The Female Brain
by Louann Brizendine M.D.
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.53 You Save: $17.42 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.50 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Female Brain
Book Review: Cavewoman Brain - Ancient Wiring of the Brain and how it still controls us in the 21st Century
Summary: 3 Stars
"Every brain begins as a female brain. It only becomes male eight weeks after conception, when excess testosterone shrinks the communication center, reduces the hearing cortex, and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large." - This is the quote on the book flap.
It grabbed my interest, I admit. This is a book written for a general audience in hopes of helping "women through the various shifts in their lives: shifts so big they actually create changes in a woman's perception of reality, her values, and what she pays attention to. If we can understand how our lives are shaped by our brain chemistry, then maybe we can better see the road ahead." says Brizendine. The author also remarks that she has chosen to "emphasize scientific truth over political correctness" in writing her book.
There is frequent reference to the Stone Age Brain and how we still act out of primitive imprinting based on the Female Brain's Ancient Wiring.
The chapters I found most helpful were:
Teen Girl Brain, Love and Trust, The Mommy Brain and the part about sex, Ch. 4. There are three appendixes:
1- The Female Brain and Hormone Therapy
2- The Female Brain and Postpartum Depression (only two or three pages)
3- The Female Brain and Sexual Orientation (only two pages)
Only appendix #1 seemed the most thorough and interesting to me. I did find the discussion of Hormone Therapy or HRT as previously known (hormone replacement therapy) well written.
CH. 6 - Emotion: The Feeling Brain, seemed familiar to me and has been covered in several other books and compares men and women's brains and the gender differences in this area especially re: communication misunderstandings.
For mothers (and fathers) of teenage girls, I think it's worth the price of the book. This is a 25 page chapter which has a good amount of info on hormones and specifics about the effects of them on teen girl brains.
The author founded the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic in the Dept. of Psychiatry at UCSF and she draws on her clinical experiences there in compiling case studies for this book. She references prescribing Zoloft (an SSRI antidepressant) a number of times. I imagine that's part of what makes her book controversial, in addition to some people's opinion that she "male bashes". I personally didn't take offense to any of that.
I found some of the book slightly repetitive in different chapters and got tired of reading the word "marinating" as in "...the brain has been marinated in such and such hormone...." but generally it's a readable and informative book which I gave three stars.
It's not hard science and therefore will reach a wider audience, which is the author's intention, I believe. She wants the people who read her book to be able to "better plan" their future by knowing about one's innate biology. I don't think this goal will be achieved by reading the book, but that doesn't mean it's not worth reading.
Book Review: generalizations and a little too much "intuition"
Summary: 2 Stars
Nurture molds nature after birth. The fact that girls at a very young age are made aware of their place and (lesser) value in the world has a strong influence on their need to check for safety. Continual, careful reading of the faces around them is one way to do this. We live in a global culture of sexualized violence and rape, mainly aimed at girls and women, They must navigate a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT world then men do which directly effects and modifies their behavior and interpretation of events that most boys and men would see as benign and unmemorable. Womanhood is a social construct. It must be taught and indoctrinated just as manhood must be.
In her analysis of woman as sexual beings, again, interpretation is everything; from the potency of hormonal washes to cultural influences. Women are aware of sex at the least, everytime they press their thighs together or press against their breasts. As it is inappropriate from an early age for females to express sexuality--for a variety of reasons and for which in many countries they may be killed or given an earlier than usual clitorectomy, much of the mind-body sexual translation is suppressed; feeling is not allowed to be associated with action. Sexual feelings may be interpreted as literal hunger or emotional loneliness and a cookie is immediately grabbed instead of an appropriate sexual object. Yet in many studies women were measured to be more sexually responsive to visuals than men--they just didn't have the connect to their body to recognize it! If women were interviewed about the time it took them to orgasm through self-pleasuring versus the time it took with a partner, we would again understand some of female sexual reticence. When one's sexual partner is more often than not portrayed and permitted to be one's predator, how easy would it be to see sex.....as simply sex. These forms of terrorism against women are intended and systematic. This is where the "war" on terror should really begin and a fulcrum for much research analysis.
The mommy brain comes off as an old time fairy tale. Women have to be trained to breast feed! Many many women are ambivalent about the birth of their child and have to learn to pay appropriate attention to them. Unfortunately, since the bulk of care giving is forced on women, this helps lead to the unending circle of abuse between adults and children, and adults between adults. Community and government must help support all functions of childcare.
All in all, read the book, enjoy the anecdotes and generalizations made from her thriving clinic,as one reads anything interesting. One wonders the economic class and geographic location of the research participants.
....And researchers and physicians, in the name of science assume you are wrong about most of what you think is right, when it comes to female physiology and psychology. Let a little "human intuition" be your guide.
Book Review: Nice Book, but based on generalizations.
Summary: 3 Stars
Before I start, I should say that the easy 'layman' way that it is written is good making it accessible to the general public. It also has very good scientific research behind the book, and Brizendine's credentials are superb. Other than a couple of scientific oversights (like having two X chromosomes creates 'more feminine' brain pattern as opposed to a single X chromosome, which it does not), she does a relatively good job at keeping her facts straight.
