1

QUOTES XXII
Quotations about
SEX DIFFERENCES

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS ONE OF MORE SEX WITH LESS PROCREATION, OF
MORE 'IDENTITY' WITH LESS TERRITORIAL INSTANTIATION, AND OF MORE STATE
EMPLOYMENT WITH LESS CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION. SEX, IDENTITY AND
EMPLOYMENT WERE ALL SOUGHT, AS NEVER BEFORE, FOR THEIR OWN SAKESWITH LITTLE CONCERN FOR WHAT WOULD ONCE HAVE BEEN THEIR USUAL
CONSEQUENCES. THESE CHANGES SUITED WOMEN WELL. FREED FROM
FREQUENT CHILDBIRTH AND THE NEED FOR A PERSONAL PHYSICAL GUARDIAN,
WOMEN PROGRESSIVELY DISPLACED MEN IN STATE-SECTOR EMPLOYMENT.
TRADITIONAL FAMILY LIFE WENT INTO DECLINE AS WOMEN NO LONGER NEEDED
MEN; BUT IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WHETHER THE RESULTING NATION-STATES
MAKE THE BEST USE OF THE TWO SEXES' TALENTS OR CAN DRAW ON THE DEEP
LOYALTIES THAT ONCE LED PEOPLE TO DEFEND THEIR OWN RELIGIONS (EACH
HAVING ITS OWN DISTINCTIVE SEXUAL ARRANGEMENTS AND SEX-ROLE
DIVISION OF LABOUR).
While behaviourism held sway in psychology, sex differences were ignored-like most other
biological influences that contribute to human nature and human variety. According to classical
behaviourism, people's 'histories of reinforcement' were all that was needed to explain their
psychological differences. Thus no special study of sex differences was required. With the
publication of Eleanor Maccoby's The Development of Sex Differences in 1966, this neglect
ended; but disagreement would persist as to the malleability of the differences.
The 1970s witnessed attempts to link sex differences in cognition and psychopathology to
hemispheres, handedness, hormones and much else (e.g. Flor-Henry, 1983, The Cerebral Basis of
Psychopathology). However, through the 1980's there was less confidence in neuropsychological
stories and more development of the various competing strands of modern 'feminist' thought.
Today it has still to be considered that some sex differences are of social origin, even if a
'patriarchal' social structure itself emerges as a likely development in most imaginable
sociobiological circumstances.
The are five broad (but inter-linked) questions which give rise to argument in psychology and
social science.
1. How do people acquire their sex-assignation as male or female?
2. How do people come by their sexual orientation of desire?

3. How do people come to differ in masculinity vs femininity of interests and personal style? {In
recent years it has been fashionable to view all such sex differences in personality and in 'what
sex you feel you are' as matters of 'gender identity' (see below, c. p.70, P.J.Burke,). Yet this
terminology would seem to beg the question of whether 'identity' is the issue. - Is an interest in
flower-arranging actually an identity-assertion, or might it just be an interest tout court? Anyhow,
in extending the term 'gender' to people from its natural use in linguistics classify nouns, the
terminology of 'gender' is strangely coy about using the word 'sex'.}
4. How and why do people arrive at their sexual opinionation concerning such matters as 'the
opposite sex', 'the battle of the sexes', and the social, political and religious arrangements that
should be made if the sexes are to live and procreate harmoniously?
5. Who is right about about the sexual prospects in the modern West? For example: will the sexes
live increasingly disharmoniously? - Is the nuclear family finished? Will women support
themselves and their children chiefly from some mixture of their own careers and state benefits?
Could male labour and reproductive capacity be suffering steadily reducing demand? And what
could males be expected to do with their time if their chief involvements with children were by
means of the taxation system and the requirements of the divorce courts?
The more familiar feminist package of arguments contests the importance of sex differences; and
attributes such differences as really must be admitted (in 'spatial abilities', 'aggression',
'dominance', 'criminality', 'tough-mindedness', 'analyticity', attentional styles, emotionality, logical
reasoning, genius, sexual perversion, promiscuity, stark insensitivity, or whatever) to the
influence of the local social environment. This little-real-difference package holds out the future
prospect of reductions in such differences as are found; and enthusiasts for Women's Liberation
may accordingly assert that there are no inherent obstacles to women occupying positions of
industrial, political and religious leadership in the same proportions as do men.
A second, equally 'liberated' point of view has proved increasingly popular with feminists. This
big-real-difference package of arguments actually stresses the male's physical potency and
borderline-inhumanity as a biological aggressor who is conspicuously responsible for rape, child
abuse, war and ethnic cleansing. This view is that the aboriginal qualities of the male must tend to
disqualify him from Western civilisation; and it might be added that the modern technologies of
nuclear deterrence, women police and judges, semi-automatic weapons and in vitro fertilization
have anyhow rendered largely obsolete the traditional male's special capacity for hand-to-hand
combat and allied forms of coercion.
Feminist respect for biological and evolutionary factors may even go beyond postulating 'big
differences'. It may taken a step further to embrace a third view, that there must be differences
between the sexes-even if the male does not strictly need to be aggressive or sex-crazed.
According to this package (e.g. Ruth Bleier, 1984, Science and Gender ) feminists accept what is
a fairly plausible evolutionary tale to account for male over-representation in social leadership.
The story begins with human bipedalism: this enabled carrying and thus hunting over
considerable distances. Once hunting for food took the human male away from the home base for
longer periods, men's uncertainty about the paternity of women's children was simply bound to
make them invent forms of 'patriarchy'; for patriarchy invariably serves to control female
sexuality and to reduce the chance of men being cuckolded or made to support women's children
by other men. Until recent times, it was only via some kind of sexual indoctrination and policing

(usually provided by religion) that men could know in which children they should invest time,
effort, cash and affection: female sexual fidelity was quite simply the cornerstone of male
investment in children. (If, under other social arrangements, men were to have serious uncertainty
as to which children were their own, the sociobiological expectation would be that they would
reduce their efforts to improve the quality and life-chances of any particular children and
concentrate on having in quantity children for whom others-viz. women or the state-are left to
provide the bulk of the welfare. - See Quotes XXIV.)
An advantage of the 'innate patriarchy' package is that it seems to explain three time-honoured
puzzles:
(i) why male jealousy tends particularly to concern female sexuality (whereas female anxieties
about their partners seem more often to concern how the man spends his time and money-e.g.
Buss, 1991, Ann.Rev.Psychol.);
(ii) why so many cultures seem to operate the often-derided 'double standard' of sexual morality;
and
(iii) why the world's longer-running religions and polities have been organized by men.
{Of course, the twentieth century-with the Pill, easy abortion, AIDS, the welfare state, incubatormix-ups, genetic figerprinting and genetic engineering -poses quite new problems (and
opportunities) requiring quite new responses by both sexes. Yet the male 'offer' [as it might be
called] of either 'assured paternity of females' children' or 'disinvestment' seems likely to stand-at
least until some 'marvel' of implant surgery makes it possible for men to bear their own children.}
The Quotations illustrate these three psychological theses of feminism which, in their very
diversity, explain some of the problems of the Women's Movement today. Do women naturally
constitute a cohesive force that could achieve political unity in support of traditional family
values and in opposition to crime, warfare and sexual promiscuity? Or will women's natural
affection, ready sympathy and need for security (in pregnancy and beyond) achieve fulfilment
more naturally in the championing of the job-creative and benefit-providing welfare state sector
of modern economies? Are women well advised to compete with men in engineering,
architecture, computing, politics and the priesthood? Or is there simply no proper objective for
women but to slough off discredited stereotypes and shibboleths-as they certainly have in the
West in recent years?
The psychological understanding of sex differences will bear on all these as-yet-undecided
questions. To answer at least the last of them affirmatively may seem easy enough in its tolerant
individualism. Yet an unvarnished approval of 'de-stereotyping' will not satisfy politically
conscious feminists who urge precisely that women should indeed assert their distinct interests as
a natural biosocial group. Nor will it satisfy biological realists: a young woman who plans her
future life merely in response to own current stereotype-free 'gender identity' will arguably be
neglecting the ennobling maternal energies and sensitivities that would come on stream for her at
the birth of her first child.
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of sex differences in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
The book was first issued, in March, but then withdrawn by the 'publisher' because it was
deemed to have infringed modern canons of

'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes, and others'
comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on race and
education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
*******************************************************************

INDEX to QUOTES XXII

Page
(i) The battle of the sexes. 6
(ii) Sex differences? 15
(iii) Explaining sex differences. 36
Constitutional, evolutionary and physiological factors Social factors Emollient proposals
(iv) Women's Liberation? 52 Favourable considerations Less agreeable considerations
(v) Men's 'Liberation'? 68 Favourable considerations Less agreeable considerations
Epilogue.

(i) The battle of the sexes?

"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.....wherefore for the sake of
their lusts [women] consort with devils."

Malleus Maleficarum, 1486.

"Of woman's unnatural, insatiable lust what country, what village does not complain?"
Robert BURTON (author of the Anatomy of Melancholy), 1621.
"The helpmeets of [the coarse and largely illiterate Scottish noblemen of the sixteenth century]....
were indeed a remarkable race, and very often more estimable than their husbands; or perhaps the
unbridled spirit is simply more attractive when manifested in the female than in the male sex....
Despite the almost total lack of education granted to women....the wives of the Scottish nobility
were from time to time to time capable of throwing up a figure of genuine intelligence and spirit,
such as Jean, countess of Argyll, Jean Gordon, countess of Bothwell, or Agnes, countess of
Moray, who put many of their male contemporaries in the shade."
Lady Antonia FRASER, 1969, Mary Queen of Scots.
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
"....he is not a pleasant man - very few are."
Dowager Countess of Sunderland, 1680.
"Now twenty-four, exceedingly beautiful and with a large private income, [Catherine Geelvinck]
laid waste the drawing rooms of Utrecht with broken-hearted suitors. Students sang about her,
and foreign visitors (especially the minor German nobility) got drunk in her honour. She was
known universally and somewhat breathlessly as la Veuve. Low-voiced, cool and coquettish, she
spent vast sums on the latest Paris fashions to show off her splendid, milky charms. Her large
brown eyes had a slight cast, and transfixed Boswell with their hint of sexual naughtiness. In
reality, Madame Geelvinck had a calculating heart, poured all her emotions into her only son and
comported herself with enough care to achieve two more marriages and an even larger income.
But for Boswell she was an immediate challenge."
Richard HOLMES, 1992, 'Among the tulips'.
Granta 41: Biography
"Here's Merrie England indeed: a duchess discovered under a hedge, her petticoat around her
waist and a peer of the realm (not her husband) on top of her. Another great lady walks around
with dirty fingermarks on her dress: not those of a financial adviser, but of a boy from the stables,
of whose sexual athleticism she has heard from the staff below stairs. The hard-drinking and halfeducated squirearchy roars about the countryside, on the hunting field by day and in the alehouse
all night: and that's just the women. You don't like your wife? Throw a candlestick at her! You
have to negotiate? Make sure to take your whip!"
Hilary MANTEL, 1993, The Spectator, 26 vi.
(Reviewing L.Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce
in England 1660-1857, Oxford University Press.)
"Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them very little."
Doctor JOHNSON.
"....Rousseau's most lasting relationship was with an illiterate washerwoman, Therse Levasseur,
with whom he first took up at the age of thirty-two, at a moment when he was feeling sorry for
the insults she had to bear. Though a good housekeeper, she is described [by Rousseau] as
'jealous, stupid, gossipy, and a liar'. But she did patiently care for a very difficult man, to whom

