More science of sex differences

This will come as no surprise to readers of this site, but recent scientific research has again confirmed differences in the brain structure of males and females. What is particularly interesting about the recent findings is that the test subjects were newborn infants. So from the very start of life, before any effect of culture, boys and girls are different in the way their brains are wired.

From the abstract:

Using high-resolution structural MRI, we measured subcortical gray and white matter brain volumes in a cohort (N = 143) of 1-month infants and examined characteristics of these volumetric measures throughout this early period of neurodevelopment. We show that brain volumes undergo age-related changes during the first month of life, with the corresponding patterns of regional asymmetry and sexual dimorphism. Specifically, males have larger total brain volume and volumes differ by sex in regionally specific brain regions, after correcting for total brain volume. Consistent with findings from studies of later childhood and adolescence, subcortical regions appear more rightward asymmetric. Neither sex differences nor regional asymmetries changed with gestation-corrected age. Our results complement a growing body of work investigating the earliest neurobiological changes associated with development and suggest that asymmetry and sexual dimorphism are present at birth.

Feminists losing the terf war

It doesn't matter how outlandish a liberal innovation might seem, if it fits with liberal principles then it will be pushed onto society regardless - if, that is, there is no effective opposition to liberalism itself.

Here's an interesting example. There is a push on now to have people accept the idea that men can give birth to children. It is beginning to become politically incorrect to talk about "pregnant women" as this excludes women who identify as men but who nonetheless get pregnant.

Seems kooky, but look at the following Facebook thread:

This is a debate between radical feminists who insist that you need to be biologically female to be a woman (they are called "terfs") and other leftists who reject this as "transphobic."

The significant part of the debate is that a professional organisation for midwives (the Midwives Alliance of North America) has already committed itself to the idea that men can give birth ("suggesting that only women can give birth is not welcome here").

The midwives association repeated this view in another thread:

The "terfs" who insist that being a woman is based on biological reality are warned by the midwives alliance that "comments that say that men can't give birth are transphobic and will not be tolerated."

There is so much that could be said about this. The twistedness of liberal morality is apparent in this discussion. Liberal morality is built on the idea that we should be free to choose our identity and our own subjective goods, but that we should allow others to do the same. Therefore, there is no objective moral order for individuals to orient themselves to, but instead the point of morality is to show how tolerant you are of others choosing as they will.

But it all gets mired in a contradiction. On the one hand, if a woman declares that she identifies as a man you are supposed to be tolerant and accepting of her decision to identify this way. But this then means that someone who points out, as a basic fact of reality, that there is a biological aspect to being a woman, will be told curtly that their speech will not be tolerated. So a morality of "tolerance" ends up being, by all previous standards, remarkably intolerant.

You can tell that if things go as they usually do that the terfs will lose this battle. If, as per liberalism, we are to be free to self-determine our own identity and pursue our own subjective goods, then it is difficult in principle to say to someone biologically female that they can't identify as a man and become a "pregnant male." To oppose this is, in liberal terms, bigoted, prejudiced, phobic, hateful, discriminatory and all the rest of it.

In the past, the only opposition to the liberal left came from the liberal right (the "establishment conservatives"). The liberal right would sometimes initially oppose these kinds of things (as "going too far") but once they got traction, then the right liberals would fold and would eventually end up defending the new status quo.

It's interesting now to see something different emerging. There's a section of the alt right which is now doing what a genuine opposition would have done decades ago, and actually push back in a determined way against the left liberal project. It is still too small to win in the wider society, but it is carving out a political space where the older dynamic no longer runs as it used to.

So perhaps we won't see, in a few years time, a liberal speech code outlawing the use of the term "pregnant woman" as hate speech. Maybe the usual pattern of politics will continue to lose ground.

It's not just that feminists are anti-male...

The term feminist is very unpopular, even amongst young women. For instance, research by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK found that:

...the label 'feminist' is often forcefully rejected, particularly by young women. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) suggests that, in rejecting feminism, women are often seeking to position themselves within conventional norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

"In many contemporary European societies, the term feminism provokes unease and even hostility," says Dr Christina Scharff of King's College London, who carried out the research"...

Playing an important role in the rejection of feminism in both countries are the distorted stereotypes of the 'man-hating feminist', the 'unfeminine feminist' or the 'lesbian feminist'. Many participants in the study did not want to call themselves ‘feminist’ because of these stereotypes.

...Although none of the participants could point to specific individuals, most still viewed the pioneers of gender equality as 'lesbian, man-hating feminists'.

And then there's this:

A study commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and published today found that feminism is regarded virtually unanimously in negative terms, ranging from old-fashioned to "ball breaking".

Those questioned felt women were more equal than ever before and believed that issues such as women's greater domestic role or concentration in lower-paid jobs are the result of individual choice and natural differences between the sexes which had to be addressed by individuals rather than, as the women's movement argued, society as a whole.

The findings of the Future Foundation study, Talking Equality, have sent shockwaves through the EOC.

The suspicions that young women have when it comes to the "pioneers of gender equality" are fully justified. And the problem is not just that a fair proportion of these pioneers were man-haters. Equally significant is that they were women who did not like or accept womanhood or femininity. Many were as anti-female as they were anti-male.

I was reminded of this when reading about one of the major pioneers of second wave feminism in the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone. She wrote:

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

That is one of the drives of liberal modernity: to make sex distinctions not matter. If you believe that the end goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, then you will want to make your life as self-determining as possible, which will then mean that you will reject predetermined qualities, such as your own sex. As you cannot change your sex, the next best thing you'll be able to do is to make it not matter.

A generation earlier, the same ideas were in circulation. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir could describe the intellectual temper of her own times as follows:

If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.

That's particularly interesting as it traces the failure to accept sex distinctions to an even deeper change in philosophy: from philosophical realism (which accepted the real existence of masculine and feminine essences) to nominalism (which saw such categories as having no real existence but as being names to group things).

Can sex distinctions be made not to matter? Well, not very easily. A University of California neuroscientist, Larry Cahill, has just recently been interviewed on differences between the male and female brain:

The differences exist at virtually all levels, he says, from those of tiny cells to large structures in the brain, from brain chemistry to what he calls intriguing differences in the way men and women remember emotionally searing events.

And this:

What it is, is just a storm of sex differences, big and little, found all over the place – down to the level of single neurons. We see these differences everywhere, and we started to realize, damn, we simply assume they aren't there. And these sex differences have implications for how the brain works and how to fix brains. That's your big story right there.

For me it's the existence of this huge fire in neuroscience. We've been collectively in kind of denial about it. But we've hit some sort of critical mass in the last couple of years. It's really starting to change.

Brainwashing Norway

See, documentaries can be fun. I've just watched one called Brainwashing Norway. It's brilliant. The Norwegian who made it, Harald Eia, seems to be a genial sort of guy, but alert, intellectually curious and quick-witted (caveat: all I really know about him is that he's a comedian with a sociology degree).

