THE STUBBORN PERSISTENCE OF GENDER:

The most emailed article on the New York Times website over the weekend, " Medicating Women's Feelings," was by a female psychiatrist concerned about a boom in the number of Americans taking psychiatric medications and, in particular, the number of women. Julie Holland reckons that at least one in four women now takes such medication, and one in seven men. 

 

This is "insane," she says, and one has to agree with her. But it is her opening that really amazed me: 

 

Women are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathetic to our children's needs and intuitive of our partners' intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. Ruled by our emotions rather than reason? By evolutionary design? Hard-wired, indeed? Aren't we supposed to believe these days that behaviour is all by social conditioning, that the body has very little to do with it, and that it's time to give women their head and men their heart? 

 

Perhaps 90 percent of those emails were sent by feminists and gender studies professors fuming at the biological drift of Julie Holland's assertions: 

 

Some research suggests that women are often better at articulating their feelings than men because as the female brain develops, more capacity is reserved for language, memory, hearing and observing emotions in others.

Oh? What about all the female brains that are getting better every day at analyzing the stock market and manipulating genes? What about the enlightened view that the human race is not just male and female but expresses itself in a spectrum of genders which we are now seeing in all its beautiful diversity? 

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