she bore five children that neither of them - it appears - wanted; and who did not take her in
marriage until, at fifty-seven, he conducted a strange ceremony at which everyone burst into
tears."
B-A. SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Haydn's wife, Anne-Maria, would cut up his manuscripts to make hair curlers and line cake
tins."
Classic F.M. Radio, c. 1655hrs, 13 xi 1993.
"Woman makes of man what she wishes. Formerly she made heroes and now she makes apes."
"Woman does not betray herself easily and therefore does not get drunk. Because she is weak she
is sly.... The female sex has more feeling and heart than character.... Men love the soul, women
the body. They believe that the soul is good enough if only they can get it into their power."
Immanuel KANT, cited by B-A.Scharfstein, 1980,
The Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Sir Pitt Crawley....selected for a second wife Miss Rose Dawson, daughter of Mr John Thomas
Dawson, ironmonger, of Mudbury.... As the only endowments with which Nature had gifted [the
second] Lady Crawley were those of pink cheeks and a white skin, and as she had no sort of
character, nor talents, nor opinions, nor occupations, nor amusements nor that vigour of soul and
ferocity of temper which often falls to the lot of entirely foolish women, her hold upon Sir Pitt's
affections was not very great. Her roses faded out of her cheeks, and the pretty freshness left her
figure after the birth of a couple of children.... She had not character enough to take to drinking,
and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers all day. O, Vanity Fair - Vanity Fair! This might
have been, but for you, a cheery lass: - Peter Butt [the boyfriend she had ditched for Sir Pitt] and
Rose a happy man and wife, in a snug farm, with a hearty family; and an honest portion of
pleasures, cares, hopes and struggles. But a title and coach and four are toys more precious than
happiness in Vanity Fair: and if Harry the Eighth or Bluebeard were alive now, and wanted a tenth
wife, do you suppose he could not get the prettiest girl that shall be presented this season?"
From William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter IX.
"Thou goest to woman?-Do not forget thy whip!"
NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The
tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts."
From Oscar WILDE's A Woman of No Importance.
"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."
H.L.MENCKEN.
"I was much interested in the girls at one big dining room [at the Woolwich Arsenal in 1916]. They earn between 18/ and 35/- weekly. They are nearly all quite young, very fresh and pretty
and rather hoydenish. - Some of them were snowballing the boys outside the canteen. The forewomen have their meals in a separate room. They are of course older and they belong to the
professional and suffragetty classes, and some of them look as if they had seen 'life'. - They were
nearly all smoking and playing Bridge and nap after their meals! The quiet ones were reading
rather advanced books, translations from the Russian Authors and such-like.

I understand the prejudice of the skilled male worker against diluted female labour. The women
are full of beans and become terribly skilful very quickly."
Clementine CHURCHILL, 1916, letter to her husband, Winston.
"If men knew what women said about them in private, the human race would cease to exist."
W.H.AUDEN.
"I should not mind
If she were killed, or ploughed.
She did not seem to serve a useful end."
J.K.STEPHEN (cousin of Virginia Woolf).
"Behind every great man there stands an astonished woman."
Lester Pearson (Canadian Prime Minister, 1963-1968).
"The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the
war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at halfmast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the
basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction
called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor
dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think
about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female
inadequacy."
Erica JONG, 1974, Fear of Flying. London : Secker & Warburg.
"Whatever they might say they believe, women love aggression and strength and power in men.
It's deep in their minds. Look at all the women a successful man attracts. If what I'm saying
wasn't true, women would protest at every war. Instead, they love to send their men to fight. The
pacifists, the objectors, are mostly men. And even though they hate themselves for it, women long
to be ruled by men. It's deep in their minds. They lie to themselves. They talk of freedom, and
dream of captivity."
'Robert', the sadistic husband in Ian McEWAN's, 1981, The Comfort of Strangers. London :
Jonathan Cape
"....the women [in Boulder, Colorado] are something else. The two words that I hear bouncing off
the walls and ceilings more than any other are 'relate' and 'relationship'.... Yesterday I heard a girl
tell her friend, 'I find it almost impossible to relate because I go for looks'. Later her friend said, 'I
want a meaningful relationship, but how the hell can you relate with a man?" Jeffrey BERNARD,
1984, The Spectator.
"Truth, reality and objectivity are all in trouble from our point of view; we see a male-created
truth, a male point of view, a male-defined objectivity."
Ruth BLEIER, 1984, Science and Gender.
"I don't want to spend my time fighting against pornography. I would much rather be gardening,
or writing my books. But someone has to do it, and feminists have brought new ideas to the

struggle. Someone has to make society recognize that pornography is a problem - that it is in fact
anti-female propaganda."
Susan BROWNMILLER, 1984, Harper's, xi.
"....at first [in the Pauline Church] licence was given to women as well as to men to speak in
church meetings just as the spirit moved them. In theory this was supposed to produce
spontaneous and ecstatic worship, but in practice....the result tended to be chaos [due to 'speaking
in tongues'].... Thus Paul moved from an initial position in which no distinction was made
between the sexes in worship to a final repressive position made in the interests of order."
Hyam MACCOBY, 1986, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention
of Christianity. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
"....while Eastern men proudly meditate, their women work."
Branko BOKUN, 1986.
"Intercourse remains a means, or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior:
communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status.... pushing and thrusting until she gives
up and gives in - which is called surrender in the male lexicon."
Andrea DWORKIN, 1987, Intercourse. London : Secker & Warburg.
"If you tell me that things between men and women are peaches and cream and this is not war,
not a battle, I don't know where you live.... Of course it's disguised. We love each other. We go to
bed with each other. We flirt with each other. But underneath all this is the ancient history of male
supremacy over females."
Marilyn FRENCH, 1987,
interviewed by Angela Brooks, The Times, 9 x.
"For boys and girls, sexism is taught at their mother's knee. By the time they reach the nursery it
is already too late." Maire Nic SUIBHNE, 1987, New Statesman, 6 xi.
"....the presence of a woman in what has become the last bastion of male superiority in
Westminster, [the Tory Whips' Office], would be more than the Tory Whips could bear. They
would have to watch their language, and wash."
'Profile', The Observer, 19 vi 1988.
"There has been a dramatic increase in sex murders in the last twenty years, especially in the
United States. "....it's an epidemic", a Justice Department is reported tok have said. It is not, Jane
Caputi [The Age of Sex Crime] answers. It is not inexplicable, the work of mysterious
psychopaths. Drawing on American feminists writing on pornography and rape (Susan Griffin,
Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller), [Caputi] claims that sex murder is "an eminently logical
step in the procession of patriarchal roles, values, needs, and rule of force"; and that it is one of
the "latest expressions in a tradition of what Mary Daly first named as gynocide - that is, in
Andrea Dworkin's words, "the systematic crippling, raping and/or killing of women by men."
Nicole Ward JOUVE, 1988,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22 iv.
"The woman's egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the
genetic messages the child will ever receive. Women, therefore, are the original, the first sex, the

biological norm from which males are only a deviation."

Rosalind MILES (Head of the Centre for Women's Studies,
Coventry Polytechnic), 1988. Interviewed by Rosalind Yarde,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22 vii.
"....interestingly, women of primitive societies are often far less subjugated than a modern,
particularly a Western, observer might expect. Far from being broken-down slaves to their men's
drives and needs, women in early societies often had a better chance of freedom, dignity and
significance than many of their female descendants in more 'advanced' societies. The key lies in
the nature of the tribe's relation to its surroundings. Where the sheer subsistence is a struggle and
survival is the order of the day, women's equality is very marked. Women in these cultures play
too vital a role to be kept down or out of action, and their knowledge and experience are a
cherished tribal resource. As the major food providers, holding the secret of survival, women
have, and know they have, freedom, power and status.... ....Men in hunter/gatherer societies do
not command or exploit women's labour. They do not appropriate or control their produce, nor
prevent their free movement. They exert little or no control over women's bodies or those of their
children, making no fetish of virginity or chastity, and making no demands of women's sexual
exclusivity. The common stock of the group's knowledge is not reserved for men only, nor is
female creativity repressed or denied. Today's 'civilized' sisters of these 'primitive' women could
with some justice look wistfully at this substantial array of the basic rights of women."
Rosalin MILES, 1988, The Women's History of the World - or: The Phallusy of History. London :
Michael Joseph.
"In the questionnaires that several hundred young Americans filled out for a computer dating
service, women expressed stronger preferences than men in almost every respect: intelligence,
status, dancing ability, religion, race, etc.. The only category in which men were more selective
than women was physical attractiveness. After a date, the men and women then filled out debriefing questionnaires, with the result that two-and-a-half times as many men as women
expressed a strong romantic attraction to their partner. Thus the women were choosier, the men
more undiscriminating, in their reaction to partners."
Jared DIAMOND, 1991, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee.
London : Vintage.
"[Sometimes I] wonder whether war [is] not preferable to English domestic life, which it in some
ways so closely resembles.... [My] patient was a lady of ample proportions whose husband had
for 20 years made her life a hell. So jealous of her was he that he would not allow her to wear
make-up, interpreting lipstick or rouge as an attempt to attract other men.... [under drink] he had
beaten her unconscious many times, he had broken her jaw and skull, and she had eight false
teeth to replace those he had knocked out.... now he lived with another woman, whom he treated
in similar fashion."
Theodore DALRYMPLE, 1992, The Spectator, 21 xi.
"Drawing on Julia Kristeva's [film] 'Powers of Horror', Barbara Creed (1993, The Monstrous
Feminine: Film Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Routledge) contends that the "central ideological
project is" catharsis, "bringing about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes,
the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between
the human and the nonhuman." The stereotype of the monstrous-feminine, Creed suggests,
provides one with a means of glimpsing "the dark side of the patriarchal unconscious." In an

