Cordelia Fine

DELUSIONS of GENDER
How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Cordelia Fine, PhD
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York • London

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are.

—John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)

Does he secretly find Jane deeply unattractive? Is he in the slow process of recovery from some deeply traumatic incident?

Was he raised by wolves until the age of thirteen? Not at all.

He’s just a regular guy, with a regular guy-brain that’s wired all wrong for empathy.

Evan is just one of several curious characters who populate Louann Brizendine’s New York Times best seller, The Female Brain. I

Take Sarah, for example. Sarah can “identify and anticipate what [her husband] is feeling—often before he is conscious of it himself.”

Sarah can amaze her husband at whim, thanks to her lucky knack of knowing what he’s feeling before he feels it. (Ta-DA! Is this your emotion?)

And no, Sarah is not a fairground psychic. She is simply a woman who enjoys the extraordinary gift of mind reading that, apparently, is bestowed on all owners of a female brain:

Whatever the answer du jour