Unfortunately, the video takes a while to load on the internet. So I'll give a quick rundown of what happens.

It goes like this. Harald Eia has been brought up in a society which prides itself on "gender equality" which is understood to mean that sex distinctions shouldn't matter anymore. He himself has largely accepted this view; he tells us at one point that he doesn't treat his daughters as girls but as people (his daughters roll their eyes).

But he can't help but notice that sex distinctions do still matter in Norway, even though his country is ranked as the most gender equal in the world. For instance, Norwegian men and women are more likely, rather than less likely, to choose distinct occupations: 90% of nurses are female and 90% of engineers are men.

The Norwegian government has implemented programmes to make the balance more even, but they have had only a small and temporary influence on what men and women choose to do. So Eia starts to wonder if there might be innate differences between men and women.

He decides to interview some Norwegian academics to see what they think about this possibility. This is where the fun starts. These academics dress as if they are student radicals, but they are, in reality, staunch defenders of the state ideology. When he asks about the idea of innate differences, it's as if he's put a grenade into them.

This starts at 7.25 with an academic called Cathrine Egeland. She looks perplexed when asked if there might be biological differences between men and women that explain different occupational choices and she declares herself uninterested. Another academic, Joergen Lorenzten, then claims that research showing differences in the male and female brain is old-fashioned and that modern research shows that everything about men and women apart from the genitalia, hair and breasts is the same. He states that the interests, feelings, capacities and intelligence of men and women are identical.

So why then are men more interested in technical fields than women? The Norwegian academics give the stock answer that it has to do with the way that girls and boys are treated (i.e. that it is a social construct). A couple of strikingly female Norwegian women then try to persuade us that sex distinctions are produced by the different way that people address baby boys and girls.

Eia asks the academic Joergen Lorenzten if people are so "mouldable" that there are societies where men and women have the same interests (12:57). Lorenzten replies,

I feel that this is almost the basic theorem. We are, as you say, mouldable. There are no limits to what humans can do - in relation to what's important. And that is behaviour and emotionality.

To his credit, Eia decides to get some more information - this time from outside Norway. He travels to meet Professor Richard Lippa who has done a large-scale survey comparing occupational choices of men and women across 53 different countries. The Norwegian academic Lorenzten laughs when he hears of this plan to meet Lippa; he tells Eia that Americans are poor at doing academic research.

But Eia flies off to America regardless. Professor Lippa tells him that across the world there are the same differences in occupational choices. Professor Lippa does allow that culture might play a role in these choices, but believes that the differences are too consistent across all nations to be entirely a product of culture.

Next stop is Professor Trond Diseth, a child psychiatrist. Professor Diseth states that boys and girls show a preference for masculine or feminine toys from the age of 9 months. The professor believes that gender behaviour is a product of a biological disposition which is then influenced by culture. He strongly rejects the claims of Lorenzten that the research showing biological differences is old-fashioned.

Then we're off to England to meet Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. He has done research on newborn babies and found differences in what holds the gaze of boys and girls, i.e. before any cultural influence is possible. Baron-Cohen has also researched the effects of exposure to testosterone in the womb and found that this correlates to language and social development; also, that girls who are exposed to unusually high amounts of testosterone exhibit a preference for masculine toys; and that children aged 8 who were exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb have a higher level of interest in systems - in understanding how things work.

Eia returns to Norway to confront the Norwegian academics with this information (33.10). He asks Cathrine Egeland (who looks a bit like Ellen deGeneres) "What is your scientific basis to say that biology plays no part in the two genders' choice of work?" She replies,

My scientific basis? I have what you would call a theoretical basis. There's no room for biology in there for me. I feel that the social sciences should challenge thinking that is based on the differences between humans being biological. (34.50)

That's a bit like saying "I'm not interested in the truth, I'm interested in getting an outcome that I consider to be the moral one." Note too that liberals like to claim that they are the ones who are for science, but in this case it's the liberal Cathrine Egeland who is rejecting the way that science challenges her political beliefs ("there is no room for biology in there for me").

Lorenzten takes a different approach. He queries why scientists would be interested in finding biological differences:

The fascinating thing with this science is why they are so concerned with the biological origin to gender. Why this frenetic concern?

Lorenzten clearly thinks it's a bit beyond the pale to be researching biological distinctions between men and women. Eia's response is that he didn't think the overseas researchers did have a "frenetic concern" as they all recognised a mixed origin to sex distinctions: part cultural, part biological. Eia believes that it's the Norwegians who are frenetic in seeing everything as cultural.

It's interesting to see the liberal academics in Norway so discomfited when they are challenged in their views. You can tell that it doesn't happen to them often, that they inhabit an intellectual world where their own views are the orthodox ones.

How would you like a Swedish gender coach?

In Sweden they have something they call gender mainstreaming. It means that organisations must go through a process in which all staff are trained in Swedish gender theory (a feminist theory developed by a Swedish academic named Yvonne Hirdman). The organisation is then expected to dedicate itself to implementing this theory in its own operations. The long-term aim is to change the day-to-day behaviour of individuals, so that a "gender system" is no longer reproduced in society.

So Sweden very clearly has a state ideology. There is no pretence that the liberal state in Sweden is neutral.

What is it like to be subject to gender mainstreaming? In 2009, Tiina Rosenberg was appointed as a "gender coach" to thirty leading academics at Lund University. Her opening remarks at a seminar confused some of the attendees; a man from the Faculty of Engineering raised his hand to ask a question and Rosenberg stopped and turned toward him. He took this to mean that she wanted to hear the question - a big mistake it turns out.

Sindra Årsköld, an associate professor of biochemistry and a feminist herself, reports on what happened:

With flashing eyes she [Rosenberg] shouted: You are a man, I'm a woman, and therefore shut up! She then continued to alternatively scold and then insult the entire group, unprovoked and incoherently, for the entire 45 minutes. It was terribly uncomfortable. I have never seen such hatred.

To her credit Professor Årsköld questions the relevance of gender mainstreaming to the physical sciences:

The episode was a wake-up call for me ... What does a gender science look like? [You hear the] gender mantra "sex is a social construct". You also come across the ideas that "everyone is really bisexual, but are socialised into a polarised sexuality" and "heterosexuality is a manifestation of the patriarchal power structure". Hmm, interesting hypotheses. I immediately think that they are easily testable by studying groups with nearly the same biology that we have ... Namely the other mammals.

Interesting. Swedes are being taught not only that sex (meaning here masculine and feminine behaviour) is a social construct but that everyone is bisexual, or would be if it were not for socialisation. The professor of biology is sceptical, believing that sex distinctions and heterosexuality can be observed to be natural amongst the mammals.