10

argument which, quite deliberately, goes against the grain of orthodox Freudian and other
psychoanalytically-oriented theories of spectatorship, Creed claims that man fears woman as
castrator rather than as castrated, as monster rather than as victim. The stereotype is a complex
one, and Creed breaks it down into a number of different figures of female horror: woman as
archaic monster, monstrous womb, vampire, possessed body, femme castratrice, witch and
castrating mother. The effect, according to the author, is double-edged: on the one hand, the
image which defines woman as monstrous in relation to her reproductive functions serves to
"reinforce the phallocentric notion that female sexuality is abject", while on the other hand, the
same image challenges the assumption that femininity constitutes passivity.."
Graham McCANN, 1993, The Modern Review, x/xi.
"[In our study of dyadic interaction between male and female psychology sophomores] as
physical attractiveness of the women increased, the men reported an increasing percentage of
metaperspective thoughts and feelings that reflected the symbolic adoption of their female
partner's perspective."
Stella GARCIA et al., 1991,
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 61.
"'All right,' I said, 'What did you spend [in Lausanne]'? How much did you buy?' 'Ah, you want to
see all these?' she asked, opening up an Armani leather suitcase I had never seen before, and
unpacking from it plastic shop bag after plastic shop bag. 'All that?' I asked. 'Look,' said Ildiko,
'You know I only bought it all for you.' I looked. What Ildiko had bought for me was the
following: three dresses in Day-Glo colours; shoes of electric blue; anoraks of outrageous purple;
racing drivers' sunglasses; a baseball cap saying 'Cleveland Pitchers'; skin-tight Lycra bicycling
pants with startling pink flashes; Stars and Stripes knickers; Union Jack bras; a tee-shirt that said
on it 'Spandau Ballet', and another that declared 'Up Yours, Delors.' 'Do you really like them?' she
asked. 'Frankly?' I asked. 'Yes, of course, frankly,' said Ildiko. 'Well, frankly, I like your
Hungarian miniskirt much better,' I said.
Ildiko stared at me, dismay in her eyes. 'You like it better?' she said, 'But that is just from
Hungary. These are from the West. They are from shopping.'"
'Francis' and 'Ildiko' in Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale.
London : Secker & Warburg, 1992.
"Two of the mate characteristics examined (Buss et al., 1990, J.Cross-Cult. Psychol.) were "good
financial prospect" and "favourable social status." Both received fairlc low ratings from women
(across the 37 samples)....{However,} in the United Statesi the men whom women actually
choose to marry make 50% more money, on average, than men of the same age whom they do not
choose to marry (Trivers, 1985, Social Evolution). Along these lines, male medical students report
that their increasing socioeconomic status tends to markedly enlarge their pool of available sexual
and marital partners (Townsend, 1987, Archives of Sexual Behaviour 16). Moreover, in a study of
selections made at a major commercial dating service, social status emerged as the single most
important criterion nthoowomen applied to men (Green et al., 1984, Personality & Social
Psychology Bulletin 10). A similar inconsistency emerges between women's stated preference for
dominance per se and actual response to dominance signals.... The preference for dominant, highstatus men may be real but unconscious."
B.J.ELLIS, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, Leda Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind. New York :
Oxford University Press.

11

"A teacher said of one 10-year-old boy in her class that his performance was generally poor, with
him being just about able to write his own name; but she went on to add that this was not just
because he was not bright or able but because he could not sit still. What is important about this
remark was that it was of a type which was fairly commonly made about boys but never about
girls. Poor performance is not taken to be an indicator of necessary lack of ability in the case of
boys. Rather, they are active (just can't sit still). By comparison, it was common for girls who
were doing extremely well to be described as not bright. 'Her hard work gets her to her standards'
was a typical remark. ....This is not a simple matter of bias, but one point in a complex and
gendered history both in relation to Reason (the Ratio) and the work/play dichotomy in which
reason was inscribed in modern psycho-educational discourse."
Valerie WALKERDINE, 1993, Theory & Psychology 3.
"Men understand quite well what women want but they give only when it suits them. In many
situations they refuse to give and women cannot make them give."
Senta TROEMEL-PLOETZ, 1991, Discourse & Society 2.
"Joan Littlewood is the greatest theatre director of the present century, knocking possible rivals
like Max Reinhardt and Jean-Louis Barrault into a cocked hat when it comes to intelligence,
originality and the incalculable influence for good she has had on theatre all over the
world.... ....Her public image at the height of her commercial success was of a tough Cockney nut,
chain-smoking Gauloises, dropping her hat down the back of a chair while being interviewed by
Malcolm Muggeridge and sticking her bottom into the camera while she pretended to look for it,
effing and blinding like a trooper."
John WELLS, 1994, The Spectator, 2 iv.
"....no great poet has written more powerfully [than Baudelaire] of women as agents of men's
destruction. In 'Un Voyage Cythre', for example, he finds nothing standing on Venus's island
except 'un gibet symbolique ou pendait mon image.'"
R.CHRISTIANSEN, 1994, The Spectator, 26 iii.
"There's a scene in the film Annie Hall where Woody Allen tells his psychiatrist that he and Annie
have sex "hardly ever, maybe three times a week", and she tells her shrink that they do it
"constantly, I'd say three times a week"."
The Listener (New Zealand), 28i-3ii 1995.
"Comic Jim Davidson claims women are only good for two things: sex and peeling spuds! "I can't
understand what makes them tick," he says.... ....he was angry at church leaders who branded
[his] show obscene."
Daily Record (Scotland), 15 xi 1995.
"You never noticed religions always seem to get invented by men? When you ever hear of a cult
or a sect started by a woman? Hardly ever? Women have the power of creation in them; men have
to fantasise about it, create Creation itself, just to compensate; ovary envy. That's all it is. ....[At
WACO, Texas, David] Koresh {who had wanted to be a rock star} became a prophet instead. And
how did he end up living? Worshipped, that's how, in a place where he could have any woman he
wanted and smoke dope and drink all night with his buddies. Hog heaven."
'Grandmother Yolanda' in Iain Banks' Whit.
London : Little, Brown & Co., 1995.

12

"Supposing the truth is a woman - what then?"

NIETZSCHE.
(ii) Sex differences?
"None other than the revered master, St Thomas Aquinas, uttered pronouncements adverse to
womanhood - although less radical than those of {Christian} mystics who, in their excessive zeal,
pushed woman-hatred to pathological extremes. Aquinas, the supreme expositor of scholasticism,
drew his inspiration from Aristotle, who in turn had established that "small and weak things are
accounted as if they were not" (Physics ii 5). Accordingly, women where characterized as having
a weak temperament (Summa Theologica, Question 156, Article 1); and from here it was not too
great a leap to further denigration of the "weaker" sex. Being unstable of reason and weak of
temperament, women are easily led astray. Therefore, concludes St Thomas, as regards the body,
women cannot be described as continent."
F.GONZALEZ-CRUSSI, 1988, On the Nature of Things Erotic. London : Pan.
"Men are guided by their Intellects only, while Women are guided by their Hearts only."
Major Seton CHURCHILL, 1887, Forbidden Fruit for Young Men."
London : Nisbet.
"Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table; and, though custom allows them
to preside at the breakfast-table, men think them on the whole to be far from successful makers of
tea and coffee."
Sir Francis GALTON, discussing what he took to be the
superiority of sensory discrimination in men.
"Hogamous, higamous;
Men are polygamous.
Higamous, hogamous;
Women monogamous."
The psychologist William JAMES awoke one day
with this 'revelation' ringing in his head.
"[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she
accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty."
Leo TOLSTOY, 1898, cited by Paul Johnson, Intellectuals.
London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
"The woman's plenitude consists of that wonderful combination of tenderness and judgement,
which is the genius of motherhood, a plenitude springing from the very sources of her nature. I
can only work my tiny intellect for two or three hours, whereas I could be giving forth tenderness
and judgement to my children hour after hour and day after day without effort or strain." Beatrice
WEBB (social reformer and Fabian), c. 1905.

13

"One comparative study of conversations showed that 37 per cent of women's conversations were
about persons, as against 16 per cent of men's (Landis & Burtt, 1924, J.Comparative Psychol. 4)."
I.WATT, 1963, The Rise of the Novel. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"In a breathtakingly chauvinist statement, [Freud] says: "Women have made few contributions to
the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization" (Freud, 1933, 'New Introductory
Lectures'), but they may have invented weaving - a kind of cultural equivalent of pubic hair to
cover up the shame of having no penis."
Keith OATLEY, 1992, Best Laid Schemes: the Psychology of the Emotions. New York :
Cambridge University Press
"[Broverman et al.(1968, Psychol. Rev. 75) contrast the male superiority on field-independence perhaps requiring attention to non-salient stimulus attributes -] to the advantages of females on
tasks that are overlearned repetitive behaviours that call for minimal central mediation.
Broverman et al. point out that females are superior in speed of naming colors, cancelling
numbers, reading, coding, tapping, writing, typing, simple calculations, and other tasks of this
nature. Men are found superior on mirror tracing, maze performance, counting backwards, choice
reaction time, and others."
Lee WILLERMAN, 1979, The Psychology of Individual and Group
Differences. San Francisco : W.H.Freeman.
"Even Margaret Mead (1973), often cited as holding the opposite opinions, acknowledged....that
"men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home"."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1982, in I.Al-Issa, Gender and Psychopathology. New York : Academic.
"There are differences between men and women in qualities and powers: mental alertness,
intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service are qualities in which women are strong."
From Baha'i statement to United Nations Commission on the
Status of Women, 1974.
"In the course of standardizing two tests, several widely accepted findings have been confirmed:
notable male superiority on Numerical [Intelligence], female superiority on Verbal [Intelligence],
and the greater variance found generally among males than females."
Alice W. HEIM et al., 1974, British Journal of Psychology 65.
"When a woman did fall into the category of "born criminal", [the nineteenth-century Italian
criminologist,] Lombroso asserted that she was "more terrible than the male". Because of her
innate depravity, her insensitivity to pain "which breeds lack of compassion", and her childish
qualities - i.e. jealousy, cruelty, revengefulness and moral deficiency - the normal female (who
was otherwise an "innocuous semi-criminal") could be transformed into a "born criminal" whose
propensities for evil were "more intense and more perverse" than those of male born criminals.
Moreover, the born female criminal was a double exception, since criminals were "an exception
among civilized people", and women criminals were "an exception among criminals", and, "as a
double exception, the criminal woman is consequently a monster. Her normal sister is kept in the
paths of virtue by many causes, such as maternity, piety [and] weakness; and when these counterinfluences fail, and a woman commits a crime, we may conclude that her wickedness must have
been enormous before it could triumph over so many obstacles"(C.Lombroso & W.Ferrero, The
Female Offender.)."

14

Christine E. RASCHE, 1974, Criminal Justice & Behavior 1.

