You know an author is out to prove something when she states that she attended Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley within the first page of her book. Furthermore, you know she wants to be taken seriously when she keeps repeating this claim to fame every few pages and also reminds you of all the thousands of cases she has seen while working at her clinic. What you don't know, however, is why someone who claims to be so experienced relies solely on anonymous studies and personal anecdotes about herself, unidentified friends, and nameless patients (besides one biochemistry professor who was a pole dancer in college) as the basis for generalizations for the behavior of ALL women and men. Brizendine spends the majority of her book discussing such stories. When she tries to support her claims with scientific data, she is very specific; for instance, a Swiss experiment proved that oxytocin acts as a pleasure stimulant for the brain. Who conducted this experiment? When was it conducted? How many subjects were tested? Such information is conveniently left unmentioned throughout the book in order not to trouble readers' minds with cumbersome facts. Well, if that's the case, then an experiment conducted in NY proved that the brain is actually located in a person's neck and not the head. Brizendine did provide over 70 pages of notes and references, but readers are sure to be able to take the time to match anecdote with reference number when the references are alphabetized without any mention to the chapter they support. Many of the "facts" this books provides are also very questionable. Men think about sex once a minute while women think about it a maximum of three times per day? Do these chaste women turn on the television, ever? And I'm sure every teenage boy thinks about sex two hundred forty times during the four hours that he spends taking the SAT. (And yet, some boys STILL get perfect scores. They must be great prodigies indeed.) As another example, Brizendine states that women speak an average amount of 20000 words per day while men only speak 7000, a fact that Brizendine obtained from a self-help book written in 1997 called ``Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure." I’m sure years of meticulous research were made to prove THAT hypothesis. Overall, on an academic scale of 1-10, I would give this book a 3. The basic premises of the book is that women and girls seek acceptance and are remarkably intuitive due to possessing low testosterone levels, while men are domineering, aloof, and incapable of reading other people’s body language when it does not indicate a direct threat to them. On an entertainment scale, however, I would give it an 8. I had such a great time watching Brizendine try to get me to take her seriously and every few pages evoked quite a few laughs. Some great quotes presented in this literary masterpiece:“Girls who expect their boyfriends to chat with them the way their girlfriends do are in for a big surprise. Phone conversations can have painful lulls. The best she can often hope for is that he is an attentive listener. She may not realize he's just bored and wants to get back to his video game." “Testosterone has been shown to decrease talking as interest in socializing---except when it involves sports or sexual pursuit.""Their [adolescent boys':] reluctance to talk to their parents comes out of magical thinking that grown-ups will read between their spoken lines and the look in their eyes and know that the subject of sex has taken them over, mind, body, and soul.”“Activities such as caressing, kissing, hugging, gazing, and orgasm can replenish the chemical bond of love in the brain."
The takeaway from this book is that the average woman is a hyper-sensitive control freak ruled by hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, testosterone in the same way that some people feel they're controlled by the movement of the stars. These hormones in turn are determined by a combination of genetics and rearing but developed over time as a reaction to evolutionary necessities. All of which enforce behavior which you know of as a set of common stereotypes. There's not much scientific data to back up these claims but that doesn't stop Luann Brizendine, MD. This writing itself is awful -- an overly breezy example of the worst of pop science. It reads like a long magazine article written in a chatty style which among other things is directed towards an exclusively female audience. Worse, the science is poor, relying mostly on case study from private practice and completely irrelevant animal studies giving 0 background on studies. Just reporting findings is fine in these kind of books, but they should at least make a coherent argument. Example: Brizendine describes a rat experiment wherein researchers rubbed a local anesthetic on a mother rat's mammaries. Brizendine claims that the lack of sensation resulted in lack of bonding between pup and mother, and these poor rat pups as a consequence suffered from a host of problems later in the experiment. Therefore, a woman should breast-feed. Wow -- I think I need a little more information before I can accept that line of reasoning.On the other hand, I do think that brain chemistry is extremely important in determining our moods and behavior. I can buy the basic premise. The problem is that I'm not interested in why so many women exhibit stereotypical behavior. I'm more interested in the how. How does estrogen protect brain cells? How does oxytocin create feelings of relaxation? What is an emotion, and how do you know you're having one anyways? Is sadness for a woman the same thing as sadness for me? Really, I'm not interested in why women like rich, good looking, attentive guys (compared to what? poor, ugly, insensitve guys?). I'm more interested in how they know and how they evaluate what they see and feel and how that differs from the way I see myself. None of these questions even get asked. It's a crying shame.
