Pulling Teeth and Weighing Brains

"Early brain scientists, using the cutting-edge techniques of the time, busily filled empty skulls with pearl barley, carefully categorized head shape using tape measures and devoted large portions of careers to the weighing of brains. Infamously, they proposed that women’s intellectual inferiority stemmed from their smaller and lighter brains, a phenomenon that came to be widely known among the Victorian public as ‘the missing five ounces of the female brain.'"

This passage in Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine could easily be a storyline from The Knick, currently my favorite TV show. Steven Soderbergh's vision of a hospital in early 1900s New York is both modern and beautifully (mostly) historically accurate. And after spending too much time thinking about a current book on the "medically proven" differences between male and female brains (Why Gender Matters) and then beginning to read a compelling counterargument (Delusions of Gender), The Knick's depiction of what passed for medicine in 1903 feels almost uncomfortably relevant.

A perfect example: Dr. Gallinger's wife is sent to an insane asylum, supposedly one of the best. (After her baby dies, she loses her mind. Her husband's solution is to adopt another baby, and of course, in a delusional state, she kills it.) John Hodgeman plays a psychiatrist with revolutionary treatments for mental illness. He believes mental illness is caused by infections, specifically in a person's teeth. So when Gallinger comes to the asylum to visit his wife for the first time, she greets him with a toothless grin. The psychiatrist then informs Gallinger that he plans to remove her tonsils and spleen as well. This insanity was considered sound medicine.

While I was deeply unsettled by the teeth pulling, what surprises me is how little we've learned about the brain since then. We still have only a vague understanding of how to treat mental illness. The medications we use affect the brain in ways doctors don't fully understand--which is why a person with mental health issues may have to try several different types of medication before finding one (or more than one) that works. Doctors have made so many amazing advancements in so many areas that we begin to forget they still have mysteries to solve.

"Even the untrained twenty-first-century layperson can see that [weighing brains instead of measuring skulls] brought scientists only a little closer to understanding the mystery of how brain cells create the engine of the mind, and can sense the unfortunate hastiness of the conclusion that women’s cognitive inferiority to men could be weighed in ounces. It may seem like the same sort of prejudice couldn’t possibly creep into the contemporary debate because now we are all so enlightened; perhaps even … overenlightened? Writers who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness. Yet claims of ‘essential differences’ between the two sexes simply reflect--and give scientific authority to--what I suspect is really a majority opinion. If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science."

Coming up: Will I actually finally write about the worst book I've ever read? Or will I just continue to stew in my annoyance? Will I find the time to finish reviews of one of the great children's books with a female lead and one of the new children's books that has captured my heart? Find out next time on Oh, The Iron Man. (And I promise next time will come sooner rather than later.)

Feeling All the Feelings

My woman brain won't let me write a post. Okay, I'm sort of kidding, but after reading two books that insist that women's brains are inherently different from men's--wired for emotions, wired for caution--I think I'm starting to believe it.

Seriously, though, I haven't been able to finish a post to put on this blog. I missed my deadline yesterday, and now, here I am typing a placeholder post, just so I don't feel like a complete failure.

I got stuck for a few reasons. One, I read two books that were so full of gender nonsense that my brain got scrambled. Two, I read a great first-person article on Vox that got me thinking about race and gender and the intersection of the two and the fact that I have an interracial marriage and an interracial child, which is something I rarely think about, and, wait, why don't I think about it more? Three, I started to really doubt my ability to say anything meaningful, a feeling that only made me wonder if I really do have a stupid female brain that is keeping me from succeeding by constantly undermining me with self-doubt.

Obviously, I've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm a thinker. I'm an overthinker. So, at least now you know what you're getting into if you follow this blog. I will think stuff to death. But I'll try to do it on my own time and only give you the edited version.

I'll leave you with a quote from that Vox article, "I Never Noticed How Racist So Many Children's Books Are Until I Started Reading to My Kids" by Leigh Anderson:

The YA writer Shannon Hale notes that when she speaks at school assemblies, the administrations often will grant girls permission to attend her lectures, but not boys. For male authors writing books with male protagonists, the school will allow both boys and girls to attend. Hale writes: "[T]he idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don't have to read about girls, that boys aren't expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world...this belief leads directly to rape culture." It's not a far leap to imagine that white children reading only about white children will stunt their empathy for people of other races.

Zero Things I've Learned from Raising One Three-Year-Old Child with a Penis

It seems every few weeks an article titled something like "11 Things Only Parents of Boys Understand" pops up in my Facebook feed. These articles are often written by otherwise progressive people who for some reason don't see the problem with attributing their children's actions to their genitalia.

And, inevitably, I read these articles (why?!) only to find that I can relate to, at most, one or two items on the list. Yes, Jack loves Star Wars (mostly because I taught him to). But no, he doesn't give better hugs than girls (and why is that a competition, anyway?) or constantly want to wrestle. He loves to sit still and read one book after another--even chapter books--and he's only three. He loves to draw, sometimes for half an hour or more without stopping. Maybe he's the exception. Or maybe the world is full of exceptions and we should stop trying to make rules.

Raising one child (or even two or three) of one sex does not give anyone any special knowledge about all children of that sex. Jack is one special, wonderful little person, but he is an individual, and I have learned nothing from raising him that I can apply to all boys. If I based all my knowledge of boys on Jack, I would think they were all picky eaters who like to sing songs full of nonsense words and sleep on the wrong end of the bed. 

I think people feel compelled to write these articles for a couple of reasons (assuming they are not really into maintaining traditional gender roles for the sake of humanity). First, they are a little surprised when their children fit so well into the stereotypes they were once reluctant to accept. Second, when the parents are women who really wanted a girl or men who really wanted a boy, they feel the need to convince themselves that having the opposite of what they wanted is actually great--or even better than what they originally dreamed of.

I understand these urges. I'll admit, when I imagined having a baby, I always imagined having a girl. I felt like I understood girls better than boys. And why not? I used to be a little girl. But what I found was that Jack ended up being so much like me in temperament and personality that I had little trouble understanding him. It didn't matter that he was a boy.

Being in school has introduced Jack to the idea that he belongs to a certain gender called "boy," and he is very enthusiastic about identifying with this group. It's an instinct we all have--we gravitate toward the people that we understand to be most like us. It always surprises me, though, how many adults have not learned to move past this basic instinct. They automatically put Jack into a category because he has a penis, even though he doesn't fit into that category very well. I can't stop them from doing it. The best I can do is keep teaching Jack that he can love dancing and reading and art and Star Wars and soccer and dinosaurs and those things don't belong to either gender. They belong to everyone.

Coming up: Will I finish Strong Mothers, Strong Sons before it sucks the life force out of me? Will I manage to post more than one thing next week? Find out next time on Oh, The Iron Man.