"....in contrast to male patients [drug addicts], women who remained addicted after treatment
more often had a criminal record; and they had substantially more previous convictions at first
attendance than the women who responded to treatment.... A possible reason for this difference
may lie in sex differences in the aetiology of antisocial behaviour. Female delinquents are known
to deviate more from social and psychological norms than male delinquents (J.Cowie et al.,
Delinquency in Girls). Thus in female addicts a criminal record may indicate a more serious
degree of psychological maladjustment than in male addicts, and their maladjustment may be
reflected in their poorer response to treatment."
P.T.D'ORBAN, 1975, British Journal of Psychiatry 127.
"Meta-analysis shows men are] better on insight problems requiring restructuring; more dominant
and have a stronger, more 'potent' self-concept; more curious and exploring, more active and
more impulsive."
J.H.BLOCK, 1976, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 22.
"....females are more cynical than males."
P.WEINREICH, 1977, Bulletiln of the British Psychological Society 30.
"Factor analysis revealed four main types of fantasy [in a sample of Londoners stratified by sex
and social class]:
(1) Exploratory (e.g. group sex, promiscuity, homosexuality);
(2) Intimate (e.g. kissing, oral sex, outdoor love);
(3) Impersonal (e.g. watching others, fetishism, using objects
for stimulation);
(4) Sado-masochistic(e.g. whipping or spanking, being forced).
These four types of fantasy were positively correlated and were all more commonly reported by
men, although women were almost as high on the Intimacy factor. Women were also more likely
to be passive or receptive in their fantasies, and men active."
Glenn D. WILSON & Rudie J. LANG, 1981, Personality & Individual Differences 2.
"Z.Rubin et al. (1981, Sex Roles 7) found that men were more likely to endorse romantic ideas
about marriage, whereas women tended to be more pragmatic, often rating economic security as
highly as passion. (In another sense, women are probably more romantic than men, as witnessed
by the richness of romantic fiction for women: this, however, is related to fantasies concerning
relationships, and parallels the much greater male readership of pornographic literature."
Robert A. HINDE, 1987, Individuals, Relationships and Culture. Cambridge University Press.
"It is sometimes claimed about women (not proven, but claimed) that although they behave more
morally, they have a less rigid definition of moral sense. The rabbinical tradition of deciding what
is theoretically right and theoretically wrong is less meaningful to women than simple acts of
kindness."
Mary KENNY, 1982, The Spectator, 12 ii.
"One of Margaret Thatcher's greatest assets in politics has been her ability to remember faces and
names. It is a particularly feminine gift, and one that she has in abundance.... Margaret
remembers not only the face and the name, but also whether they have an arthritic knee, a house

15

with rising damp, or a daughter in South Africa."

Penny JUNOR, 1983, Margaret Thatcher: Wife, Mother,
Politician. London : Sidgwick & Jackson
"[Amongst Afro-Caribbean youth in Britain] so many girls are Christians and so many boys are
'sinnermen' as to make courtship rather difficult, a matter of heartaches and soul-searching."
Roy KERRIDGE, 1983, The Spectator, 24 ix.
"The female principle (which is not, of course, confined to women) does see deeper, feel more
widely."
P.J.KAVANAGH, 1983, The Spectator.
"....men are different, men quite often wonder whether they are doing the right thing and worry
about it; men have been known to blame themselves for behaving badly....to say they're sorry, and
ask to be forgiven, and promise not to do it again, and mean it. Think of that! Mean it! All beyond
female comprehension. Which incidentally is why they're not novelists and must never be
priests."
'Stanley' in Kingsley AMIS, 1984,
Stanley and the Women. London : Hutcheson.
"Many studies have shown how women like to form close relationships with equals but are less
able or willing to cope with hierarchical, structured groups engaged in joint tasks, and rarely
emerge as the leaders of such groups." Michael ARGYLE, 1984,
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 37.
"[The two personality dimensions of] will (w) {or Independence / Disagreeableness} and
affection (a) {or Tender-mindedness / Idealism} both appear to allow contrasts along the
traditionally 'masculine versus feminine' lines of Osgood's 'Potency' dimension."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, Psychology Survey 5.
Leicester : British Psychological Society.
"The totally unselective nature of Diana's attention was indeed, as she sensed, a disability....
Diana's hyperconscious condition was apparent to [Mark], though mysterious [to him] since it
was in such colossal contrast to his own tendency towards almost exclusive concentration on one
thing. It was this capacity that enabled him to chop his time up into systematic thinking bouts, an
invaluable ability. Diana, who was incapable of mislaying a glove or forgetting the date, called
him absent-minded. Stupid, when she was in a bad temper. Which, of course, she knew quite well
he was not. She was herself, Mark considered, well above average intelligence but without
powers of elimination she was unable to concentrate this intelligence."
Penelope LIVELY, 1984, According to Mark. London : Heinemann.
"It is commonly thought that women are the romantics; their lives are said to be organized more
around love, while men are more concerned with work, money, and other activities. But here the
data contradict that common assumption. Hobart (1958) asked hundreds of men and women
questions about romance and found that men are much more likely to be romantics than women
are. Men fall in love faster and have a more romantic view of love relationships than women do.
In another study of the course of love in dating, 20 per cent of men fell in love before the fourth
date, while 15 per cent of women did. It is usually the woman who ends the affair, and the men

16

who suffer more (Walster, Walster & Traupman, 1978, J.Person. & Soc. Psychol.)."
R.ORNSTEIN, 1985, Psychology.
San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
"The correlations of sex with [three pain measures, taken as pressure was applied to the index
finger of the dominant hand] were significant and of [modest (r = .36)] magnitude, with men
giving lower pain ratings and showing greater pain tolerance than women on average."
Debora L. DUBREUIL & P. M. KOHN, 1986.
"Many studies have shown consistent differences in the social attitudes of men and women with
respect to factors like xenophobia, racism, tough-mindedness and punitiveness.... whether the
findings are the result of either gender socialization or socio-biological factors is unknowable at
this point." J.SIDANIUS et al., 1986, Journal of Social Psychology 126.
"Any consideration of female crime is a salutary experience for a man: as Barbara Wootton first
pointed out, if men behaved like women, the courts and prisons would be virtually empty."
B.INEICHEN, 1986, Biology & Society 3.
"These findings [of different patterns of attention by males and females in tests of fieldindependence] are consistent with the view that females are more willing to take in the whole
field and less willing to select out and focus on one aspect of it.... [Again, another author] argues
that [her finding on Kohlberg's tasks of moral reasoning] reflects a difference that boys tend to
see the situation as involving separate persons in conflict, whereas girls see it as persons
embedded in mutual relationships.... For the male [the approach to rationality] is a tendency
towards exclusion, focussing and linear logic; for the female it is a tendency towards inclusion,
broad scanning and synthesizing rather than analyzing. Now, we must be very careful about
seeing these as actual sex differences.... But what seems to be emerging tentatively from these
studies is the possibility of identifying two styles of dealing with the world...."
Helen WEINREICH-HASTE, 1986, in J.Harding,
Perspectives on Gender and Science. Lewes : Falmer Press.
"Men are very good at not seeing what they don't want to see, even on a simple level like the
washing-up pile in the sink."
Helen MIRREN (actress), 1986.
"[Our study] examined sex differences in self-efficacy, self-concept, belief in human
benevolence, religious belief and depression-proneness in 232 male and 248 female college
students. Results show sex differences only in belief in human benevolence."
Report of Psychological Abstracts 75, 1988, of S.Hong
& T.Grambower, 1986, Psychological Reports 59.
"....it took five years of extensive nationwide search to find 36 extremely mathematically talented
girls."
Camilla P. BENBOW, 1986, Neuropsychologia 24.
"Men are more sentimental than women; women are more emotional than men."
Richard BARBER (Editor of Women's Own), 1987,
BBC IV UK, 1 iv.

17

"....women are good at thinking about lots of things at once.... they have lots of antennae out."
Dr Janet MORGAN, interviewed by Caroline Phillips, 1987, The Times, 20 iv.
"It seems to me that women are a great deal less romantic than men."
Auberon WAUGH, 1987.
"Available statistics suggest that, while both women and men experience sexual harassment [in
universities], it is most often women who are harassed by men."
J.STOCKDALE, 1987,
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 40, A24.
"In societies ranging from Calgary in Canada, through Puerto Rico to Kenya, young girls'
[exploratory] movements tend to be far more restricted than those of young boys."
Reported in New Society 79, No. 1256, 23 i 1987.
"Content analysis of fantasies [reported by 4,767 readers of the British tabloid newspaper, The
Sun] revealed a male preoccupation with group sex and voyeurism, and a female concern for
committed partners and romantic settings.... typically 'female' was reference to exotic, romantic
settings such as islands, beaches, forests, fields, flowers, waterfalls, moonlight, space and heaven
(e.g. "My man making love to me on a quiet beach in the moonlight with waves lapping over
us"). The [usual sexual] partner was often present in these settings, and several women mentioned
freedom from distraction (e.g. from children or telephone) as an important aspect. Only 4% of
men's fantasies included romantic, exotic or secure settings [compared with 15% for females]."
Glenn D. WILSON, 1987, 'Male-female differences in sexual activity,
enjoyment and fantasies'. Personality & Individual Differences 8.
"Men are higher in dominance, rebelliousness and aggression - all power traits that concern
conflict and confrontation; but there are no gender differences for the more subtle power traits of
Machiavellianism and impression management. Women are higher in the prosocial traits of
altruism, nurturance, and succorance, probably because they are allowed to be more dependent
and are trained to offer help to others (Block, 1984, Sex Role Identity and Ego Development)."
A.H.BUSS & S.E.FINN, 1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52.
"When sex differences do appear [in response to environmental stress], they are often
inconsistent, complex, unreliable, and not particularly meaningful. Sex differences in response to
restrictions of physical space, however, are more reliable, with the typical pattern being that
males respond more negatively than females to both crowding and invasions of personal space."
T.C.GREENE & P.A.BELL, 1987, in M.A.Baker, Sex Differences in Human Performance.
Chichester : Wiley.
"The ratio of male to female offenders for all types of crime has been narrowing steadily during
the last few decades. But the fact remains that, today, about eighty per cent of crimes against
property are committed by men, as are ninety-five per cent of crimes involving violence."
Elizabeth STILL, 1988, Biology & Society 5, ix.
"Girls work and boys play."
Beatrice B. WHITING & Carolyn P. EDWARDS, 1988,