What do You think about The Female Brain (2006)?
This book was a delight to read. Having long decried supposed gender differences and endorsed a faith in the universality of reason, much of what Dr. Brizendine claims to be gender-characteristic of brains was definitely not what I wanted to read. However, her mix of challenging claims and anecdotal exemplifications of them worked very well towards making what could have been a very dull exercise into something fun and memorable.Although I mark myself as owning a copy of this book, I plan to give it away within the near future and look forward to reading her subsequent book on the male brain.
—Erik Graff
I mostly really liked this book. It is a somewhat scientific book that describes the effect of hormones on the female brain from birth through death, specifically examining puberty, child-bearing and rearing, menopause, etc.I was left feeling like the worst parts of myself are all controlled by my hormones. And that the best parts of myself, are also a product of my hormones. It made me wonder what my personality would be left with once I didn't have any hormones? It was really educational and insightful. I particularly read the part on puberty and perio-menopause with great interest, since that's where the females in our household are right now. She describes men as mountains hormonally--veritably unchanging, and women as the storms that rage around those mountains, constantly changing. Every single day, women have a different hormonal/chemical mix in their brain than they did the day before. It's never the same.I'm finding myself recommending this book to everyone--female and male.A few things I didn't like about it:1) Brizendine's early implications that females are superior to males because we have hormones which make us more responsive to other humans, better listeners, more nurturing annoyed me. I felt like she included that and the little by-line on the back of the book ("Men, get ready to have brain envy") to passify the feminists. The examples she gave of little toddler and preschooler boys and girls to prove her points of superiority were completely annoying to me. I could find just as many examples from my preschoolers of cases where the boys displayed better behavior and the girls were manipulative and exlclusive. Seemed very one-sided. 2) Brizendine tries writing in the Malcolm Gladwell style. No one can do it like Malcolm though, so the lack is obvious.3) Brizendine is a psychologist, not a researcher. This becomes more evident as she presents the research to prove her point. For instance she presents a piece of evidence about the monogomous DNA strand which may pre-determine whether you're more likely to stay with one mate, or try for many. But the original research doesn't really say that. She just takes a small portion of it to prove her point. Being married to a researcher makes me more aware of these "research omissions."
—Megan
I stopped reading this book on page 68.It's amazing I made it that far. Part of me thinks I should finish the book because I should know what is inside. People not only like to come to me for gender advice, but also test my boundaries on "gender roles." A friend loaned me this book, I believe as a way to see what my expert opinion of it would be. I have no idea how she feels about it.It frightens me to think this was a NY Times Best Seller. Oh, the masses who read this and loved it!You know what made me finally put this book down?*It wasn't her pointing out that female and male brains work in different ways. *It wasn't her stating on page 8 that a female engineer quit her work to be in a more people-oriented career, thus giving more credibility to the idea that engineers don't work with people or for people.*It wasn't even when she dug up the old "I gave my daughter a truck and she treated it like a baby" cliché.*It was almost when she says men look for visual clues (plump lips, smooth skin) to ensure fertility when looking for women to date.It was her slut shaming. In the chapter about how the female brain works in the areas of love and trust, she states: (Warning, put that cup down and swallow that bite) "Social reputation is often a factor in male assessment, since the most reproductively successful males also need to pick women who will mate only with them. Men want to ensure their paternity but also to be able to count on a woman's mothers skills to make sure that their offspring thrive. If Melissa had immediately gone to bed with Rob or showed off to him about all the guys she has had, his Stone Age brain might have judged that she would be unfaithful or had a bad reputation." Go ahead, read that passage again. Yes, you read it correctly. Cave men don't want slutty women to hook up with.There's a lot of research in here and a lot of medical terms that aren't clearly explained. But from all the things on gender that I have learned from reading outside and inside the classroom and the science background I have, I have to say that this person takes facts and uses a huge rubber band to tie it to normative behavior. Instead of this book, pick up Pink Brain, Blue Brain. Sure it's 2-3 times longer, but it doesn't traffic in stereotypes and certainly believes that we have evolved from the Stone Age. A reader suggested Cordelia Fine's "Delusion of Gender" as another alternative to "The Female Brain." http://www.cordeliafine.com/delusions...Have other suggestions? Keep them coming!
—Veronica