Professor Årsköld is also critical of other attempts to gender mainstream the physical sciences in Sweden:

There lurk far more dangerous beasts in the gender jungle than an angry aunt and some counter-intuitive hypotheses. Moira von Wright, professor of education and president of Södertörn University College, has criticised the elementary and secondary school physics books because they emphasise the physics of objective knowledge rather than man's relationship to nature as a social process...

One example she highlights is the rainbow, whose physical explanation completely ignores the "social, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic and religious dimensions of the rainbow." She proposes a cure for these deficiencies: "A gender sensitive physics requires a relational approach and a lot of the traditional scientific knowledge content of physics will be removed."

.. I am offended and outraged at these ideas. Why tackle the natural sciences, whose unchanging core is above gender and which are the key to the wealth that enables us all to sit here and speculate, fed and healthy?

Professor Årsköld finishes by stating her belief that these efforts at gender mainstreaming could cause a backlash against feminism and that women like herself do not need gender coaches.

The Lund University episode is not unique:

In November 2007, a seminar on gender equality was held at the Department of Earth Sciences in Uppsala.

People sat there who know the most about Earth's internal and external affairs and learned more about such things as the famous five forms of domination which, according to feminist Berit Ås, are used by men to suppress women.

One of the participants was apparently not as interested in the domination of the mountain bases and climate, as he leafed through some papers because of a deadline for a script. He shouldn't have. The lecturer was offended and immediately made a mental note of the man...

When the lecturer the day after heard gossip that the same man had discussed her outfit with a few colleagues afterwards the offence was compounded and she wrote to the university's legal department and explained that she was subjected to "abusive treatment because of sex".

The Legal Department and the president agreed that the matter required investigation. A few months later his sentence was declared: the higher academies' version of shame - official criticism of his behavior.

Not all Swedes are happy with the state of affairs in their country. I'm finding an increasing number of Swedish websites critical of state feminism. It's surely a movement with a potential to grow.

Delusions of gender?

Are there any hard-wired differences between men and women? An article in the Daily Mail today suggests not:

It's official, men and women ARE from the same planet

Scientists would have us believe that men and women are so different they could hail from different planets.

But a new book claims the difference between the genders is down to the way we are brought up.

It says the idea we are hard-wired at birth, as promoted by 1992 bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, is outdated...

Instead, we are steered towards gender-defined skills by parents and teachers. According to the book, Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, a Melbourne University psychologist, there are no major neurological differences.

It seems most unlikely. Our daily experience suggests that there are some sex distinctions which run deep. Earlier this year, for example, I announced to a Year 8 class (14-year-olds) that I had some baby photos and asked if they'd like to see them. An enthusiastic chorus of "yes" came spontaneously from the girls, but the boys just looked at me blankly. It's difficult to believe that such an immediate, unrehearsed response could arise just from intellectual conditioning.

So why would Cordelia Fine assert that there are no major hard-wired differences between the sexes? One of the glories of the internet age is that you can easily do some research of your own on such matters. I looked up Cordelia Fine and discovered an article she wrote setting out her ideas.

It turns out that she is a feminist with standard, orthodox ideas about autonomy. Like most liberal moderns, she believes that autonomy is the aim of life. She rejects the traditional maternal role of women as being non-autonomous and therefore (in her eyes) low status. She wants to transform traditional roles so that women are careerist and men participate equally in the "inferior" domestic and maternal tasks. This shift toward a single unisex role for men and women represents gender equality for her.

So she worries about trends in science which are revealing neurological differences between men and women. She thinks that these scientific findings might lead people to accept sex distinctions as natural and inevitable. Such an attitude she labels "neurosexism".

She wants to continue to believe that sex distinctions are social constructs which can be entirely overcome. This puts her at odds with scientific research showing that there are differences in the functioning of the male and female brain.

But do people accept the unisex ideal? In her article, Cordelia Fine admits that research shows that people drop the unisex ideal once they've had children. Why would women in particular do this? According to Cordelia Fine, it's because a belief in innate differences makes it easier for women to accept their "inferior," non-autonomous motherhood role:

If a frazzled mother can tell herself that her hard-wired powers of female empathy uniquely position her to intuit that the red-faced, cross-patch baby wants to get down from the highchair, then there’s no need to feel cross that she’s the only one who ever seems to notice. If she can take seriously Brizendine’s claim that it is only when the children leave home that “the mommy brain circuits are finally free to be applied to new ambitions, new thoughts, new ideas” she may feel less resentful that the autonomy to pursue a career unhindered, a freedom still taken for granted by her partner, is now no longer extended to her.

And what if women feel torn trying to combine career ambitions with motherhood? The answer, asserts Fine, is not to accept limitations, but to change social arrangements - by which she means loading more work onto the shoulders of men (whom she treats with some contempt). For instance, in response to one (female) neurobiologist she writes:

Brizendine promises her female readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future.” It may startle some readers to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced maternal ‘brainpower’.

(Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the overwired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside.)

She seems to think that aggressively placing extra demands on hard-working family men is a viable way forward.

I don't believe that sex distinctions are entirely due to hormones, genes or brain structure. Our behaviour as men and women is also influenced by the culture of relationships (i.e. by what is selected for in relationships) and by ideals of masculinity and femininity promoted within a society.

But I wouldn't want to be taking Cordelia Fine's position that there are no significant neurological distinctions between men and women. I doubt if that will be borne out by further scientific research.

Nor would I want to share her politics. Feminists sometimes claim that they are all for choice for women. But Cordelia Fine is yet another feminist who ends up pushing one option alone. Because she sees autonomy as the great prize, and careers as the way to get autonomy, she treats the motherhood option as an inferior, low-status pursuit associated negatively with oppression and inequality.

In the Cordelia Fine version of life, women get to have children but they don't get to identify positively with the motherhood role. Motherhood becomes something dangerous to women, a potential hindrance to the important things. It therefore loses its standing as a legitimate choice.

Is it any wonder that so many women drop their belief in Cordelia's version of "egalitarianism" once they have children?

C'mon guys - social construct theory is unscientific

There's a little item in today's Herald Sun which is more politically significant than it might seem.

US scientists have conducted tests which measure neuron activity in the brain; they found that women use both the left and right side of the brain to perceive spatial awareness, but that men only use the right side.

What effect does this have? According to the scientists, men have a more focused spatial awareness, which is described in the article as a "more exact form of mental mapping". This is termed a "co-ordinate" spatial awareness.

Women have a "categorical" spatial awareness in which they are more aware of objects around them even if they are irrelevant to the task at hand.

These scientific findings do seem to fit some typical male and female qualities. Men do seem to focus more intently when it comes to understanding and creating systems, whereas women are often more present in the moment for those around them (yes, these are generalisations which don't hold true in every case).

