Morality

[DanaC]

Sure thing Jim:

Most of the sources cited by the author of The Female Brain, to back up her suggestion that men think about sex all the time and women hardly at all, relate to papers that said nothing about frequency of sexual thoughts in men or women. One of the very few studies whch the author of the rebuttal was able to find that seemed to show a higher frequency of sexual thoughts amongst men than women was a very small study, and fundamentally disagreed with the other author about those levels of frequency, with women thinking about sex around half as much as men (as opposed to the book under discussion, which suggests men think about sex once a minute and women once or twice a day).

Even the few studies that have been done into this and have shown any kind of a disparity, cannot answer to the complex reasons for that disparity, which may include different levels of comfort both in accepting/going with sexual thoughts and reporting said thoughts to researchers, both of which are far more likely to have a social or psychological basis rather than simple girl brain - v - boy brain chemical differences.

There are differences between the typical female and the typical male brain. But those differences, in almost every case are not as extreme as the differences between individual brains of either gender. Often when it's said that a particular characteristic is more common in women than in men, that basically means if you pick a random woman there's a X% chance she'll have that characteristic, and a X% chance for a random man. That percentage figure is often much less startling than the headlines would suggest. So, a characteristic that is considered 'male' and set out in such books as 'typically male' and given a great deal of weight as proof of vastly different male and female brains, may actually only be expected in a random male with a 55% probability. The fact that if you were to select a random woman you'd have a 45% likelihood that she'll show that characteristic, or a characteristic level of something, is conveniently ignored.