Just how extreme are sexual brain differences?

[visceral_instinct]

I ask because I notice that 'evolutionary biology' (read: 'women are nurturers, men are hunters', 'men want sex, women need love', etc) seems to be in fashion and I can't help observing that some of these ideas seem very exaggerated. (Note: I am NOT a raging PC-obsessed nazi, I am not trying to say there are no neurological differences between men and women.) I mean, all this stuff about how women are inherently 'nurturers' and men are inherently 'hunters/warriors'. Most people I know have both of these qualities, for example, fathers are nurturers as well as mothers, and women can be hard-nosed and competitive when it is necessary (ever seen 2 girls fight over a guy??) Ditto with the sex/love dichotomy thing, the idea that men want sex and women want communication. Most people want both of these. At least, I've had both boyfriends and simply males who were my friends who would talk to me endlessly about personal stuff, probably because they wouldn't dare confide in friends of their own sex for fear of being labelled 'poofy'.

So how much of it is hard neurological fact and how much is just ideology? Because I suspect that some of it is just ideology. There seems to be a resurgence of belief in gender stereotypes. I mean, when I was younger, if you were a girl and you played with slingshots and liked to mosh at metal concerts, you were simply a 'tomboy'. Now, you hear words like 'male brain' and 'Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia' (a piece of retarded and misleading pop science if ever there was one, there's a difference between being a tomboy and suffering from a hermaphroditic disorder). I think that is because both men and women are stepping out of traditional gender roles and some people just find it confusing.

Opinions, people?

 

[James R]

A lot of the statements from evolutionary psychology are exaggerated in the popular press, as well as being over-simplified. For example, as you say, both men and women want sex and love. If there are differences, they are differences in degree, or in the emphasis that men and women place on each thing.

Moreover, saying that men want sex more than women, if it is true, does not mean that ALL men want sex more than ALL women. It's better to think of overlapping bell curves than two completely separate distributions of people. It's like taking a statement like "Men tend to be taller than women" and concluding that any given man will be taller than any given woman.