A psychology professor from the University of Sydney, Dianna Kenny, added that the surface of a man's parietal lobe, which is responsible for spatial ability was 10 per cent bigger than women's and that levels of testosterone also seemed to improve spatial ability (so that women with higher levels of testosterone also have higher spatial ability).

Professor Kenny suggested that the spatial ability of men often made them better at tasks such as putting together module furniture or setting up VCRs and also made men more suited to certain careers such as cartography, engineering, surveying and IT.

Why is all this so politically significant? On the one hand, liberals will dislike the scientific findings. Liberals want us to be autonomous, self-defining individuals. Therefore, they want to believe that our sex, the fact of being born a man or a woman, can be made not to matter. For this reason, they usually prefer to explain sex distinctions between men and women as being artificial social constructs, set up for purposes of domination and oppression.

On the other hand, liberals like to think of themselves as being scientific types. They generally look down on those who don't accept a scientific world view.

So here is the conundrum for liberals. Science is telling them that there are significant hard-wired differences between men and women. If they reject the science, they are joining the ranks of those they have looked down on for so long.

If they accept the science, then they have to admit that the social construct theory wasn't correct - that sex distinctions can't be explained in terms of social influence alone, but that they do have some legitimate basis in human nature.

(I can't find a link to the Herald Sun post yet, but there is a report along similar lines here.)

Leading English feminist: our big mistakes

Rosie Boycott is a big name in English feminism. Back in 1971 she founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib with Marsha Rowe and in 1973 the pair founded the publishing house Virago Press.

So it's significant that Rosie Boycott is now rethinking the feminism she did so much to promote. In an article for the Daily Mail Boycott renounces key aspects of feminist patriarchy theory.

Patriarchy theory assumes that autonomy is the key good in life, the good which confers our status as humans, and that men have organised society so that they get autonomy (the power of doing as we will) at the expense of women. If you believe this then logically the traditional male career role will appear to be the truly human one which everyone should aspire to. Furthermore, if society is organised to maximise autonomy for men, then it's logical to believe that men get to do what they want and have easy, privileged lives compared to beleaguered, oppressed women.

Rosie Boycott had such beliefs as a young woman:

When I first became a feminist, back in the 1960s, I thought the male ways of life were the gold standard, the way life was meant to be ...

Unlike women, who were tied to the kitchen sink by their apron strings, enmeshed in childcare from sun-up to sun-down without the time or scope to advance their own careers and intellectual pursuits, men were free of all these onerous responsibilities.

They were free to pursue intellectual goals, to work, to succeed, above all to be leaders of the world.

I believed, along with so many others, that women, deep down (or not so deep down), wanted to do all that as well.

We believed we were prevented from doing so only because men, and the sexist world they created, prevented us.

They kept us out of the club because otherwise their power base would be threatened, and if women didn't stay at home with the kids, ready with the supper, slippers and sherry, then their world would be a much poorer place.

In this view men haven't worked hard for the benefit of women; instead, they have organised in a deliberate way to exclude women from the good life. Little wonder then that second wave feminism damaged relations between the sexes.

Rosie Boycott then explains that she believed that sex differences were the result of conditioning and that being a woman (the non-human role) wasn't something that girls were born into, as a biological destiny, but something they were merely brought up to be:

Girls have started to outperform boys at GCSE and A-levels: they get more places in university and better degrees.

In the U.S. between 1969 and 2000, male undergraduates increased by 39 per cent, whereas female ones increased by 157 per cent.

The trend continues beyond education and into the workplace.

In their early 20s, recent reports show, women are actually out-earning men in many instances.

All this proved to me, and to other feminists, that biology in no way dictates your destiny.

In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir says: "One is not born, but rather one becomes, a woman."

I agreed.

We were all born equal: it was only what happened in the nurturing process that decided the differences between men and women.

And we women were all destined to become desperate housewives - desperate to break out of the rigid roles society had accorded us.

But her expectations were confounded. Women who were "high flyers" in their 20s, elected to scale back their work commitments in their 30s. Was this simply due to discrimination at work? Rosie Boycott once thought so, but now thinks that discrimination cannot adequately explain what is happening - not when women are being actively encouraged in the workplace.

She has read a book by Canadian academic Susan Pinker, called The Sexual Paradox, which discusses some of the hardwired, biological differences between men and women. After briefly listing some of these differences Rosie Boycott writes:

What Pinker has done, in fact, is to have proved how and why girls are different from boys right from the womb, when they are pumped full of different hormones.

You can see these differences from very early on - and they cannot be "overridden".

Nature wins over nurture every time.

I've had many feminist friends who have relentlessly presented their tiny daughters with bright-red fire engines to play with, only to be aghast when they throw them aside in favour of a Barbie doll.

The converse is true for boys.

Above all, the hormones women receive in the womb mean that, by nature, they do not want to be manic, one-dimensional workhorses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job (or hobby).

Overall, they are less extreme than men.

The social critic Camille Paglia once wrote: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Men are simply more variable - there are more really stupid ones and more very smart ones than women; more extremely lazy ones and more who are willing to halfkill themselves with overwork.

Women, by contrast, are steadier, less risk-taking.

As a consequence, they live longer.

In other words, because of their biological make-up, most women want to limit the amount of time they spend at work and to find "inherent meaning" there ...

Boycott then describes her former understanding of equality:

When I set out into the world as a working woman, I believed the quest for equality with men was a quest for the right to have the same life as a man: a full-time job (an obsessive one at that), a fulltime hobby, a partner who really did split the child-care neatly down the middle, plenty of time for "me" to do whatever I wanted.

Again, note here the contradiction generated by patriarchy theory: the belief that the male career role, as demanding as it is, is the desirable autonomous human one, combined with the belief that men, with their privilege of autonomy, get easy lives in which they are free to do what they want.

Rosie Boycott has redefined her understanding of what true sex equality means. She wants a concept of equality which allows womanhood to be valued, so she suggests that men and women be thought of as equal but different:

Our values, Pinker asserts, are based on the simple fact that the world of men (i.e. success and drive) is the correct model.

While society continues primarily to value skills that emphasise money as the only currency of success, the skills that women have will always be seen as second-rate - and women will be seen to be failing.

The tragedy is that it is women who end up paying the price for this misunderstanding.

Too many of us struggle on in jobs we do not like, simply because the fiscal rewards are seen as the marker of achievement.

I realise, of course, that there is a danger here of over-simplifying the debate: affording a home often requires two full-time incomes.

Yet, it is equally undeniable that all of the women whom Pinker spoke to who had decided to step off the career ladder - whether to devote more time to their children or to develop their own businesses - report far greater degrees of satisfaction.

What we need to do, she asserts, is to stop rating women according to men and accept that the sexes truly are different ...

To make men and women genuinely equal, we have to accept and honour difference, not mark everyone's scorecard according to the same set of standards.

