The Anscombe Society

Confirming the Goods of Family, Marriage, and Faithful Love

Why We Should Take Sex Differences Seriously

by Steven E. Rhoads

Here is a true and horrifying story. In the mid-sixties identical male twins were born. Their circumcision in 1966 was botched, and one lost his penis. Not knowing what to do, the parents consulted a Johns Hopkins University doctor, who recommended castration, construction of female genitalia, administration of female hormones, and raising the child as a girl. The parents followed this advice and renamed the child Brenda.

When Brenda was 12, the villain of the piece Dr. John Money said she had adjusted well. Psychology and sociology texts, prominent feminists, and the media talked of the opposite sex identical twins, one masculine and the other, Brenda, remarkably feminine--neat and dainty. The example of these twins was held up as evidence that sex roles are socially constructed.

These claims amounted to a series of unconscionable lies. Many years later a journalist looked for Brenda and found her in Canada. She now called herself David. She had become a man. David was married to a woman. He had, it turned out, always acted like and wanted to be male and at age 14 had started living as one. His parents had told him the truth when he was age 15 and helped him get a mastectomy and male hormones. Growing up, the first time he was put in a dress, he had ripped it off. When he was given a jump rope, he used it to tie people up and whip them. He played with dump trucks and built forts, pretended to shave with his dad, and found the Rockettes sexy when at age 12 he saw them in New York. Brenda wanted to urinate standing up, and her elementary school teachers remarked on her pressing aggressive need to dominate.

The Brenda-David story ended tragically. A couple of months ago David committed suicide. After the truth about Brenda surfaced, Johns Hopkins decided to look at twenty-five other males, ages 5 to 16, born without penises, castrated, and raised as girls. All loved rough and tumble play. Fourteen had declared themselves to be boys. Johns Hopkins found two males born without a penis but raised as boys. These two fit in well and were better adjusted than the others.

As sexual differentiation specialist Margaret Legato explains, the masculinizing effect of testosterone in the womb is what makes you think you are a male. It is useless to later say to a child born a boy, You are a girl.

The bottom line illustrated by this story is that getting nature/nurture answers wrong can be devastating and dangerous. In fact, we are born masculine or feminine. Certain characteristics are largely built into us, not created by society or our families.

There are three kinds of evidence that men and women have different natures. First, male and female hormones change behavior.

Second, differences between men and women appear in cultures around the world: Men, in general, are aggressive and assertive and women are nurturing, and these differences do not seem to result from culture because they occur regardless of whether a culture is patriarchal or egalitarian.

Third, male and female infants and young children behave differently before society has had a chance to construct their identities. In infancy, for example girls like to look more at people while boys like to look more at mobiles. And throughout life females tend to be more interested in people and males in things.

I want to talk today about three kinds of differences--the first is aggression or competitiveness, the second sexuality and the third nurturing of the young. First, let's look at aggression or competitiveness, where, for better or for worse, males take center stage. By age 13 months boys are more assertive and aggressive than girls and destroy things more.

Some girls play more like boys, and on average these girls have more testosterone than the average girl.

As adults men are much more violent. Across all cultures twenty-five to thirty men kill another man for every one woman who kills another woman. Among men, high-testosterone men are often more violent and they want to dominate. But in civilized society low-testosterone men do better than high-testosterone men. They do better in school, have higher status occupations, closer friends, and happier marriages.

There are two ways to reduce testosterone in men who seem to have too much of it. First, get them married off and make them fathers. Both these events, marriage and fatherhood in marriage, have been found to reduce male testosterone levels. Once they are husbands and fathers, men can begin to channel all that energy and aggression into careers and being good providers.

The second way to make men less violent is to channel their aggression into sports. One big problem with Title IX, which has led to increased sports opportunities for women, is that it has led to fewer opportunities for men. With a budget crunch you can get equality in numbers by increasing the numbers of women or reducing the numbers of men.

And the focus on equality in numbers is misplaced because there is lots of evidence showing that men like sports more than women. Before the age of two, girls like dance more and boys like balls and rough-and-tumble play more. In college three to four times as many men as women participate in intramural sports which are open to anyone who wishes to participate.

I don't doubt that many women also get a lot out of sports, but sports channel male physical aggression. We don't need sports to channel female aggression. Most women prefer peaceful sports--sports with no physical contact and with an opportunity to show beauty and grace, agility and coordination as well as strength.