18

Children of Different Worlds: the Formation of Social Behavior. Harvard University Press.
"The [present] study indicates that the adolescent males, but not the females, tend to become
more romantic after enrolling for university studies."
J.L.PHILBRICK & C.J.STONES, 1988, 'Love attitudes in Black
South Africa'. The Psychological Record 38.
"Research indicates that males perceive people to be more interested in sex than do women, and
are less able than women to differentiate among liking, love and sexual involvement."
R.L.SHOTLAND & Jane M. CRAIG, 1988,
Social Psychology Quarterly 51.
"Any ninny of a man can dress up in funny clothes and be the impersonal mediator between God
and the congregation. The impersonality makes it unimportant whether he is a ninny or not. But
the gift of the female principle is for the particular and the personal which is more subtle and
important."
P.J.KAVANAGH, 1988, The Spectator, 20 ii.
"Carol Gilligan {'Remapping the moral domain', Harvard University} has drawn a distinction
between typical male orientation to morality (based on rules and logic) and female orientation
(characterized by caring and responsibility). A prosocial value orientation and a morality of care
and responsibility, although not identical, have evident similiarities.... While moral rules arise to
serve human welfare, rules can be reified or held as absolutes, and at times the group rather than
the individual is made the focus of their concern. This makes it easier to exclude specific
individuals or subgroups from the universe of moral concern."
Ervin STAUB, 1989, The Roots of Evil. Cambridge University Press.
"[Colin Wilson's] The Misfits concentrates on sexual "outsiders" from de Sade to Percy Grainger.
lnterestingly, none of the misfits is a woman. Even Dr Charlotte Bach, whose theory that deviants
are more highly evolved triggered this book, pretty soon turns out to be Carl Jajdu sporting a pair
of foam rubber breasts under his suit."
Fiona PITT-KETHLEY, 1989, The Times (Review Section), 13 v.
"Women are on the whole more sensual than sexual. Men are more sexual than sensual."
Mai ZETTERLING, 1989, The Observer, 21 v.
"The figures so far (from a British survey) show that the average number of heterosexual partners
{claimed} of men in the course of a lifetime is 11.0 and of women 2.9."
John MADDOX, 1989, Nature 341, 21 ix.
"Men have always liked morality in the way they like tennis - once a year, and strictly as a
spectator sport."
'Girl', in a short play Julie BURCHILL, 1990, Sunday Times (Section G), 27 v.
"In the 1960's, a Californian organisation called the Sexual Freedom League predicted that, in the
next decade, women would use prostitutes as commonly as men did. They would masturbate to
pictures of well-hung young men and gather in cinemas, presumably with copies of
Cosmopolitan on their laps, to watch dirty movies.... Thirty years later, there is no evidence that

19

any sex industry aimed at women exists.... Playgirl's circulation is modest, about 50,000 - of
which a large proportion of "readers" are assumed to be gay men.... ....A counsellor who runs
men's groups told me of a couples session he led. The men and women were divided into two
groups and told to go away and come up with the one question they would most like to ask the
opposite gender. The women asked: "Why is it that when I try to get close to you, you act like I'm
trying to take something away from you?" The men asked: "How important is penis size?" This
awesome split between the emotional and the physical may be culturally determined and destined
to alter."
Linda GRANT, 1991, 'Why men want to do it their way'.
New Statesman & Society, 1 xi.
"One may assume that the sexes differ....in their selection of personality characteristics [in their
preferred mates] - males perhaps selecting for the livelier emotional expression associated with
youth and sociability, and females for the more restricted affective expression that goes with
ambition and success."
T.J.CROW, 1992, 'Sexual selection, Machiavellian intelligence,
and the origins of psychosis', The Lancet 342, 4 ix.
"....in the Islamic world today and among Islamic minorities in the
West, there is what Salman Rushdie has described as "Already Existing Islam"....[which] is
misogynous and strives to restrict women to a small, private space. It is obsessed with sex and
sexuality, especially that of women. Many imams consider women as objects of desire, lacking in
rationality. At critical points of discussion with some Muslim men, I have been confronted with
the following hadith: "Women are lacking in mind and religion.""
Fadia FAQIR, 1992, 'Unveiling paradise: Salman Rushdie and
Islam'. New Statesman & Society, 14 ii.
"....adult females have a consistent (albeit fairly small) advantage in decoding others' non-verbal
expressions of emotion when these are posed, expressed intentionally, or are expressed in
relatively less leaky channels {such as the face, which is less likely to provide unintendedly
information revealing a person's true emotional state}; [but] this advantage decreases or even
disappears when the non-verbal cues are spontaneous, expressed unintentionally, or are expressed
in relatively more leaky channels, such as the body or tone of voice. To what extent this pattern of
findings can be explained by invoking the argument that females are more non-verbally
"accommodating" {i.e. not "eavesdropping" on unintended cues} than males is open to question."
A.S.R.MANSTEAD, 1992, in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, Handbook of Individual Differences:
Biological perspectives. Chichester : Wiley.
"Women still spend more money on fashionable clothes than men. No wonder Freud asserted that
"all women are clothing fetishists". We have always been valued for how we look, rather than
what we are. In consequence, more women also study fashion than men. But male fashiondesigners get top billing at the international shows."
Lorrain GAMMAN, 1992, 'Hemlines and higher things'.
New Statesman & Society, 28 vi.
"Surely it's a well established if disheartening fact that gender drives an unassailable wall through
the nation's reading habits? As one of the characters in Alice Thomas Ellis's recent novel, Pillars
of Gold, opined: "I can't read books by men...They will go on about their willies and chopping

20

blondes to bits, and who cares?"

Tom SHONE, 1992, The Spectator, 11 vii.
"It is my experience [of children under the age of five] - in general, on average - that as soon as
they can socialise, boys form gangs and carry out violent fantasies, while girls, who in other ways
are as tough as their brothers, form alliances based on co-operation, and that their fantasies,
though equally imaginative, are less overtly violent."
Sean FRENCH, 1992, New Statesman & Society, 28 ii.
"....men and women are not alike. They have different sexual roles to perform....everything that
the Book (from which comes Judaism, Christianity, Islam) has to say about sex is wrong....The
male's function is to shoot semen as often as possible, while the female's function is to be shot
briefly by a male in order to fertilise an egg, which she will lay nine months later. Although there
is nothing anywhere in the male psyche that finds monogamy natural or normal (the scientific
search for monogamous, exclusively heterosexual mammals has been sadly given up, while our
feathery friends - those loving doves too - have let the natural lawyers down), the monogamous
concept is drilled into the male's head from birth because, in the absence of those original tribal
support systems that we discarded for the Book, someone must help the woman during gravidity
and the early years of baby rearing."
Gore VIDAL, 1992, 'Get gay and save the planet'.
New Statesman & Society, 14 viii.
"Generally [in a study of students in 20 countries], the men scored higher than the women did on
competitiveness, the valuation of money, and positive attitudes towards saving."
R.LYNN, 1993, Journal of Social Psychology 13.
"....an attractive man or woman confederate approached strangers of the opposite sex on a college
campus and posed one of three randomly selected questions:
"I have been noticing you around campus. I find you very attractive.
(a) Would you go out with me tonight?
(b) Would you come over to my apartment tonight?
(c) Would you go to bed with me tonight?"
Of the women approached for a date, roughly 50% consented;
of the women approached with an invitation to go back to the man's
apartment, only 6% consented; and
of the women approached with a request for sex, none consented.
Of the men approached, roughly 50% agreed to go out on a date
(same percentage as women),
69% agreed to go back to the woman's apartment, and
fully 75% agreed to go to bed with her that evening.
These findings have been replicated (R.D.Clark & E.Hatfield, 1989, J. Psychol. & Human
Sexuality 2) and appear to be robust."
D.M.BUSS & D.P.SCHMITT, 1993, 'Sexual strategies theory: an
evolutionary perspective on human mating'.
Psychological Review 100, 2, 204-232.
"[In data from tests administered nationally to 186,000 German late-adolescents], males and
females differed on their performance on g-loaded tests, with males scoring higher.... On every

21

one of the 20 samples, males showed approximately a .30 standard deviation advantage in g.
Females enjoyed approximately the same advantage in perceptual speed, and about twice that
advantage on the memory factor." D.N.JACKSON (Univ. Western Ontario), 1993 to 6th Meeting
of the Internat. Socy for the Study of Individual Differences, in Baltimore.
""It might seem," [writes Camille Paglia in the preface to Sexual Personae] "that a battle-scarred
veteran of the sex-wars, born with a personality so ill-suited to the prescribed sex role {she
became a "radical Amazon and bisexual" and "would love to molest young boys the way gay men
can"} would have the most grounds for complaint against society. But the opposite is true: my
noisy resistance to primary socialisation brought me full circle back to biology."
Her philosophical journey back to biology may be roughly summarised thus: once Paglia thought
there was no essential difference between men and women - only oppressive masculine and
feminine constructs. Now she believes there is a radical and irreducible difference, that the sexual
stereotypes reviled by feminism are natural truths. There is a tendency in man's nature to anger
and action, for example - and a tendency in woman's nature to stability and composure. "Most of
us inhabit not polar extremes, but a constantly shifting [grey] middle," she writes. "However, a
preponderance of grey does not disprove the existence of black and white.""
Zo Heller, 1993, Independent on Sunday, 17 i.
"[The historical novelist, Mary Renault] even believed, like Camille Paglia [the fashionable
American anti-feminist], that the male artist has "some extra reserve of neural strength."
Boyd TONKIN, 1993, New Statesman & Society, 26 iii."[The American modern artist, Georgia
O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986), adapted] the spiral forms of her early abstract charcoals into swirling
sunsets and cloud formations, into the labial curls of petunia trumpets and oriental poppies, and
the desert landscapes of Texas and New Mexico.... Certainly it would be possible to argue that
she helped perpetuate the myth of the female as more intuitively in touch with life's mysterious
forces, which would today be challenged by feminist critique. Yet she did give legitimacy to the
female experience of "being in the world". What she created was not a male observation of
female sexuality but what it feels like, from the inside, to be an open, receptive woman. With her
rigorous muscular animus she allowed her anima, literally, to flower."
Sue HUBBARD, 1993, New Statesman & Society, 16 iv.
"....toughness....is a female characteristic."
Anita BROOKNER, 1993, The Spectator, 24 vii.
"When self-report measures of dependence are used, the vast majority of studies investigating
differences in adult dependency have found higher levels in women than in men."
BORNSTEIN, R.F., 1993, Psychological Bulletin 112.
"Among....mathematically gifted 13-year olds, [sex] differences favour males in mathematical
reasoning ability, but not in verbal reasoning, where there are no [sex] differences. Our gifted
males score approximately one half of a standard deviation higher than females on the SAT-M,
our measure of mathematical reasoning. Males' SAT-M scores are also more dispersed {yielding
an upwardly shifted distribution of male scores (Benbow, 1988, Behav.& Brain Sci.11}. The
resulting proportion of males and females at age 13 at various cut-off scores on SAT-M is
approximately as follows:
> 500 (average score of college-bound 12th-grade [18-year-old] males): 2 : 1;
> 600 : 4 : 1;

22

> 700 (top 1 in 10,000 for 7th graders [13-year-olds] :13 : 1.

