Biological development and differences

We all start out female. The early foetus is then bombarded by varying amounts of testosterone, which will ultimately decide the sexuality and behaviour of the baby and its brain. In cases of severe deprivation, a man’sliver will fail to breakdown relevant hormones in his body, and he will gradually revert to his more female origin. In Japanese prisoner–of–war camps, men’s nipples (themselves feminine echoes) lactated. These levels of testosterone, by the way, are influenced by genes and by stress –this is one reason why pregnant mothers should be cared for lovingly.

  • Birth
    • 115 males are conceived for every 100 females.
    • Male births slightly outnumber female.
  • Brain
    • Autism is a largely male phenomenon. 4:1
    • Tourette’s Syndrome is a largely male phenomenon.3:1
    • Dyslexia is a largely male phenomenon. 3:1
  • Communication
    • It is men who stutter. (This is the only characteristic I cannot find numbers for. Do you know of a womanly lady who stutters? In twenty years of coaching and speaking, I have only found one – and she had a distinctly male or systemic (see later) mind.)
    • It is men who are colour–blind. 16:1
    • It is men who suffer hearing loss. 2:1
  • Aggression
    • More boys (age 15–19) die in a homicide. 5:1
    • More boys (age 15–19) die from drowning. 11:1
    • More men commit suicide. 4:1
  • Illness
    • Strokes, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and accidents kill men at a higher rate than women – though this is changing fast. Achievement
    • 167 of the 170 surviving Nobel Prize winners are men.

Ultimately our male/female make–up is the consequence of hundreds of thousands of years of Darwinian evolution. At one extreme, we had the male engineered to hunt alone or in small groups. This necessarily required great abilities to fight, to focus, to run, to remember complex routes, to survive alone. At home the female’s priorities were the different ones of organising families and communities. Their interest was in relationships and close human support. In sexual terms, the male’s priority was to create as many children as possible, to follow the inbred drive to sustain his strengths by fathering future generations. The female’s priority was quite different – to nurture the small number of children that survived.

Our cultures have matured, in the last 100,000 years, at a far faster rate than our biological make–up. This is particularly so for men.

Women, it could be said, were there already. Thousands of years of cave–based socialising had prepared them for the developments of towns, cities and complex modern society – unfortunately this is not the case with men. We cannot go much further in understanding why we act the way we do without considering in some detail how and why our brains differ. Particularly as it is still men who predominantly make up the leaders of our society. It is men, or at least those men or women with male or systemic brains, who will continue to do so, and it is they who will more frequently experience the driven mentality we have discussed earlier.

We differ from women, and, on the whole, the differences make bleak reading for us males.

In summary, although we men start out slightly more numerous, from then on it seems to be all downhill. The New York Times estimates that by the age of 100, women outnumber men by eight to one – good news possibly for the lone survivor! Why these differences? And if there are such marked differences between us, what else does that tell us about how we behave and how we should interact? What is it that we do not understand? What has happened? What other differences are we starting to identify?

Chapter 2 summarised the research by three women at UCLA. This showed how men, when stressed, generated adrenalin, an echo of their need to flight for survival; whereas women produced oxytocin, a similar echo of their different need to socialise and collaborate, but one which is of far greater value in today’s much changed environment. This research took place in 2002. No less recent is the emerging understanding amongst doctors that, as men and women’s bodies work differently, so their response to treatment is different even for the same apparently illnesses. “We have effectively practised medicine as though only a woman’s breast, uterus and ovaries made her unique” says Marianne Legato, Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University, and adds “We’ve acted as though her heart, brain and every other part of her was identical to a man. It’s a mistake of astonishing proportions”.

A few centres devoted to gender medicine have started in the US, but, as yet, only a few. They matter:

  • women’s greatest killer is heart attack, and their symptoms are subtly different from those experienced by men. At the Centre for Gender Specific Medicine in Louisville, Kentucky, the Electro Cardiograph uses, accordingly, a different programme depending on whether the patient is male or female. Not so elsewhere!
  • Legato published “The Principles of Gender Specific Medicine” in 2004; the Journal of Gender Medicine was started in 2002; as yet the UK’s Medical Research Council appears ignorant of the subject. (The Times, Saturday July 24 2004) As it is, most research on heart attacks remains male–orientated, founded on the assumption that one size fits all! We will see a radical change from traditional generalised to gender–specific medicine in the next few years. Scientists are beginning to realise that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently, for example in dealing with pain. The Codeine that dulls toothache for a woman is considerably less effective for a man. And Aspirin may well not protect women from heart attacks.

 

Previous research had focussed exclusively on men. The Boston–based 10–year study of 40,000 women found the aspirin led to a 40% increase in severe gastro–intestinal bleeding and an increased defence, not against heart attacks, but strokes. It appears that the two sexes have unique and different pain–killing systems. We have always known that women get drunk faster than men, and assumed, rather too simply perhaps, that this is because men are larger. And this indeed may be partly the cause. But we now also know it is because women have less of the enzyme ethanol dehydrogenase in their bodies, which is needed to break down alcohol in the stomach.  See the causes of heart attacks.

After fifteen years of working with men and women, and of reading and studying around the subject, I suggest that the differences between our brains are no less significant. Stanford University researchers in California have found that memory and emotion heightened activity in nine areas of women’s brains, compared with two in men (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2001)

In evolutionary terms, it would be very surprising if women and men were not wired for different approaches to intimacy. If we suspect that men and women are wired, therefore, for different kinds of thought and behaviour, one way to find out is to check the wiring itself. Do the brains differ? It turns out they do. As we have mentioned, during the foetal development, the two sexes encounter different levels of testosterone in the womb. This has a lasting effect on the hypothalamus, a small brain structure that influences sexuality and aggression through life. We also know that sex differences influence the frontal lobe region responsible for emotional reasoning. And we know that the two halves of the brain are connected by the corpus callosum – a complex bridge of fibres that is larger and more complex in a woman than a man. Think of a spider’s web for a woman, and a coaxial cable for a man!

Small amounts of testosterone lead to the more complex wiring of the female brain. What happens when this dose is increased? Scientists at Cambridge University have shown how babies with higher levels of testosterone are slower to pick up language skills, find it harder to form relationships and are more likely to develop obsessional traits when they grow up. At 12 months they already had poorer eye contact with their parents, and by 18 months the variation in language skills is becoming apparent. By the time they enter the classroom, children with high testosterone levels are finding it harder to socialise – these are the Alpha Males of the future.

Allan and Barbara Pease’s work on men and women makes hilarious and valuable reading (“Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps” Allan & Barbara Pease: Pease Training International 1998)

The table opposite summarises in note form the differences their book describe. First, an important caveat: I do not believe it is useful to categorise people as “normal” and therefore “acceptable”. Everyone is different: their genetic make–up; the chemical and physical context of their birth; their experiences, first as a little chap and then at school, all make for differences that matter eventually to a greater or lesser extent. The quantity of testosterone will influence where the healthy baby will come on a sexual spectrum, from the silent lone male through homosexual male or female, transsexual, to female. A word here about the bigotry and unreason that remains in our society about homosexuality: I repeat, there is a spectrum of sexuality, and you are on it somewhere because of the amount of chemicals that bombarded your foetus

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