Competitive cheerleading and competitive dance are particularly popular, but they don't count for Title IX purposes though they involve far more fitness and athletic ability than bowling and archery, which do count. If cheerleading and dance did count, as they should, their participants would get more support and the Title IX numbers game would not lead to the demise of so many male teams.

Sports aside, in general, far more than men, women like cooperation and connection more than competition. On the playground if arguments occur, girls just stop playing the game and do something else. Boys don't. They resolve the dispute so they can finish the game and sort out the winners and losers.

Young men like sports more than young women do. Young men also NEED sports more than women -- sports can help control or channel male aggression. Too many people see colleges filled with violent football players and peaceful computer nerds (incidentally, sometimes playing violent video games) and conclude, Look what football does--it creates violence. There is evidence these people have ignored.

First, look at where football players and computer nerds come from. The former are often from tough neighborhoods while the latter are from suburbia. Second, consider the bodies of the football players. Those big upper bodies are signs of testosterone. Third, think about who is more likely to be violent--the football players who can beat everyone up or the computer nerds who can't

To see if football causes the violence, we need to compare the violence of kids from tough neighborhoods with humongous bodies who are football players with kids from tough neighborhoods and humongous bodies who are not football players and then see who is the most violent.

I think we would find that football and other sports reduce random violence. The source of most male aggression is unsupervised peer groups. Sports channel aggression within rule-bound activity. Football players who beat people up off the field get kicked off the team! That alone keeps them more peaceful than they otherwise would be because they love to play sports and love connection with teammates.

Wrestlers also tend to be tough, aggressive kids. Here Title IX has had a major impact in cutting male opportunities to participate. We should make sure that wrestlers have a chance to show their toughness on the mat so they don't show it elsewhere.

My book has a cartoon that shows the female predisposition for cooperation and the male predisposition for competition. In the first frame Cathy and her boyfriend are comparing their diets, and Cathy says, You've lost six pounds on our diet so far, and I've lost only one… In the next frame her boyfriend jumps up, exclaiming, I win! Cathy says, Excuse me? In the third frame the boyfriend runs around, yelling, I win! I win! I win! YES! I win! In the fourth frame, after Cathy kicks him out of the house and slams the door behind him, he thinks, Open, honest expression of feelings ….Yeah, Right….We need to reform Title IX so that men can engage in the sports they love and the sports that channel their innate aggressive tendencies in a rule-bound direction.

If we turn from aggression and sports to sex, we also find sex differences. Men are more interested than women in sex. Testosterone regulates the male and female libido, and men have far more testosterone than women do. If you ask people how often they think about sex, men say three to five times a day. Women say several times a week or several times a month. One recent survey of American adults explored the importance of a host of things such as marriage, parenthood career, religion and sex. By far the greatest difference between the sexes was in the men's higher ranking for the importance of an active sex life. Men are more interested in sex than women are, and they are also more interested in sex with a variety of partners.

Despite the striking differences about male and female sexuality, American sex education and media treat casual sex as enjoyed more or less equally by men and women. Take Sex in the City and Friends as examples. For the women, romantic interests abound, and there are at least as many men as women hurt by failed relationships. The casual, uncommitted sex, despite the occasional bad scene, seems as wonderful for the women as for the men.

Of course, both Friends' Rachel and Sex in the City's Miranda must live with their adorable accidents, but these off-stage babies rarely slow down their footloose, single lives. While babies are left largely unseen, in these shows venereal disease hardly exists. In the real world, exposed women are dramatically more likely than men to be infected by a sexually transmitted disease (for example, eight times more for HIV), but even Samantha's world class promiscuity has left her disease free.

Even when they avoid both pregnancy and VD, women simply get less out of casual sex than men do. Only seven percent of women engaged in short term sex report being extremely satisfied physically. In and out of marriage, women say they engage in sex to share emotions and love. Men give reasons that are more narrowly physical, such as need, sexual gratification and sexual release. Many women read romance novels featuring the one special man, while many men view pornography showing many interchangeable women.

My wife, an English teacher at an all male college, has trouble getting Shakespeare's romances across to young men whose sexual world is more elemental. When she asked what sort of women they would fall in love with, one young man said it was too early to think about love: He hadn't slept with enough women yet.

These differences in motivation lead to a lot of pain for young women. Seventy-one percent of teenage girls report being in love with their last sexual partner, but only 45 percent of boys do. And teen girls are far less likely than boys to report being happy with their sexual experiences and far more likely to report that they wished they had waited longer to have sex.