So has Rosie Boycott become a traditionalist? Not really. She is still enmeshed in the modernist principle that what matters is getting what you want, creating your own self and being unimpeded in your choices. She does recognise, though, that today it is the impediment of ideology which is most likely to restrain a woman's free choice in life. So her conclusions, even if they are framed in modernist terms, still seem radically at odds with feminist orthodoxy:

I also believe that Pinker's book should mark a watershed.

Sexual equality is all very well.

But real equality comes from making your own choices, not just following the well-trodden path towards careerism, simply because it has been signposted by society as the only path to success.

Liberation must always be about being yourself, not simply a clone.

The battle of the sexes is over.

Let the fight for women to be women commence.

Why can't Sweden just accept it as normal?

From Sweden we get the following news:

The Swedish Consumers Association has reacted angrily to one of the ice pops in GB's new line. 'Girlie', a star-shaped, pink ice-cream with glitter make-up stored inside the stick, is entirely inappropriate, according to the association ...

According to GB, the 'Girlie' ice pop signals a "sense of summer", "star status" and "a disco feeling".

The Swedish Consumers Association however uses an entirely different word: "gender-profiling".

"Girlie, GB's new ice pop, is pink and has make-up inside the stick. It says a lot about what GB thinks about girls and how they should be," said the association in a statement.

According to the consumer watchdog, Sweden does not need more products that reinforce existing prejudices surrounding young boys and girls.

"Especially with a product as neutral as ice cream," said Jan Bertoft.

He would like to see alterations made to the product to make it less gender specific.

"They can call an ice pop 'Girlie' if they want, but it doesn't have to be so clearly aimed at young girls and telling them how they should be," said Bertoft.

GB's marketing manager, Christoffer Schreil, considers it unfortunate that some people have viewed the ice cream as being directed solely at girls ...

Schreil ... admits there have been a few complaints.

"We reply to everybody who gets in touch and tell them that we certainly did not mean to reinforce or cement gender roles in any way," he said.

I think I can explain this. An important strand of liberal thought is the idea that we are distinctively human because of our ability to self-determine who we are and what we do.

We don't determine traditional patterns of gender for ourselves, and therefore such patterns logically strike the liberal mind as being impediments to the self-defining individual.

Hence the fears that pink girlie ice creams might tell girls "how they should be" and reinforce gender roles.

The story doesn't end there, though. If traditional gender roles are oppressive, liberals have to explain how they came about. It's been common for left-liberals to claim that they exist as social constructs in order to shore up male privilege.

This means that there is even more reason for liberals to fear a traditionally feminine gender identity: it is thought to contribute to female oppression and gender inequality.

The Swedes are serious about this kind of ideology. Just a few years ago a Swedish minister, Jens Orback, declared that:

The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideologies.

At about the same time a county government in Sweden removed funding for a book because it contained an interview with Annica Dahlstrom, a leading neurobiologist, who has recognised differences between the male and female brain.

If there are differences between the male and female brain, there might be reasons within human biology for traditional gender patterns, and this would violate the Swedish government policy of social construction. So there was to be no interview with Annica Dahlstrom and no book.

A Swedish newspaper editor wrote in support of the county government that:

Our Swedish gender equality policy is based on us being equal and socialised into different gender roles. Annica Dahlstrom is an essentialist feminist and believes that boys and girls are totally different. The county government cannot publish material with that opinion.

So the ice cream story isn't just political correctness gone mad. It reflects mainstream liberal politics within Sweden.

One interesting thing to note about the above quote from the Swedish editor is the sense in which the term "equality" is used. The quote suggests that men and women can't be equal if there is a real basis for gender difference. In other words, it is assumed that gender equality is based on a fundamental sameness between men and women.

Perhaps this is an outcome of the whole social constructionist argument. If you believe that gender differences are constructed to oppress women, then you will assume that eliminating gender differences will create gender equality. So gender sameness will be associated with equality between men and women.

This isn't an easy concept of equality to defend, since few people would really want, or think it possible, for men and women to be the same. So I think we could expect liberals to run both an argument that gender sameness equals equality, and a denial that gender sameness is an outcome they are aiming for.

There is also another difficult aspect of the liberal view of gender equality. If the liberal measure of equality is how autonomous or independent we are (allowing ourselves to be self-determined), and if men are assumed to be a privileged class, then men must be assumed to be highly autonomous and independent.

This would explain the assumption that I've heard expressed by feminists that men historically could do as they wished. Yet, when advocating for a modernist view of the family, liberals often tell men that they will have a liberating expansion of "choice" if they give up the breadwinner role.

So men are being given opposing accounts of their historical role according to the particular matter at hand: that they have had too much choice historically, as a privileged class, but that they have suffered from lack of choice in their traditional role within the family.

Note too another unfortunate aspect of the liberal view of gender equality. If the measure of equality is how autonomous or independent we are, and men are identified as the historically privileged class, then the male role is the one to be envied and sought after.

So you can expect liberals to fall into the idea that women, to be equal, must have more of the "superior" male role and men more of the "inferior" female role. In particular, this will mean advocating careers for women over a more traditional motherhood role.

Again, I don't think that even liberals find it easy to embrace the logic of this position. Most liberal women will retain at least an aspect of a traditionally feminine identity and instinct and won't want to regard this as inferior. So it won't be surprising if liberal women fluctuate uneasily between the claim to a "superior" masculine role, and an identification with the more traditionally feminine.

Finally, given that "equality", understood the Swedish way, requires men to act against a deeply embedded provider instinct, and women to act against an even more deeply embedded motherhood instinct, it's not surprising that the Swedes have accepted the necessity of state coercion in achieving equality.

According to Jens Orback, the Swedish minister quoted earlier, the achievement of gender equality requires government action in all policy areas:

Our work for gender equality is governed by our understanding that a gender-based power structure exists, meaning that we see that women are subordinate to men and that this is something we want to change.

To be successful in making these changes we must ensure that a gender perspective is present in all policy areas. The gender mainstreaming strategy is therefore essential if we want to achieve a gender equal society.

I have focused on pointing out some difficulties in making the liberal view of equality coherent or persuasive. The larger task, though, which I won't attempt now, is to question the liberal assumptions on which their view of equality is based.

Meanwhile, we'll have to expect "advanced" societies like Sweden to be flummoxed by the concept of pink ice creams for girls.

Are men killing the novel as art?

One thing which points us to the underlying differences between men and women is what we choose to read.

I can remember pondering this question years ago when I used to take public transport to uni. The men in the tram/train carriage would generally read a newspaper or some kind of trade journal; the women were more likely to read a magazine like Cosmo or a novel.

It turns out that my observation about women reading novels is generally true. In an article titled "Why Hemingway is Chick-Lit" we learn that 80% of novels are bought by women. Men, in contrast, buy a majority of non-fiction books.