The problems I find with this book is that it is based on generalizations, mainly stemming from the levels of hormones, and the fact that it discounts the effects of nurture/environmental factors on the individual. Brizendine portrays the brain as having two switches: male and female, where the truth is much more complex. Although we may be coded genetically for a surge of natal testosterone (male) or varying estrogen levels overtime (female), the fact is that these hormone levels are volatile and often erratic. One male is not necessarily going to be exposed to as much natal testosterone as another, making one more 'male' than the other. Again, Brizendine addresses how some women express too many hormones in extreme PMS, yet she fails to recognize the women who express too little, or even what this expression variation means for different people's brains. In summary, she makes brain gender seem like a toggle when it is really a slider. Enviormental factors, in the womb for example, also play a large role. Many females who grow up to be 'tomboyish' or more 'male' may have been immersed in residual testosterone in the mother's womb from previous births. As a director of a Hormone clinic, I hope she would have picked some of this up.
She also fails to acknowledge the great significance of nurture, which if I tried to elaborate in this book review, it would take pages. I will leave it simply that her neurological knowledge must be addled in some way to discount the value of nurture on the way the brain works.
In addition, many of her 'facts' in her chapter are not represented by statistical data, but anecdotes of her personal cases. It adds a nice touch of 'pathos' but does nothing on the scientific level. Interestingly, as another reviewer pointed out is that very few reputable scientists have come out and supported her work, and the few who have come out have done so in a reserved fashion. This could be due to the informal nature of her book, the lack of conclusive experimental data, blatant generalizations or a combination of the three.
Overall, Brizendine makes a nice read, which is backed up by seemingly pure scientific knowledge, yet it is severely lacking in the foundation on which the book is built upon. If she addressed the facts like 17% of people are of the opposite brain gender, maybe I would have rated her book higher.
Book Review: Don't listen to the naysayers
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't listen to the naysayers.
Brizendine has had the guts to broach a touchy subject in a touchy era. For nearly half a century now the feel good political correctness movement--spearheaded by the feminist movement starting in the 60s--has tried to persuade us to ignore what is obvious to anyone with eyes open, that men and women are different. And they do this under the auspice of all of us just getting along. (Alas, the feminist call for us to just get along, if anything, supports Brizendine's claim that women will say and do just about anything to preserve societal harmony.)
To support this let's-all-get-along movement the idea that men and women are essentially identical at birth and are only "socialized" into gender indentity and gender roles has been carved into the cultural Zeitgeist as if gospel. But now that research is starting to uncover the fact that this nurture rationale for gender differences has been overstated for the past fifty years, the old guard is up in arms. For sure, they are simply in denial that their precious theories are turning out to be hogwash. (I recommend reading "How Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl," which recounts how the original case study meant to support the socialization of gender identity/role turned out to be a load of hooey.)
Brizendine's critics, such as Peterzell, are actually living in some fantasy world, where sexual differences are somehow washed out in statistical apologetics. For example, you may hear that the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups--meaning that men and women will overlap, statistically, in traits we would associate with "feminine" and "masculine." What you won't hear is why such traits are considered "feminine" or "masculine" to begin with if they do not have some kind of intrinsic connection to womanhood and manhood, respectively. In other words, they tell us that gender differences are not great enough to warrant distinction while at the same time using the very distinctions that are near universal in every human culture on earth to distract us from these distinctions. (Women are tough enough to serve in the military...but, aha, why can't men be more peaceloving like women?)
The academics need to make up their minds. Either men and women are different or they are not. To try to rationalize away a difference is not science. It is politics. Brizendine's book is a bold step in saying enough is enough. Pretending that there is no difference, or that the difference is insignificant is not doing a service to society. It is only making us more confused.
Book Review: If this is a female brain, then what's in MY skull?
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought and read "The Female Brain" because I didn't want to condemn Brizendine's assertions out of hand.
I am, to the best of my knowledge, an XX-chromosomed heterosexual woman (I haven't had karyotyping done, but all the anatomical signs are there). However, my brain isn't much like the brains Dr. Brizendine describes. I didn't completely conform to the behaviors she described in female children and adolescents. Nor was I a tomboy, so the "more testosterone" hypothesis fails. A few things rang true, but the vast majority of them were behaviors I abhorred in others, and couldn't understand because I simply didn't think that way.
My adult brain never did fall victim to a flood of hormones leading me to breed. I don't think babies smell good, and I have never thought so. I felt the urge to bear a child exactly once. It lasted less than 15 minutes, until I was hit with a powerful menstrual cramp and that was the end of that. I've never been so completely hormonally gaga in love that I was willing to give up everything for a man I was attracted to. And I have been extremely attracted--just not willing to give up myself or my life for him. If anything, I skipped straight from a moody adolescence (that was as "normal" compared to Brizendine's descriptions as I ever got) to the postmenopausal stage, refusing to be a "nurse with a purse". And I haven't even reached menopause yet.
Perhaps "The Female Brain" describes the vast majority of "normal" female brains, but it doesn't describe mine. And if it doesn't describe mine, given the same chromosomal load and social pressures as any other woman, then what gives?
The book was a quick, easy read. If anything, I felt unsatisfied by the lack of technical and scientific information in the text. I would have preferred references and citations to have been placed through the text, instead of at the end. The only truly useful information I got out of the book was some information on the calming effects of progesterone, sufficient to allow me to effectively browse PubMed for scientific studies on the phenomenon.
08/22/06: Why are men so fond of puns? Men tend to pun more, and engage in long-running "pun wars". Their pun activity is, from what I've observed, at least an order of magnitute higher than womens' pun activity. One would think the opposite would be true, since puns are entirely dependent on verbal facility. Just wondering...