
[Great points, Lime. It's not that there aren't differences between men and women, it's that we insist the differences have to match our preconceptions. (The differences are far more like clasped hands, not separate planets.) Thanks, Lime. --fl]
Submitted by 852 (not verified) on Tue, 2006-08-29 14:05.
I took that test a few months ago and scored exactly in the middle between men and women. On some items that were supposed to indicate masculinity I scored higher than the average male. Same on some items that were supposed to idnicate femininity. I also scored lower than the average male or average female on other items.
Here's what I have to say about the test: While there may be some biological basis for some of the trends it notes, as one of your other commenters pointed out, humans are shaped by socialization to an enormous degree, and that socialization can create physical differences. Think about the oft-cited difference in upper body strength. First, there is more variability among women and among men there is between the average man and the average woman. Second, one reason men develop so much strength -- in societies like ours -- is that they are encouraged to participate in activities that develop that strength. Girls are less encouraged to do so. And, as girls have been increasingly encouraged to do so over the past decades, they've increased in strength.
It seems nearly impossible with humans to separate the effects of biology, environment, and socialization. I often wonder why it continues to be so important a project for scientists and the rest of us to find a basis for gender differences. I'd much rather we spent our time finding ways to undermine them!
[Thanks, Elizabeth. Funny you should mention upper body strength. Now that I'm back online I'm about to something I wrote on the train from D.C. to NYC about gender. It invokes 70's-era body builder Lisa Lyons dead-lifting Arnold Schwarzenegger -- a feat very few men could accomplish. More about that in a moment, I suppose. (I appreciated our conversation at Vivian's and I'm very glad to have met you.) --fl]