The gender contrast is so stark that some fear it is undermining the status of the novel. Lakshmi Chaudry, in the article I linked to above, writes that:

we may be headed back to the 19th century, when the novel was considered a low-status, frivolous, pastime of ladies of leisure, unfit for real men ...

... the novel seems to be reverting to its origins as a feminine hobby, and hence is in danger of being toppled off its high artistic perch.

Penguin books has even tried to improve the situation by sending out models to award a prize of 1000 pounds to any man caught in possession of one of their novels.

Which brings us to the most interesting question. Why is it that women read more novels than men?

Lakshmi Chaudry gives a modified liberal answer. Usually liberals adopt a constructionist explanation for gender difference. This is the idea that gender difference is caused by the influence of culture, which means that there are no fixed, essential traits defining men and women.

Liberals are drawn to the constructionist view because of their underlying belief that we only become human when we are self-determining: when we can make up for ourselves who we are.

The constructionist view suggests that gender difference is something that we ourselves have created, and that it is therefore malleable, changing and evolving. It doesn't, as a result, place any necessary limits on what we can (or should) will ourselves to be. Nor does it give to the qualities of manhood or womanhood the status of unchanging, objectively existing truths that we might measure ourselves by.

The French feminist Simone de Beauvoir put the constructionist view in its most radical form when she declared that "one is not born, but becomes a woman".

The major problem for the constructionist view is that modern science is begining to map significant differences in the male and female brain. It is going to become increasingly difficult to uphold the view that culture alone is responsible for generating differences in behaviour between men and women.

So how does a modern liberal cope with the new trends within science? Lakshmi Chaudry gives some ground, but not much. She still firmly rejects the more conservative "essentialist" view:

In recent years, various pundits have used this so-called "fiction gap" as an opportunity to trot out their pet theories on what makes men and women tick. The most recent is New York Times columnist David Brooks, who jumped at the chance to peddle his special brand of gender essentialism. His June 11 column arbitrarily divided all books into neat boy/girl categories - "In the men's sections of the bookstore, there are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women's sections there are novels about .. well, I guess feelings and stuff." ...

Brooks' real agenda, however, is ... to promote the latest conservative talking point: blaming politically correct liberals for a "feminized" school curriculum ... "It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture," Brooks claims, "The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls."

So, when David Brooks raises the idea that there might be biological differences between boys and girls influencing reading habits he is described negatively as a conservative peddler of gender essentialism.

However, Lakshmi Chaudry does make a small concession to the newer science. She accepts some cognitive research cited by Lisa Zunshine as it attributes only a "small difference" in reading habits to biological difference. This allows Lakshmi Chaudry to claim that this small biologically based difference is then greatly increased in extent by culture:

But in a culture infused with polarizing messages about gender, such small differences can be magnified into vast disparities.

So the social constructionist explanation still dominates, in spite of Lakshmi Chaudry's small step forward.

Finally, I should point out that conservatives don't deny that culture has an influence in shaping gender difference. We do, though, take the idea of an essential masculinity and femininity, hardwired into our natures, much more seriously than liberals. We don't view such gender qualities negatively as potential impediments to our individual will, but as important parts of our self-identity and as an aspect of the "good" in human life.

(Hat tip: reader KS)

Does the mind have a sex?

In 1673 a Frenchman, Francois Poullain de la Barre, declared that "the mind has no sex".

He wrote on this theme that,

It is easy to realise that the difference between the sexes concerns only the body - being, correctly, only this part that serves for the production of men. Since the mind participates only by giving its assent (and giving it in all people in the same manner), we can conclude that it is sexless.

In simple terms, de la Barre believed that men and women differed only in their reproductive organs. He thought that men and women were, by nature, the same in all other respects, including everything to do with the mind.

De la Barre drew some very modern, feminist conclusions from this idea. He asserted that traditional gender roles had no basis in "natural law" but were maintained by prejudice and custom alone.

(For instance, he complained that "legal scholars, who also have their prejudices, have attributed to nature a distinction that derives from custom alone.")

De la Barre claimed that,

the mind, not functioning differently in one sex than in the other, is equally capable of the same things

and therefore concluded that women were as equally suited as men (or more so) to be priests, generals and monarchs.

The argument framed by de la Barre eventually came to have much influence. But it can now be seen to be mistaken in its first assumption. Science is now demonstrating that the mind does have a sex. After a period of more than 300 years we can now conclusively reject the theory pioneered by de la Barre.

It has now finally become accepted in the scientific mainstream that there are significant differences between the male and female brain. A new book, The Female Brain, written by an American neuro-psychiatrist Louann Brizendine is the latest, and undoubtedly not the last, work to be published in this area (see the review by Janet Albrechtsen aptly titled "Feminism begs to differ, but unisex brain is a fantasy").

The scientific research should give heart to conservatives who have long held that there are naturally occurring differences between men and women which are hardwired into human biology.

(In fact, I think many conservatives would tend to the view that there is an essential masculinity to men and femininity to women, which forms a core part of our identity and which is reflected in traditional gender roles within the family and society.)

The state of play

Science is increasingly vindicating conservative politics.

For decades, liberals have asserted that there are no significant differences between men and women and that the dominance of men in certain professions can only be a result of prejudice or bigotry.

Conservatives, in contrast, have held that men and women are different in their natures and that this explains the dominance of men in certain fields (and the preponderance of women in others).

Science has finally swung the debate in favour of the conservative view. It's difficult now to suggest that there are no significant biological differences affecting the dispositions of men and women.

There is an article in today's Herald Sun (not online) which shows how liberals are reacting to the scientific reality. It's by an Australian mathematician, Dr Clio Cresswell. Her liberalism is clear from her confession that "I've always had a lot of trouble with the idea of male and female differences" and that "When people tell me I can't do something because of its male flavour, it becomes a challenge to me to become the best."

So her starting point, just like any liberal, is to want to overcome gender differences as representing a kind of restriction on the self.

However, she's too much of a scientific realist to overlook the evidence that natural differences do exist. For instance, she notes that,

A 1999 study conducted at Virginia Tech in the US found that the areas in boys' brains involved in mechanical and spatial reasoning mature four to eight years earlier. Could that be why I only hooked into mathematics at 18?

So how does she reconcile her liberal dislike for gender difference with her knowledge that men and women are different in their intellectual natures?

She takes a kind of mid-way position. She still wants more women in the sciences, but she admits that women will have a different "take" on their scientific work. She notes that the Australian Mathematics Sciences Institute is trying to attract girls into maths by emphasising "biology, psychology and the environmental sciences" as career paths rather than physics, finance and engineering.

In terms of the medical sciences she relates the views of Dr Fiona Stanley, Australia's only female plastic surgeon, who says that what she loves most about her work is not the "purely technical exercise" of surgery, but "pain management, healing, psychology ...".

She herself admits that "For me, the true beauty of maths lies in its encapsulation of complex inter-relationships, not in its ability to solve problems."