These ratios have remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, and have now been observed
among mathematically gifted students in the 3rd grade (8-year-olds), and cross-culturally (though
they are smaller in Asian populations)."
Camilla P. BENBOW & D.LUBINSKI, 1993, in Ciba Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins
and Development of High Ability.
Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.
"Large as some of the differences between the sexes on cognitive tests are, they are dwarfed by
the effect sizes on certain 'self-report' measures of values....{Effect sizes average .75s.d.} Recent
data from Iowa for bright 12- and 13-year-old boys and girls confirm the direction and
pervasiveness of such sex differences and of the huge difference in mechanical reasoning ability
favouring males even at this young age.... as judged by [the] unusual values inventory based on
the philosophical system of Spranger (1966), boys and young men seem oriented towards the
following three evaluative attitudes:
theoretical ('The dominant interest of the theoretical man [or woman] is the discovery of truth',
Allport et al., 1970, Manual for the Study of Values);
political (...interested primarily in power); and
economic (....interested in what is useful).
Girls and young women tend to be strongly:
aesthetic ({valuing} form and harmony);
social ('The highest value for this type is love of people'); and
religious ({valuing} unity....{seeking} to comprehend the cosmos as a whole....)."
J.C.STANLEY, 1993, in Ciba Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of
High Ability. Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.
"....in the villages of the Malagasay, [amongst] speakers of Mayotte, Lambek [1980, Amer.
Ethnologist] reported that 39% of the adult women and 8% of the adult men were considered to
be [spirit-]possessed.... When considering only women between the ages of 35 and 55 [in
Northern Sudan], Boddy (1988, Amer. Ethnologist] reported that 66.6% had experienced
possession."
N.P.SPANOS, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 116.
"Fifteen [cognitive ability] matrices based on a total of 96,968 males and 90,142 females
[applying to West German medical schools, 1981-1989] were factor analysed [and rotated to
orthogonal simple structure]. In all fifteen analyses, males scored {substantially - c. s.d.} higher
on the reasoning factor {e.g. 'quantitative and formal problems'; 'diagrams and tables'; 'medical
and scientific comprehension'(drawing conclusions from short texts on medical and scientific
topics)}; and females scored higher on the memory factor {'learning facts'(memorizing short
medical case histories)}.... Differences in memory in favour of females have been observed
before [e.g. Born et al., 1987, J.Cross-Cultural Psychol. 18], but these findings have not attracted
the attention of influential reviewers.... In our data, there was no support for the conclusion that
gender related differences in general reasoning ability or at least in mathematical reasoning
ability are declining (Feingold, 1988; Hyde et al., 1990; Linn, 1991). [However] there was a
slight decrease of gender-related differences on the memory factor."
H.STUMPF & D.N.JACKSON, 1994, Personality & Individual Differences 17.
"A recent edition of the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Reports (1991) showed that, in 1990, girls under

23

age 18 were responsible for approximately 72% fewer property offenses and 87% fewer violent
offenses than boys under 18.... victimisation surveys have corroborated the magnitude of the sex
difference found in arrest data."
H.YOSHIKAWA, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115.
"....[many] women writers and academics respond with distress and rage to [criticisms by
reviewers]....Negative reviews are received as blustering attacks, criticisms as bruising assaults.
One journalist tells me she prefers interviewing men, because women often phone her to
complain after the piece has appeared."
Celia KITZINGER, 1994, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 24 vi.
"Of course women get the itch now and again, we wouldn't be here as a race otherwise.... But
they are not, lucky, lucky, lucky things, for ever hungry, for ever desperate, for ever longing for
the base physical fact of getting their rocks off. I mean, the fact is, it's five in the afternoon and
I've already tossed myself off twice today."
'Ted Wallace' (a middle aged mysogynist), in Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus. London :
Hutchinson, 1994.
"There are no women among Roe's (1953) eminent scientists...or among members of the Royal
Society; none in a list of the leading mathematicians (Bell, 1965), and none would be found
among the 100 best known sculptors, painters or dramatists. Simonton (1992) found no women in
a list of the most famous 120 composers from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and
hardly any women among his scientists.... In 10,000 individuals randomly selected, there would
be five females, but 55 males with an IQ as high as [160]."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.

"Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet [and first wife of Voltaire], knew English, Italian, Latin and other
languages; and she loved and understood the arts, especially music. But her most particular
interests were in philosophy, mathematics and physics. With great diligence, she gathered and
studied the works, in various languages, of contemporary scientists. While not a scientist with
innovating power, she wrote a clear summary of Leibnizian ideas and made a creditable
translation of the whole of Newton's Principia into French. This translation appeared
posthumously with a preface in which Voltaire praised her supple intelligence and devotion to
science."
B-A. SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The Philosophers.
Oxford : Blackwell.
"[The English Ladies' Diary, an early eighteenth-century publication] announced that since ladies
seemed to prefer mathematics to cookery, the Diary would dedicate itself exclusively to enigmas
and arithmetical questions."
Londa SCHIEBINGER, 1990, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the
Origins of Modern Science. Harvard University Press.

24

"One of the most important German poets of the nineteenth century, Annette von DrosteHlshoff, was possessed of a pious nature which served to cover an intensity of emotional
conflict.... Characterized by a realistic preoccupation with detail, the fi
mness of her poetic art often affords a masculine touch, in contrast to the womanly element which
expresses a quiet, unpropagandistic at the limitations of feminine life."
Thesaurus of Book Digests, 1977. New York : Avenel.
"Most beloved by Hiawatha
Was the gentle Chibiabos,
He the best of all musicians,
He the sweetest of all singers.
Beautiful and childlike was he,
Brave as man is, soft as woman,
Pliant as a wand of willow,
Stately as a deer with antlers."
H.W.Longfellow, Hiawatha
- Section VI, 'Hiawatha's friends'.
"The enormous amount of data now available from intelligence tests, which are intended to test
native ability, affords little support for the view that there is any marked difference in general
mental ability between the sexes." Mary COLLINS and James DREVER, 1936, Psychology and
Practical Life. Bickely, Kent : University of London Press.
"Male criminals were considered to be atavistic throwbacks to an earlier stage of evolution....
Alas, similar analysis of female criminals revealed an incidence of atavism of only 14%.
Undeterred, Lombroso and Ferrero {see above} argued that this was because women were less
evolved than men and consequently were not capable of degenerating so far."
Anne CAMPBELL, 1982, in I.Al-Issa,
Gender and Psychopathology. New York : Academic.
"....the conventional wisdom that girls are better than boys at verbal tasks is not fully supported
by the present data.... Similarly, although boys tend to score more highly than girls on the Block
Design and Visualization of Cubes scales, they show no clear superiority on Rotation of Letterlike Forms. On the Matrices, yet another visually presented scale, it is the girls who have the
slightly higher scores."
C.D.ELLIOTT, 1983, Manual for the British Ability Scales.
Windsor : National Foundation for Educational Research.
"There are perhaps three ways in which the dualism of gender can be undermined: by the denial
of sex differences - the denial of dualism; by the redefinition of dualism as a dialectical
integration - like the Eastern concept of yin and yang, and the concept of androgyny as the
presence within all individuals of both masculine and feminine qualities; and by the affirmation
of a dualistic perspective but with a re-evaluation of the polarities. The present wave of feminist
thought has at different times used all three approaches."

25

Helen WEINREICH-HASTE, 1986, in J.Harding,

Perspectives on Gender and Science. Lewes : Falmer.
"He is a gentle man - pushed on by an intelligent, ambitious, articulate wife."
A sports commentator, talking about the British boxer,
Joe Bugner; BBC IV UK, 23 x 1987.
"....the typical male superiority on spatial tests is most evident in such tasks as space relations,
which depend on the ability to manipulate mental images; whereas females perform at least as
well as males on non-verbal visual imagery, symbolic size comparisons, and other tasks that
depend on the ability to retain or generate static images."
A.PAIVIO (University of Western Ontario), 1988, to 24th
International Congress of Psychology, Sydney (S600).
"Hyde and Linn (1988) carried out a meta-analysis....of gender differences in verbal ability....
....for the studies published after 1973, the [female superiority] was significantly smaller and
corresponded to only 10 per cent of the population standard deviation."
J.T.E.RICHARDSON, 1991, in R.H.Logie & M.Denis,
Mental Images in Human Cognition. Holland : Elsevier.
"It's not that females are not aggressive. History can attest to that; but I do not think that their
morality and general responsiveness is of an interpersonal nature, rather than suffused with rigid
absolutes that can dictate highly defensive responses." Joan OFFERMAN-ZUCKERBERG, 1991,
in J.Offerman-Zuckerberg,
Politics and Psychology. New York : Plenum.
"The International Encyclopaedia of Women Composers lists thousands of creators, all of them
active in some degree, most of them with some kind of public in their time? What happened to
the music of these women? It does not seem possible that none deserve more notice from history.
Along with the other new freedoms and respect gained by women in the middle of this century,
the incredible neglect of [women] composers has begun to turn round.... Nearly half the present
generation of younger composers are women. Still, only in 1983 did a woman finally receive the
Pullitzer Prize in music, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, for her Symphony No. 1."
Jan SWAFFORD, 1992, The New Guide to Classical Music. New York : Random House.
"The symbolic violence of chess may....explain why, until recently, the game had so little
attraction for women, who tend by nature to be eirenic.... However, things are changing. A 15year-old Hungarian genius, Judit Polgar, has beaten Boris Spassky in a match and achieved
grandmaster status."
Paul JOHNSON, 1993,The Spectator 6 iii.
"The evidence from a number of studies that up to 16 per cent of men report being coerced into
sex by a female acquaintance contradicts the notion of female sexuality as passive and inactive,
the notion of the male as always 'ready and eager for sex at every opportunity', and the notion that
men cannot be overpowered by physically weaker women."
Jane USSHER, 1994, British Journal of Psychology 85.
"It was not until 1994 that Richard Lynn (Person.&Indiv.Diffs.17) finally published an analysis

26

which managed to conclude that men are more intelligent than women after all."
{?Marekh KOHN, 1995, The Race Gallery. London : Cape.}
"Be honest with yourself. Women are never that hysterical. In my experience, they're intensely
realistic. We men are far more emotional."
'Crawford' in J.G.Ballard's Cocaine Nights, London, HarperCollins, 1996.}

""It might seem," [writes Camille Paglia in the preface to Sexual Personae] "that a battle-scarred
veteran of the sex-wars, born with a personality so ill-suited to the prescribed sex role {she
became a "radical Amazon and bisexual" and "would love to molest young boys the way gay men
can"} would have the most grounds for complaint against society. But the opposite is true: my
noisy resistance to primary socialisation brought me full circle back to biology."
Her philosophical journey back to biology may be roughly summarised thus: once Paglia thought
there was no essential difference between men and women - only oppressive masculine and
feminine constructs. Now she believes there is a radical and irreducible difference, that the sexual
stereotypes reviled by feminism are natural truths. There is a tendency in man's nature to anger
and action, for example - and a tendency in woman's nature to stability and composure. "Most of
us inhabit not polar extremes, but a constantly shifting [grey] middle," she writes. "However, a
preponderance of grey does not disprove the existence of black and white.""
Zo Heller, 1993, Independent on Sunday, 17 i.
"Margaret Atwood is unusual among feminist writers in that she holds the view - and propounds
it with some vigour - that women can be as wicked as men, and in addition that they can direct
that wickedness at each other.... The trouble is that this idea is beginning to rejoin much older and
more clichd novels in which the mouselike girl triumphs over the flame-haired temptress, much
relished by schoolgirls of all ages.... [In The Robber Bride ] we are in a world of women...., and
female stratagems are remorselessly described. Yet that original impression of powerlessness
remains."
Anita BROOKNER, 1993, The Spectator, 16 x.
"[Luce] Irigaray is one of France's best known feminist theorists. She has traced the ways in
which woman and the feminine have been silenced, devalued and effaced in human history and in
particular within its mythologies and intellectual discourses. She is an exponent of criture
feminine - poetic and elliptical writing which is often dialogic in form, evocative rather than
analytic in style, and seeks to recover the repressed feminine, the unacknowledged body, and to
give them a place within language. {She has written} an imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche in
which the feminine genre is represented in terms ot the metaphor of the sea; ....'Veiled Lips' is a
further engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy."
Nicola LACEY, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1175, 12 v.

