From Loretta:
A recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe Magazine ( "The Difference Myth" by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett , October 28, 2007) told me that my thinking about men and women is completely wrong.
Or maybe not.
In this thought-provoking piece, the authors question the belief that men and women think and learn differently. Rivers and Barnett dismiss a number of books and find fault with the research demonstrating and describing these differences. 
They want us to know, for instance, that the author of MEN ARE FROM MARS AND WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS got his degree from a “diploma mill.” Well, I wasn’t wild about Gray’s book--maybe because a man had written it and he communicated like a man (oh dear, was I wrong to notice the difference?)--but as they cited all the Bad Research of the 1990s, I was puzzled at Rivers and Barnett’s not mentioning linguist Deborah Tannen’s YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND. Mary Jo recommended this book to me, and it radically changed the way I thought about men and women. To an extent, LORD OF SCOUNDRELS (yes, coming soon, again, to your local bookstore! ) was a result of what Tannen helped me understand about the differences between male-think-speak and female-think-speak.
This exchange between my heroine Jessica and her brother Bertie, for example:
“Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.
She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce--just before falling into the punch bowl--to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”
She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do--or want to do--with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and--”
“Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”
Bertie is quoting his idol, Lord Dain, the hero of the book, who a few pages later points out to his disciple, “Women deal in a higher mathematical realm than men, especially when it comes to gifts.” If the technology gods are kind, a longer excerpt from this scene, in which Dain first meets Jessica, will be available on my website next week.
Male-female differences are crucial to Dain’s relationship with Jessica. She’s the one woman in all the world who can understand him, because she understands men so well. She knows how to “translate” his language and behavior. When he does weird or stupid guy things, she knows they’re just weird or stupid guy things and doesn’t take them personally...until she has to. And then she speaks in a language he can understand.
I don’t believe these behaviors are so weird and stupid if one considers biology and evolution and what the male, generally, needs to do (copulate) vs. what the female, generally, needs to do (buy shoes).
But let’s look at Nature. It was my husband who called my attention (when he could stop laughing) to this little bit from the Summer 2007 edition of Living Bird, a publication of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology: Some research on the sage-grouse involves using a robotic female sage-grouse. This device, which the researcher calls a “fembot,” looks like a bird sitting on the car of a model train. The wheels are plainly visible. The researcher moves it via a radio control along model train tracks. The fembot can’t fly and can only travel on the tracks. Nonetheless, according to the article, “Males are easily fooled--male sage-grouse will copulate with virtually anything that remotely resembles a female, including piles of cow dung...”
To be fair (not that I have to be: it's my blog and I'll be unfair & irrational if I want to), llike Rivers and Barnett, I do question some of the research findings. For example, I have found it hard to believe that men talk less than women; in my experience, guys can hold forth for hours about all kinds of topics in which I have not the remotest interest (sports, cars, blockbuster action movies, etc.). As a card-carrying feminist, I also sympathize with the authors concern about certain education trends that exploit the differences between girls and boys. OTOH, the educational system in this country seems always to be ruled by the latest learning trends in some ways and fossilized in 18th &19th C methods in others.
Still, feminist or not, I'm not buying the argument that men and the women think the same way. This is because, contrary to some people’s beliefs, one can be a feminist AND have a sense of humor. There’s no way I’m giving up my He vs She jokes or battle of the sexes stuff. And to prove it, I’ll leave you with this from a New Yorker article (Burkhard Bilger, A Reporter at Large, "Spider Woman," The New Yorker, March 5, 2007. An abstract of the article is here. )
This piece, about a researcher who milks spider venom, includes some wonderful quotations from an earlier researcher, John Crompton. According to the article, Crompton “envied the crab spider, ‘whose life consists of immobility interspersed with succulent meals,’ but settled on a male labyrinth spider, whose mate treats it kindly after copulation. For most species, Crompton noted, a husband’s place is ‘in the digestive tract of his wife.’”
Male spiders are still going to go for smoochies with female spiders, even when it means certain Death.
Any analogies to human behavior in Nature? What do you think? Are men & women alike or unlike? Do our brains work differently? Feel free to give examples.