For many young women there is a period of sexual adventure or experimentation, but studies show that the most sexually experienced single women, while still believing that casual sex is fine, find that their feelings will not cooperate. They feel used, hurt and demeaned after sleeping with men uninterested in relationships. Many of the most sexually active men, on the other hand, are having a ball.

In 1999, 29 percent of 35-to-44-year-old females were unmarried; in 1960 fewer than 13 percent were. Remarkable! In less than forty years, the percentage of unmarried 40-year- old women has more than doubled. These facts are explained in part by men enjoying unencumbered sex while hoping that a more appealing and equally willing woman may be right around the corner.

Too often, in today's culture, women stroll off to the playground of casual sex only to be hurt. They conclude, wrongly, that they alone are too sensitive to enjoy what their favorite female TV characters seem to love. In truth, the feeling that casual sex makes them unhappy is too common among women to be idiosyncratic. It's a normal, healthy reaction to a bad idea. To get what they want most -- a committed, loving relationship and good sex unmarried women should start by saying, "No.

If men are center forward with aggression, competitiveness and sex, with nurturing women take center stage. Around the world, females are the nurturers.

Hormones help explain this. Girls going through puberty are flooded with estrogen--a nurturing hormone. If someone compares an 11-year-old girl who has gone through puberty with an 11 year old who has not gone through puberty, the one who has gone through puberty is more interested in babies. Oxytocin is even more important for nurturing and bonding and women have more neural receptors for oxytocin than men do and pregnancy gives them still more.

Now switch to the predominantly male hormone--testosterone. Testosterone inhibits nurturing of babies. Women with high testosterone are less interested in babies than other women. Women with no testosterone ( an abnormality) are much more interested in babies than most women. If you inject a monkey mother with testosterone, she become less interested in her baby.

Mothers, more than fathers, simply find it pleasurable to care for infants. But with the greater attachment comes greater vulnerability: the baby's cry disturbs them more. A mother hearing her baby cry at night wakes up and is worried. A father probably doesn't hear it, and if he does, he is usually annoyed more than concerned. One study looked at families where each parent performed at least 35 percent of the child care. Fathers as well as mothers reported that mothers were more involved emotionally in their children's lives. Mothers were more worried than fathers about their absent children. Mothers had more difficulty concentrating on other tasks when they themselves were not care taking.

Even in Sweden, which has made concerted efforts to meld the roles of fathers and mothers, fathers are much happier at returning to work at the end of their parental leaves. Also, in Swedish families where fathers take leave and express a desire to be the primary caretaker of their new infants, the traditional parenting differences emerge. For example, mothers show affectionate behavior, vocalize, smile, tend, hold, and sooth the infant more than fathers do.

How important are children to mothers? Mothers report liking parenting more than fathers do. On a 10-point scale, 86 percent of mothers rate their children a 10 for their importance to personal happiness; just 30 percent of employed women rate their job as a 10. Most mothers have baby lust. They want babies and they like to care for them. It is also true that mothers are naturally better equipped to be caregivers.

Mothers are better than fathers at distinguishing a cry of pain from one of hunger or of anger. Women in general are also better than men at reading body language and other nonverbal signals.

I can give you only a glimpse of my argument on why daycare is not the answer to career/family tensions. First of all, even with good day care guilt doesn't disappear. Moreover, that guilt is not completely irrational. More and more evidence shows that extensive non-maternal care in the first years of life puts kids at greater risk --greater risk it hurts them in terms of basic health--day care centers are loaded with germs--and also because it makes it far more likely that a child will become needy, disobedient and inappropriately aggressive (including explosive behavior) in pre-school and kindergarten.

For young kids, day care raises levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. We know that levels of cortisol are higher for day care kids on school days than on days that they are at home.

Having a really important job--one with the potential to do great good for society as a whole--is no protection against maternal desire to be with a child and guilt if one is not there.

Of all the moving stories I have encountered in researching this book, none are more poignant than that related by a prominent politician who is also a mother.

Madeleine Kunin, a survivor of the Holocaust who rose to become governor of Vermont, says she was tormented at being governor while she was the mother of four children.

At least once a day, Kunin remembers, I would feel a stab in my chest, thinking I should be at one place when I was at another. There was no cure for the anxiety; all she could do, she says, was not to let it overwhelm me, not to let it pull me down, but to carry it as gracefully as I could.

Many prominent women give up on careers rather than put up with the tension, guilt and grief. Wendy Chamberlain gave up the plum assignment of ambassador to Pakistan at the height of the war against terrorism when bombings in Islamabad caused all dependants to be ordered home: Chamberlain refused to be apart from her thirteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters. Multiple studies show that the stresses of job plus children are very tough on women.