(iii) Explaining sex differences?

27

Constitutional, evolutionary and physiological factors

"Women as a sex are more naturally akin to piety."
PYTHAGORAS, c. 532 B.C.
"Ancient Greeks believed in a condition called Wombiness, a hysteria caused by the womb
travelling round inside the body. It could affect the liver, or the head; it could even suffocate the
woman. It meant that woman was unreliable, untrustworthy. The best that could be done with her
was to insert a wool pessary twisted round a feather dipped in myrrh, or hold some burning goat's
horn under her nose."
Jane JAKEMAN, 1993, The Modern Review, x/xi.
"No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the sow, the
stallion from the mare.... Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition."
DARWIN, 1871, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex. London : Murray.
"Sadism is....nothing else than an excessive and monstrous pathological intensification of
phenomena....which accompany the psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males."
R. von KRAFFT-EBING, Psychopathia Sexualis.
New York : Paperback Library. Adaptation of 12th ed., 1965.
"[Our article, tracing the song of the male zebra finch to greater development of the left lobus
parolofactorius,] is the first report of a gross sexual dimorphism in a vertebrate brain."
F.NOTTEBOHM & A.P.ARNOLD, 1976, Science 194, 8 x.
"It is now well known that women are biologically somewhat less lateralized in brain function
than men. This means simply that psychological functions in women are not localized into one or
the other hemisphere of the brain to the same degree as in men. Mental abilities in women are
spread over both hemispheres. Even by age six, for example, a boy can recognize objects in his
left hand by feel alone better than in his right hand. In girls both hands are equal.... And it is
common knowledge that elderly men with a stroke or haemorrhage in the left hemisphere are
more speechless than elderly women with a similar diagnosis. Accordingly we might expect more
residual language function in the right hemisphere, making it easier for women to learn to be
oracles. And indeed the majority of oracles and Sibyls, at least in European cultures, were
women." Julian JAYNES, 1977 & 1990, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind. Chicago : Houghton Mifflin.
"With some cautionary remarks against overgeneralization, [Freud] nevertheless [states] that,
because of the virtually inevitable experience of early penis envy, women develop a number of
not altogether desirable psychological characteristics: they are more vain, compensating for their
early-discovered inferiority by over-valuing their beauty and externalities; they experience more
shame, which has the function of hiding the absence of a penis; they want to be loved rather than
love; they are less creative and have little sense of justice since their basic envy interferes; they

28

are weaker in their social interests and have less capacity for sublimation, are more rigid, age
earlier psychologically, and are less sincere as well as intellectually inferior."
Marie JAHODA, 1977, Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology.
London : Hogarth.
"Some of the traditional differences between men and women, such as their novelty drive, the
active versus receptive nature of their libidos, and the speed of their sexual response cycles, are
fundamentally built into their biology, and society is bound to accommodate them. It is no good
pretending that they do not exist."
E.O.WILSON, 1979, On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.
"A gene causing the index finger to be shorter than the ring finger is said to be dominant in men
but recessive in women, with the result that more women have longer forefingers than men. Since
this finger-length ratio varies considerably within sex, the possibility that it might relate to
masculinity-femininity of social behaviour in women was investigated. 985 women provided selfreports on the length of their fingers and their degree of assertiveness, without knowledge of the
hypothesized link. Women whose forefinger was shorter than their ring finger were more likely to
describe themselves as 'assertive and competitive'...."
Glenn D. WILSON, 1983, Personality & Individual Differences 4.
"....the greater variance of males on IQ tests has sometimes been suggested to be an artefact; but
the fact that on the evoked potential similar significant differences have been observed by the
Hendricksons suggests that this is a true biological difference which must be taken into account."
H.J.EYSENCK & P.BARRETT, 1984, in C.R.Reynolds & V.Wilson,
Methodological and Statistical Advances in the Study of
Individual Differences. New York : Plenum.
"In every society, human and animal, males do the fighting. This is not only because of their
greater physical strength, but it is due also to the most basic requirement of a species: survival of
the next generation. In a population of ten males and ten females, if nine females died in battle,
only two or three children could possibly be born to the group the next year.... So males are more
expendable."
R.E.ORNSTEIN, 1985, Psychology: the Study of Human
Experience. San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
"[One possible] endogenous type of explanation of sex differences in cognitive abilities [is] that
boys do better than girls on spatial or mathematical reasoning tasks because males exhibit greater
specialisation of their hemispheres."
Camilla P. BENBOW, 1986, Neuropsychologia 24.
"....neuroandrogenic factors [are] all but certainly responsible for much of the average sex
difference in (a) assertive erotic behavior and (b) status-related aggressive behavior, both in
humans and in most other mammals.... Certain drugs, known as progestins, were utilized to
prevent miscarriages in miscarriage-prone women, primarily during the 1940's and 1950's.
Eventually it became apparent that the drugs had androgen-mimicking properties.... despite
corrective surgery and subsequent rearing as normal females, most of the affected females exhibit
an unusually high level of assertiveness and aggression compared to females generally."
Lee ELLIS, 1986, 'Evidence of neuroandrogenic etiology of sex

29

roles from a combined analysis of human, nonhuman primate and

nonprimate mammalian studies'. Personality & Individual Differences 7.
"The double standard of [sexual] morality has long been characteristic of Western (and many
other societies).... it is surely related to the fact that a woman always knows that the baby inside
her is her own, but a man can be cuckolded. Thus males must ensure the fidelity of their mates;
but, provided the bond is maintained (and if risks of infection can be disregarded), females can
permit their males some sexual licence.... Thus it seems that there are many similarities between
the behaviour of man and women in close personal relationships as observed in Western society
and those that the evolutionary argument would predict our ancestors to have shown." Robert A.
HINDE, 1987, Individuals, Relationships and Culture. Cambridge University Press.
"Male sexual jealousy and the double standard can....probably be adequately explained as
adaptations for paternity assurance."
Janet L. LEONARD, 1989, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 12.
"According to our theory, complex combinations of genetic, hormonal, neurological and
environmental factors operating prior to birth largely determine what an individual's sexual
orientation will be, although the orientation itself awaits the onset of puberty to be activated, and
may not entirely stabilize until early adulthood. The involvement of learning, by and large, only
appears to alter how and when and where the orientation is expressed. For humans, the crucial
timing appears to be between the middle of the second month of gestation and about the middle
of the fifth month, during which time the hypothalamic-limbic regions of the male's nervous
system are permanently diverted away from their otherwise-destined female phenotype. Either
because of unusual features in the genetic programs that control the biochemical processes of
masculinization and feminization, or because of environmental interference with these
biochemical processes, sexual inversions [failures to differentiate neurologically, morphologically
and behaviourally according to one's genetic sex] of varying degrees occur fairly frequently.....
Despite surgical correction of the genitals at birth and rearing as females, longitudinal studies
have found that the behaviour patterns of persons with congenital adrenal hyperplasia tend to be
unusually masculine for females. Compared to most females, they are more apt to prefer
competitive sports, and are less likely to prefer playing with dolls and dressing in feminine
clothing. They also report fewer fantasies about romance and marriage."
Lee ELLIS & Ashley AMES, 1987, 'Neurohormonal functioning as sexual orientation: a theory of
homosexuality-heterosexuality'. Psychological Bulletin 101.
"Our research confirms for early adolescents [of both sexes] findings of clear personality
relations between testosterone and dimensions of personality [especially with self-ratings of
cynicism, dominance and originality]."
J.R.UDRY & L.M.TALBERT, 1988,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.
"Mice....can be artificially selected for aggressive behaviour, but, interestingly, [according to
F.Huntingford and A.Turner, Animal Conflict, Chapman & Hall] "aggression in females is not
enhanced in lines selected for male aggression, nor is the converse found."
M.POTTS, 1989, Biology & Society 6.
"[The right hemisphere, in men,] is highly developed for special functioning of the kind required

30

for astronomy, map-reading and tennis-playing, whereas in women it is more like a back-up to the
left."
G.WILSON, 1989, The Great Sex Divide.

"[Sex differences in innate mental constitution are] astonishingly small - far smaller than common
belief and common practice would lead us to expect."
Cyril BURT, 1912, cited by L.S.Hearnshaw,
Cyril Burt: Psychologist. New York : Cornell Univ. Press.
"Sex differences in cognitive ability have no biological or physiological base."
Tessa BLACKSTONE & Helen WEINREICH-HASTE, 1980, New Society.
"The malleability of gender as demonstrated by Money's work on hermaphrodites and the
adrenogenital syndrome has undermined the strength of a causal link between hormones and
gender-specific behaviour."
Helen WEINREICH-HASTE, 1983, British Journal of Psychology 74.
"The counterpart to the myth that male domination and the social structure of the patriarchy are
given by male hormones is that is female hormones that produce the nurturative, mothering
activity of women - the mothering "instinct"."
S.ROSE, L.J.KAMIN & R.C.LEWONTIN, 1984,
Not in Our Genes. Harmondsworth, Mddx : Penguin.
"[Supporters of biologistic views] claim that the most up-to-date scientific knowledge has finally
uncovered the anatomical difference that separates them [women] from us [men] In the
nineteenth century, it was thought that the ovaries compete with the brain for developmental
energy. That turned out to be rubbish. Then it was claimed that women's brains were smaller than
men's. That is true, but not when corrected for body weight and, anyway, brain size in humans has
no correlation with mental ability. The latest fad is brain lateralization." R.C.LEWONTIN, 1985,
The New York Review of Books, 24 x. {For brain size x sex x intelligence, see Nature editorial, ix
1992 and subsequent correspondence.}
"Two cases of sexually motivated murder [both involving sexual excitation during the attack] are
described, committed by delinquents with low levels of testosterone in plasma: one a patient with
Klinefelter's [XXY] syndrome; the other a man after castration. Even a decreased level of
androgens, either primary or secondary, [does not provide] absolute prevention of sexually
aggressive behaviour." J.RABOCH et al., 1987, British Journal of Psychiatry 151.
"The social-cognitive processes [such as expectations and attributions] involved in interpersonal
judgements such as performance evaluations are clearly much more central to the construction
and maintenance of sex differences than are fixed traits....

