Baron-Cohen was "bowled over" by the results. The more testosterone
the children had been exposed to in the womb, the less able they were to
make eye contact at 1 year of age. "Who would have thought that a
behavior like eye contact, which is so intrinsically social, could be in
part shaped by a biological factor?" he asks. What's more, the
testosterone level during fetal life also influenced language skills. The
higher the prenatal testosterone level, the smaller a child's vocabulary
at 18 months and again at 24 months.
Lack of eye contact and poor language aptitude are early hallmarks
of autism. "Being strongly attracted to systems, together with a lack of
empathy, may be the core characteristics of individuals on the autistic
spectrum," says Baron-Cohen. "Maybe testosterone does more than affect
spatial ability and language. Maybe it also affects social ability." And
perhaps autism represents an "extreme form" of the male brain.
Depression: Pink -- and Blue, Blue, Blue
This year, 19 million Americans will suffer a serious depression.
Two out of three will be female. Over the course of their lives, 21.3
percent of women and 12.7 percent of men experience at least one bout of
major depression.
The female preponderance in depression is virtually universal. And
it's specific to unipolar depression. Males and females suffer equally
from bipolar, or manic, depression. However, once depression occurs, the
clinical course is identical in men and women.
The gender difference in susceptibility to depression emerges at
13. Before that age, boys, if anything, are a bit more likely than girls
to be depressed. The gender difference seems to wind down four decades
later, making depression mostly a disorder of women in the child-bearing
years.
As director of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and
Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, Kenneth S.
Kendler, M.D., presides over "the best natural experiment that God has
given us to study gender differences" -- thousands of pairs of opposite-sex
twins. He finds a significant difference between men and women in their
response to low levels of adversity. He says, "Women have the capacity to
be precipitated into depressive episodes at lower levels of
stress."
Adding injury to insult, women's bodies respond to stress
differently than do men's. They pour out higher levels of stress hormones
and fail to shut off production readily. The female sex hormone
progesterone blocks the normal ability of the stress hormone system to
turn itself off. Sustained exposure to stress hormones kills brain cells,
especially in the hippocampus, which is crucial to memory.
It's bad enough that females are set up biologically to internally
amplify their negative life experiences. They are prone to it
psychologically as well, finds University of Michigan psychologist Susan
Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D.
Women ruminate over upsetting situations, going over and over
negative thoughts and feelings, especially if they have to do with
relationships. Too often they get caught in downward spirals of
hopelessness and despair.
It's entirely possible that women are biologically primed to be
highly sensitive to relationships. Eons ago it might have helped alert
them to the possibility of abandonment while they were busy raising the
children. Today, however, there's a clear downside. Ruminators are
unpleasant to be around, with their oversize need for reassurance. Of
course, men have their own ways of inadvertently fending off people. As
pronounced as the female tilt to depression is the male excess of
alcoholism, drug abuse and antisocial behaviors.
The Incredible Shrinking Double Standard
Nothing unites men and women better than sex. Yet nothing divides
us more either. Males and females differ most in mating psychology
because our minds are shaped by and for our reproductive mandates. That
sets up men for sex on the side and a more casual attitude toward
it.
Twenty-five percent of wives and 44 percent of husbands have had
extramarital intercourse, reports Baltimore psychologist Shirley Glass,
Ph.D. Traditionally for men, love is one thing and sex is...well,
sex.
In what may be a shift of epic proportions, sexual infidelity is
mutating before our very eyes. Increasingly, men as well as women are
forming deep emotional attachments before they even slip into an
extramarital bed together. It often happens as they work long hours
together in the office.
"The sex differences in infidelity are disappearing," says Glass,
the doyenne of infidelity research. "In my original 1980 study, there was
a high proportion of men who had intercourse with almost no emotional
involvement at all -- nonrelational sex. Today, more men are getting
emotionally involved."
One consequence of the growing parity in affairs is greater
devastation of the betrayed spouse. The old-style strictly sexual affair
never impacted men's marital satisfaction. "You could be in a good
marriage and still cheat," reports Glass.
Liaisons born of the new infidelity are much more disruptive -- much
more likely to end in divorce. "You can move away from just a sexual
relationship but it's very difficult to break an attachment," says
Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D. "The betrayed
partner can probably provide more exciting sex but not a different kind
of friendship."
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