So is this a possible solution for liberals? Can they admit male/female differences but still even up the science professions by making science less technical and problem solving, and more oriented to human relationships?

I doubt it. I still remember at university meeting quite a number of women who had gone into scientific fields, found them unsatisfying and were returning to study for careers like teaching.

Even Dr Clio Cresswell is an illustration of this tendency. She began her career as an actuary, a very dry career choice for a woman. Sure enough, she quit her job to return to uni to do a PhD (more predicatable) and became a Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.

But she then veered off further into more traditionally feminine employments. She has subsequently written relationships advice for a women's magazine (more on this later) and has dispensed relationships advice on the TV show Beauty and the Beast. She has hosted a breakfast radio show and appeared on the panel of the TV comedy show The Glasshouse. She's done book reviews on radio and become an Australia Day Ambassador.

In other words, she has not found maths by itself a sufficiently fulfilling career choice. Does she really expert large cohorts of women in the future to do so?

Finally, on a different note, it's curious that Dr Cresswell should have ended up in the business of relationships advice. She is now past 30 and has not had success in this field. Nor would you expect her to, given the strategy she set herself to win a man.

She writes that at age 18 she came up with a plan to win over "a man's heart":

My plan was ingenious: I'd become a fully developed package, in both mind and body. Mathematics for the mind, along with other things like reading and travelling and then running, weight training and sweating for the body. Great conversation and a great set of shoulders - I'd be irresistible. Yep, I'd easily compete with the women who'd intimidated me in my early years.

I expect that a lot of the men of my generation will roll their eyes at this kind of strategy. Did she really believe that broad shoulders were the way to attract men? Did her instincts fail so much that she thought men wanted intellectual conversation and muscularity in a woman?

It seems she's partly learned her lesson. She goes on to write,

I'm not much beyond 30 now. And how's the plan going you ask? Not that well, I'm afraid. The trouble seems to pop up early on. Like when I meet a gorgeous man and he'll ask the question: "What do you do?" I reply, "Mathematician" and he'll come back with: "You must have a lot of testosterone" or "What's the square root of 532?" Not exactly the sexy conversation I had in mind ...

"Meanwhile, Melroy [a female astronaut] assures me that it's not at 30 but at 40 that men become increasingly interested in the full package. So my original plan still has hope. But with all those comments about too much testosterone still ringing in my ears, I've eased off on the shoulder exercises as backup.

Intriguing. I know this is written in a semi-serious vein, but the way she's presenting it is that she still hopes her body building and intellect combination, the "full package", will eventually prove attractive, though she's easing off on some of the more mannish self-presentation just in case men might actually prefer ... a more feminine woman.

Conclusion? Dr Cresswell, by the weight of scientific evidence, may be starting to accept natural differences between the sexes, which is something of a breakthrough for a liberal woman, but it'll be more impressive when such women manage to arrive at a heterosexual celebration of gender difference.

Sweden vs Science

A minister in the Swedish government has made the following extraordinary claim about men and women. Jens Orback announced that,

The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideology.

Don't let the meaning of this pass you by. The Swedish government has made it official policy that what is "male" and "female" is invented and has no real existence. Gender difference, it is being claimed, does not really exist.

In Sweden, this view is taken seriously. So much so that funding for a book was denied by a county government because it contained an interview with a leading neurobiologist, Professor Annica Dahlstrom. Professor Dahlstrom referred in the interview to scientific research showing that there are differences in the brains of men and women.

So, Swedish liberals have a problem. They want to believe that there are no differences between men and women. But then a leading neurobiologist lets it be known that science has revealed the most significant of differences between men and women.

What do the Swedish liberals do? They try to suppress the scientific evidence.

Of course, when the Vatican objects to such dubious practices as the use of the unborn for medical research or spare parts, liberals attack the Catholic Church for its "dark age" attitude of hindering scientific progress. But, as we now clearly see, liberals themselves don't support science in an open-ended way. They are willing to try to suppress a scientific truth which is inconvenient to their political beliefs.

And why do they do it? Why do they so stubbornly cling to the unlikely idea that men and women are the same?

The reason, as I have outlined many times before, is as follows. Liberals believe that we are human because we can create who we are by our own will and reason. Our gender, though, is not something that we can choose for ourselves - it's something we're simply born into. Therefore, it becomes a limitation or constraint on our freedom to choose who we are.

Liberals want to remove this constraint. A favourite option for doing so is to claim that gender is merely a social construct. Our masculinity or femininity is merely a creation of society, so the argument goes, designed to uphold a power structure which privileges male will at the expense of female will.

If true, two things follow. First, gender itself can be deconstructed, removing the constraint on the "freedom" of the self-creating individual. And second, by doing so the patriarchal power structure is undermined, paving the way for "equality" (equal will) between men and women.

No wonder that Swedish liberals cling so stubbornly to this idea, even if it makes them look like flat-earthers. It fits in with their ideology beautifully. It makes possible the kind of freedom and equality which liberals so eagerly seek.

Sadly for liberals, science is now fatally undermining the "gender is a social construct" idea. It is now beyond dispute that our masculinity or femininity is created, to a considerable extent, by biological factors. Science has proved decisively the very thing that conservatives have always claimed: that we are not just "blank slates" but that our distinctive natures as men and women are hardwired into us.

And finally, what of those liberals who don't want to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence? Most, no doubt, will retreat to option two. They will recognise that gender difference is real, but insist that it be made not to count.

They will therefore continue to support the attempt to overcome the influence of gender through social engineering.

For instance, they will no doubt approve of the "equality bonus" recently proposed in Sweden. The Swedish government is upset that most parental leave is still taken by women, even after such leave was made available to men. Swedish men, if fact, only used up 18% of their leave entitlement last year.

For a conservative, this is not so surprising. Women will by nature have a stronger maternal instinct than men, and men will have a stronger provider instinct than women. So you would expect most parental leave to be taken by women.

But the Swedish government is willing to spend a lot of money offering financial incentives to men not only to stop working and take parental leave, but to do so alone, when the mother isn't home.

For the liberal Swedish government it's important that gender not count in how we arrange work and family life. And if the financial incentive doesn't work? Get ready for more heavy-handed measures to combat any traces of traditional gender roles in liberal Sweden.

When science is a friend

It's always pleasing as a conservative to be vindicated by modern science.

Take the issue of sex differences. The very first manifesto of feminism, Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1791), was based on the idea that women are only feminine because of their upbringing.

Wollstonecraft was particularly upset with the philosopher Rousseau for giving "sex to a mind" - for believing that there are natural differences in the psychology of men and women.

More than two hundred years of scientific research later we know that Wollstonecraft was wrong. Sex hormones have been identified as naturally influencing male and female behaviour, and it's known that there are physical differences between the male and female brain.

So the mind does have a sex after all! This is good news for conservatives, who have always argued that social roles for men and women have to take account of natural differences between the sexes.