One study of sex differences in psychological stress among married couples concludes that for wives, but not for husbands, it is especially stressful to be married and employed with minor children. A second study, also of mothers, finds working moms' pervasive internal struggle was as common among those with teenagers as among those with preschoolers; even mothers with supportive husbands were often highly conflicted.

Children's reactions to their parents decisions about careers and child care are remarkably gendered. For example:

All in all, since mothers don't want to be away from young children as much as most full time careers require, since they feel guilty and worry when they are away for long periods, since they are better than fathers with children, it is reasonable to conclude that we should not expect equal parenting and equal marketplace working from each sex. Equal outcomes of this sort would surely not bring equal happiness.

The ANDROGYNOUS PROJECT--the attempt to have men and women share work and child care equally-- can be seen as MISOGYNIST rather than as the road to female salvation.

In conclusion, I'd like to say a little about female vulnerability and modern marriage. Women's outsized love of their children produces a bond that makes them more dependent on their husbands to provide the resources that enable them to spend as much time with their children as they wish. That so much of women's happiness is dependent on a good marriage and happy children makes women especially vulnerable.

They need their husbands to behave in a certain way if they are to have a happy marriage. Problems at work increase psychological distress equally for men and women, but problems in the marriage lead to much more distress for women than for men. Women's vulnerability affects their physical as well as their mental health. When wives perceive that their family and marriage are not going well, their blood pressure goes up. When husbands perceive trouble in the marriage, their blood pressure does not increase, but the husband's perception of trouble will send his wife's blood pressure up.

Men's distress in marriage has other sources entirely. It occurs when they think their wives are failing in the domestic arena or when they feel they themselves are not fully meeting their providing and protecting duties.

A general sense that they are not meeting their traditionally male responsibilities can lead to premature death in men. The world-renowned Framingham heart study has found that unsupportive bosses can harm the health of wives, but also that the wives' unsupportive bosses have an even more dramatic effect on the health of their husbands! Husbands of white-collar wives who have unsupportive bosses are over three times more likely to die of heart disease.

Why? The authors of the Framingham study note that men will want to be protective when their wives are hassled by their bosses, but they will be relatively powerless to assist or change the situation.

Fathers also become distressed when their wives work long hours. They are more depressed and less happy with life and with their marriage.

The result of modern two career families is often angry, exhausted mothers desperate for a house that looks and feels like a home and for more time with their children. Their wives' distress makes the husbands distressed. Something deep within them says my wife shouldn't be haggard and stressed, why is she working so hard --I must not be a good provider.

In most marriages, solutions which will make husbands and wives happy have to be found in women spending less time at work at least while their children are young. This suggestion is not an insult to women. Far from it. Women can be good lawyers and doctors--men can be good lawyers and doctors--but women are better than men at nurturing children and at making a house feel like a home. Women do two things well. Men only do one thing as well.

Feminists say --but if women don't make as much money as their husbands they will have less marital power. First, there is no convincing evidence of this. Second, even if it were so, marriage is not a struggle for power in which the winner gains happiness. Wives who have the final say in most marriages, --wives who win the arguments and rule the roost-- are less happy than wives who do not. Men just tune out and go watch the game. And the women can't be happy in a bad marriage.

There is ANOTHER type of power that women are particularly good at wielding and which makes for happiness all around -- it is a subtler power--a force that David Jessel and Anne Moir say creates relationships, binds families and builds societies.

Many of my female students seek this kind of power. Surveys around the world find that women see themselves, are seen by others and like to be seen not as powerful but as loving, sympathetic and generous.

We need more of the power that creates relationships, binds families and builds societies. This power comes from people who are loving, sympathetic and generous. A greater appreciation of its importance is largely dependent on cultural, not political, change. But it sure would help if we fought to end the stranglehold that feminists have on what can appear in social studies text books.

Believe it or not, the social studies texts that can gain approval of state boards cannot indicate that being a homemaker or a volunteer can be a worthy goal, can never celebrate motherhood or show any woman or girl happily playing with a baby or young child. Even reading texts cannot show illustrations of women baking cookies or sewing or having any household role.

It may be time to start questioning the assumption that society pressures young women to be homemakers. My observations of bright University of Virginia women suggest that they feel pressured in other directions entirely. Many want a future that is home-centered, but they are a little ashamed of that desire.

Their shame comes in part from school texts that completely ignore the worth, even the existence, of the majority of women who put home and children at the center of their lives.