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The Male Brain: Why Men Think The Way They Do

Louann Brizendine explores the physical bases for sex differences in her new book

By Diana Kapp | February 08, 2010 12:00 p.m. 

You might want to try to keep your own personal pet caveman in the dark on this one, but in her inevitably best-selling new book, The Male Brain(Broadway Books), neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, MD, officially, scientifically lets guys off the hook for skirt-chasing, conking out after sex, avoiding emotionality—even spending Sundays glued to ESPN. Yes, it seems that Brizendine set The Female Brain, her 2006 best-seller, to “marinate in testosterone”—her fave phrase for describing how gestating brains, which all begin as female in the womb, become masculinized about half the time—in order to produce the male bookend to that work, a “brain’s-eye view” into men’s psyches that gives them, well, a big, fat 262-page excuse.

Despite accusations leveled in publications fromNature to The New York Times that Brizendine engaged in weak science in The Female Brain,The Male Brain is, like its predecessor, a breezy and loosey-goosey girlfriend-gab take on the state of genderbased brain science. Brizendine often relies on unreplicated or small-scale experiments, studies, and surveys to draw sweeping, possibly oversimplified conclusions about gender and human nature and to spin small distinctions and differences in the data into vive la différence.

Still, it’s awfully hard to write off or dismiss an observer with the breadth of knowledge and experience in her field that Brizendine clearly has. Employing data from cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, genetics, hormonal biology, and primatology, all strung around anecdotes from her own 25-year-old therapy practice, which includes running the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, the UC system’s prestigious medical school, Brizendine professes to illuminate what makes a man a man—and we’re kind of obliged to hear her out.

As she did for women in The Female Brain, detailing the hormonal surges and brain circuitry that sculpt each life phase, Brizendine validates masculine stereotypes ranging from the perpetual playboy to the grumpy old man. We learn how much more men are preoccupied with sex than women are (their level of interest is about three times greater than that of the average female of the same age). And we revisit why women are so much more invested in offspring and their care than men tend to be—and why men can be so commitmentphobic in general.

The takeaway: Biology indeed rules—we are more or less hunter-gatherers from the savannah dressed up in expensive clothes. Brizendine insists, though, that the nature-nurture back-and-forth is a tired and reductive debate whose survival into the present day is mostly attributable to the long-running disconnect between the fields of psychology and neurobiology—a disconnect that she thinks is now, finally, being closed rapidly from both sides of the divide.

Brizendine believes that our innate impulses offer only the beginning of self-understanding—but they are also where wise acceptance and a deeper apprehension of the human condition necessarily lie. Her declared intention is to “create more realistic expectations for boys and men”—not least among their mothers, sisters, and daughters. She also firmly believes that women should stop denying the possibility of innate gender differences (despite the way such notions have historically led to the exploitation and control of women)—and indeed should point to biological differences as realities that public policy should acknowledge and accommodate in the workplace and family life.

Finally, Brizendine hopes to shed light on the “deep misunderstanding” between the sexes, to which she traces this primal scene in her couples-therapy practice: “I’ll ask her, ‘How do you know he loves you?’ and she’ll say, ‘Because he wants to talk to me.’ But when I ask him, he’ll say, ‘Because she wants to have sex with me.’ Women don’t understand that men feel loved when you want to have sex with them—and if you reject them, it means you don’t love them. And if a man can’t verbally empathize with a woman when she feels unloved—they’re like ships passing in the night.”

Clearly seeking to extend and expand upon The Female Brain’s wide success, the auburn-haired, ponytailed Brizendine, all girl-next-door charm, is morning-TV ready, her slate packed and her bullet points polished. We spoke in her UCSF office about “the brain below the belt” and what a Berkeley-bred feminist like herself is doing seemingly perpetuating retro gender stereotypes. The heart of her defense, it turns out, is that an explanation is not the same thing as an excuse. For both women and men, curbing our darker enthusiasms and most antisocial behavior is central to being civilized, socialized, and, ultimately, happy and successful human beings.

http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Movies-TV-Music-Books/The-Male-Brain-Why-Men-Think-The-Way-They-Do