For liberals, the scientific advances are a philosophical headache. Liberals want us to be creatures of our individual will and reason, not of our sex. It can't be pleasant for a liberal to learn that masculine and feminine characteristics are hardwired into us.

Which brings us to the next bit of cheering scientific news. A group of 33 children's doctors, research scientists, and mental health professionals have collaborated to write a report titled Hardwired to Connect.

The report presents scientific evidence that not only are we biologically "programmed" to connect to others, but that our level of nurture within "authoritative communities" can influence, amongst other things, the healthy development of brain circuitry.

Such findings from neuroscience reinforce the conservative belief that humans are by nature social creatures, and that it's important to uphold the deeper forms of human connectedness.

It's interesting to observe how some liberals have responded to the report. Liberals generally emphasise an ideal of individual autonomy, rather than social connectedness. You might think, therefore, that they would be unsympathetic to the findings of the report.

However, an article on the report by Anne Manne in the Melbourne Age was very approving. She chose to accept the latest scientific findings, noting that:

Neuroscience, too, is showing that all humans from earliest infancy need, seek and flourish in long-term, stable, close attachments.

To seek other human partners is an instinctive, evolved human behaviour. It is, to borrow the report's rather cyborg metaphor, "hardwired" or "pre-programmed" into brain circuitry. Violate these deep human needs and the risks rise.

We now have a heightened awareness of the way enduring, nurturing, stable attachments in early childhood shape a life in a positive or negative direction. (Age, 11/10/03)

These comments, however, don't mean that Anne Manne has suddenly converted to conservative orthodoxy. In fact, when it comes to the question of how you actually create the authoritative communities in which children can flourish, her left liberalism becomes more apparent.

Twice in her article, Anne Manne quotes the views of the Australian of the Year, Professor Fiona Stanley. Professor Stanley believes in following "the kinds of policies that have worked in other countries, like the Scandinavian countries."

The Scandinavian model appeals to Professor Stanley because of the emphasis on social welfare, which means the provision of professional services by a high taxing state. Both Anne Manne and Professor Stanley contrast this model to the economic rationalist one in Australia (and other Anglosphere countries) where expenditure has to be justified in terms of measurable outcomes.

The problem is that the Scandinavian model hasn't worked. For instance, Professor Stanley quotes a rise in male suicide rates in Australia as evidence of what is going wrong in this country. However, when you compare the average rate of suicide in the five left-liberal Scandinavian countries with that in the five more right-liberal OECD Anglosphere countries you find that the Scandinavian countries are actually doing much worse.

The male rate of suicide is 21% higher in the Scandinavian countries, whilst the female rate is 59% higher (which is particularly notable given that the Scandinavian countries are considered to be closest to the feminist ideal).

In fact, the report specifically cautions against the Swedish model. It notes that Sweden has devoted considerable resources to try to improve the economic and material conditions of single parent families. Despite this, a major research project has found that Swedish children living in single parent homes still suffer double the risk of psychiatric illness and suicide and three times the risk of drug abuse.

So what would conservatives suggest as a means to build "authoritative communities"? I won't attempt a detailed answer, but two suggestions spring to mind.

First, there is a need to more actively maintain a culture of family life. This means placing less emphasis in Western culture on independence and autonomy, and more on the fulfilments of family life; it also means openly recognising gender differences and finding balanced and complementary relationships between men and women within a family.

A second suggestion would be to allow the existence of institutions in which adult men can transmit a healthy masculine culture to boys. It's difficult to do this though when associations for boys (even boys' only sports teams) are outlawed by "sex discrimination" regulations.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for these things to happen while liberalism reigns supreme. I will, though, await the further results of scientific research in the field of social connectedness with considerable interest and optimism.

(First published at Conservative Central 12/10/03)

The party of science?

Liberals like to think of themselves as the party of science. That's why it's so interesting to see science increasingly undercutting core liberal beliefs.

This is most obvious in the field of gender difference. Liberals don't want there to be natural differences between men and women, because they don't want gender to count in defining who we are. Only self-created things are supposed to define us in the liberal belief system.

And yet science continues to show that liberals are wrong in their belief that gender difference is not natural but merely socialised. The latest evidence is a book by Steven Rhoads, an academic at the University of Virginia. This book reviews the scientific literature on the subject and finds that it "overwhelmingly establishes the case for nature - that is, for natural sex differences".

The review of the book by P. David Hornik gives a few examples of gender differences occurring in children from very young ages (in fact, even from a day old). (I've also written on this theme here.)

Science versus liberalism

Conservatives often have to endure being politically incorrect, but it's encouraging to know that we are often scientifically correct instead.

This is true, at least, in the field of sex differences. Liberals asserted for many decades that there were no significant differences between men and women. Any differences that did exist they dismissed as being a product of socialisation. Their aim was to remove "discrimination" so that men and women would become the same. They wanted to do this because they want people to be created through individual choice, not by their inherited sex.

But science has undermined the liberal position. It has shown that conservatives were right all along: that there are natural differences between men and women which can't simply be erased by social engineering.

Here is a quote from a new bestseller book by Dr James Dobson, summarising what has happened:

The unisex movement prevailed until the late 1980s when it fell victim to medical technology. The development of magnetic resonance imaging and PET (positron emission tomography) scans allowed physicians and physiologists to examine the functioning of the human brain in much greater detail.

What they found totally destroyed the assertions of the feminists. Men's and women's brains looked very distinct when examined in a laboratory. Under proper stimulation they "lit up" different areas, revealing unique neurological processes. It turns out that male and female brains were "hardwired" differently, which along with hormonal factors accounts for behavioural and attitudinal characteristics associated traditionally with masculinity and femininity.

How have liberals reacted to this news? Mostly they have continued to push for gender role reversal, which is logical enough given their first principles. But they have had to do this knowing that they are going against nature. There are a few liberals, though, who have rethought things and decided that gender difference is OK. Michael Moore in his latest book, for instance, urges his fellow liberals to now accept that it's normal for men and women to behave differently.

If you're interested I've also covered this issue in a Conservative Central article, When science is a friend.

Natural differences

Here's a well written column by Michael Gurian on accepting natural differences between men and women.

Liberals have spent a lot of time arguing that differences between men and women are created by socialisation alone: by upbringing, education, media influence and so on. They have preferred to believe this because they don't want an unchosen quality like our manhood or womanhood to significantly influence who we are. This is because it's a liberal first principle that we should be self-created by our own individual will and reason - that this, in fact, is what defines us as human.

Hence the liberal attempt to overthrow the influence of inherited sex roles, which is still going on today.

Modern science, though, is undermining the liberal position, as the Gurian piece makes clear. The conservative attitude, that there are natural differences between men and women which will be reflected in the nature of social life, and particularly family life, is being increasingly vindicated.