31

The evidence of sex differences in emotionality is slight, especially when observational measures
are used in contrast to self-reports. It seems likely that the main sex difference with respect to
emotion is that many males are indeed less disposed to acknowledge publicly feelings which are
incongruent with traditional role images for their sex (J.Greenberg, 1985, J.Res.Personality 19). It
has also been pointed out that some tests contain fewer questions concerned directly with issues
that might be expected to be important to many men, such as anxiety in respect of work or
money."
Kevin DURKIN, 1987, in M.A.Baker, Sex Differences in Human
Performance. Chichester : Wiley.
"Human sociobiology claims [women] are, by nature, milder, softer, less intelligent/motivated
than men. To use a notorious term (of E.O.Wilson's, in his Sociobiology: the New Synthesis),
women are more given to "coyness" than men. Obviously, argue the philosophical critics, all of
this has more to do with the deep-seated prejudices of white, Anglo-Saxon, middle class,
academic males, than anything in the real world. Values-obnoxious values-are being read into the
record, and then read right back out again, as though they existed objectively."
M.RUSE, 1987/8 'Philosophy of biology today: a review'.
(Available from the author, University of Guelph, Canada.}
"It is now recognised that men and masculinity are no longer just 'natural': they are socially
produced and so have become problematic."
Publisher's announcement, 1988, for J.Hearn, The Gender of
Oppression: Men, Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism.
Brighton : Wheatsheaf.
"....the available research evidence indicates that the process of menstruation has no effect at all
upon academic performance when measured by quantitative tests or examinations, and it would
appear that subjective complaints of paramenstrual dysfunction originate largely in social
mediated beliefs and expectations rather in any objective intellectual impairment."
J.T.E.RICHARDSON, 1991, Journal of Higher Education 62.
"....Just So Stories are again proliferating wildly. A recent example is why the hour-glass shape in
women is an adaptive trait, determined by genes. Men select women with large hips and breasts
because these are indicators of reproductive potential, or at least men think they are.... You might
think I overheard this in a pub, but it is in fact advanced as a serious proposition by Matt Ridley
in The Red Queen following the original proposal by Low, Alexander and Noonan in Ethology &
Sociobiology. If this is science then Rudyard Kipling was a great scientist."
B.GOODWIN (Professor of Biology, Open University), 1995, Times Higher Educational
Supplement, 19 v, p.18.

"I am suggesting that the girl's experience with the unfocused, open, penetrable nature of her
genitalia creates difficulties in forming mental representations of her body that have clear
boundaries and sharp definition. Further, I suggest that this unfocused representation of the

32

genitals complicates the formation of ego boundaries and a firm sense of self, and contributes to
both the mental and body issues of which women complain: they describe mental 'fuzziness' in
trying to think, and complain of fluid body images (see H.Lerner, 1976, J.Am.Psychoanal.Assn
24)."
Doris BERNSTEIN, 1990, 'Female genital anxieties'.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 71.
"Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same. It keeps telling women they can do anything, go
anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No they can't! Women will always be in sexual
danger.... ....We must remedy social injustice whenever we can. But there are some things we
cannot change. There are sexual differences that are based in biology. Academic feminism is lost
in a fog of social constructionism. It believes we are totally the product of our environment. This
idea was invented by Rousseau. He was wrong. Emboldened by dumb French language theory,
academic feminists repeat the same hollow slogans over and over to each other. Their view of sex
is nave and prudish. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the
taxidermist's."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).
"Girls are likely to fear things [bedroom 'monsters, ghosts and nasties'] from down below,
principally "under the bed", whereas boys tend to be afraid of other nooks and crannies. Richard
Coss [Univ. California] claims in New Scientist that the difference harks back to our evolutionary
past when female hominids were supposedly more likely to sleep in trees and fear attack from
predators below. "Girls climb much more than boys in the playground and are injured far less,
suggesting they are more agile," he said.... Adult women today can spread and point their toes
more.... [during] a scary film, women are more likely to pull their legs up off the ground.... In a
study of identical twins, he has identified a genetic basis.... Other scientists, however....[say] the
theory seems rather far fetched."
Steve CONNOR (Science Correspondent), 1993, The Independent, c. viii.
"Meredith Small (1993, Female Choices) shows that in sexual activity and mate choice, females
and males may not be as different as has been commonly supposed. Robert Russell (1993, The
Lemurs's Legacy), on the other hand, constructs a multi-million-year divergent course for malefemale behaviour by imaginary ancestors.... In evolutionary reconstructions as in everyday life, it
remains difficult indeed to find neutral observers of the battle of the sexes."
Adrienne ZIHLMAN, 1993, Nature 364, 12 viii.
"[In Simon LeVay's work] the average size of the INAH 3 nucleus [of the hypothalamus] in the
[male] homosexual group and the women was less than half that of the heterosexual male
group.... LeVay's work draws strength from its antecedents, particularly studies in rats which
demonstrated the existence of a region in the hypothalamus that was different in males and
females. The difference is induced by male sexual hormones, acting around the time of birth.
This line of inquiry has led to the view that the default programme for the mammalian brain is
female: a female brain organisation will develop, unless male hormones modify it at the crucial
stage when it is particularly open to endocrine influence. Thomas Aquinas anticipated the idea
when he declared that a woman is a mas occasionatus: a man who has not reached his final
destination."
Marek KOHN, 1992, 'Sex and the brain'.

33

New Statesman & Society, 27 xi 92.

"For 99% of human evolutionary history, men faced the adaptive problem of hunting and women
of gathering - possible selective reasons for greater male upper body strength and spatial rotation
ability, and for greater female spatial location memory (I.Silverman & M.Eals, 1992, in J.Barkow
et al., The Adapted Mind, O.U.P.). Internal fertilization and gestation produced an adaptive
problem for men, but not for women, of uncertainty of parenthood. Cryptic or concealed
ovulation may have created the adaptive problem for men of {not} knowing when a female was
ovulating. The dual male mating strategy, seeking (a) short-term sex partners with little
investment and (b) long-term marriage partners with high investment, created for women an
adaptive problem of having to discern whether particular men saw them as temporary sex partners
or as potential spouses (Buss & Schmitt, 1993, Psychol. Rev.). Sex differences in mate
preferences (Buss, 1989, Behav. & Brain Sciences; Kenrick & Reefe, 1993, B. & B. S.), courting
strategies, and sexual fantasies (Ellis & Symons, 1990, J. Sex Res.) correspond remarkably well
to these sex-linked adaptive problems."
W.T.DeKAY & D.M.BUSS, 1992,
Current Directions in Psychological Science 1.
"The data of all our studies corresponded closely to predictions from the hunter-gatherer model of
spatial sex differences and consistently demonstrated a greater capacity by females to remember
spatial configurations of objects. Females outperformed males in memory for both frequencies
and locations of objects, in both incidental and directed learning paradigmes.... It is often a topic
of humor that the male partner is dependent on the female for locating items in the household,
which is ascribed in the conventional wisdom to the greater role of the female in domestic
matters. It appears, however, that this capacity is a manifestation of a global, female perceptual
trait. Further, our developmental data suggested that the emergence of this trait coincides with
puberty...."
I.SILVERMAN & Marion EALS, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, Leda Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted
Mind. New York : Oxford University Press.
"Women have overall only 400 ova to play with, and have to spend lengthy periods of time
carrying and caring for their babies. Men have millions of sperm to dispense each time they mate.
Thus males and females are inexorably driven to the opposite poles of the r/K reproductive
strategies dimension. People and animals high in K are longer-lived, more altruistic and sexually
restrained; they husband their sexual resources, having few offspring but caring for them. Those
following the r strategy "cast their bread upon the waters", i.e. spread their semen widely, leaving
care of the offspring to others, if any care is given at all....D.Buss (1993, The Evolution of Desire,
New York, Basic) does not use these concepts, but argues independently for very similar
relationships."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1994, Personality & Individual Differences 17.
"....asked whether or not two nonsense words rhymed, there was a dramatic difference between
the sexes [Bennett Shaywitz and his Yale team, using MRI scanes, report in Nature]. In men, the
rhyming task was dealt with by....the left inferior frontal gyrus. In women, the corresponding
structure on the right hand side of the brain was also involved....This is the first convincing
evidence that men and women process language differently."
P.ALDHOUS, 1995, New Scientist, No. 1965, 18 ii.

34

"Although controversy exists about the magnitude of the sex difference in spatial ability under
various testing conditions, reviews by Pool (1994, Eve's Rib) and Voyer et al. (1995,
Psychol.Bull.117) show that on the "purest" spatial measures, such as rotating an imaginary
object, or shooting at a moving rather than a stationary target, the sex difference approaches one
standard deviation. Thus, Ankney (1992, Intelligence 16; 1995, Person.&Indiv.Diffs.18)
hypothesized, the sex difference in brain size relates to those intellectual abilities at which men
excel - i.e. spatial and mathematical abilities require more "brain power." Analogously, whereas
increasing word processing power in a computer requires some extra capacity, increasing 3dimensional processsing, as in graphics, requires a major increase in capacity."
J.P.RUSHTON & C.D.ANKNEY, 1996, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Social factors
"....the Mental Inferiority which we ascribe to our Women may be wholly due to the habits of our
Nation, which do not allow to Women the same Mental Exercise as Men."
R.T.TRALL, 1901, Sexual Physiology: a Scientific and Popular
Exposition. New York.
"The exclusive devotion of women to domestic pursuits robs the arts and sciences of a large
fraction of the genius that might otherwise be dedicated to them. My data strongly suggest that
this loss must be debited to motivational causes and to limitations of opportunity rather than to
lack of ability."
Lewis M. TERMAN, 1940, Psychological Approaches to the Biography
of Genius. London : The Eugenics Society & Hamish Hamilton.
"Margaret Mead [1953, Growing Up in New Guinea] discovered that each of the three New
Guinea societies she studied had conceptions of appropriate temperament for each sex, but that
these did not accord with the American pattern. The mountain-dwelling Arapesh saw little
difference in the temperament of men and women; both were expected to behave in what we
might consider a "feminine" manner - emotionally warm, nurturant, and peaceful. The
Mundugumor of the Sepik River also saw little difference between male and female
temperaments, but their ideal person (of either sex) was aloof and aggressive. Finally, the lakeliving Tchambuli did recognize temperamental differences linked to gender, but these were quite
the reverse of the American pattern: the ideal women were energetic, assertive traders, whereas
Tchambuli men stayed home, occupying themselves with domestic tasks and engaging in gossip,
personal decoration, and artistic endeavours!"
Philip K. BROCK, 1980, Rethinking Psychological Anthropology.
New York : W.H.Freeman.
"According to Chodorow (1978, The Reproduction of Mothering), female children develop other
personality characteristics than do male children. Crucial in the process of gender differentiation
is the fact that children of both sexes in the Western culture experience their primary relationship

35

with a woman: their mother.... Boys are forced to turn away from the mother earlier. Furthermore,
they have to identify with their father.... The early tendency towards denial of attachment and the
rejection of femininity is said to lead to a masculine personality characterized by autonomy,
strong ego boundaries, and a preparation for participation in non-relational spheres. The girls'
early relational experiences contribute to a great potential of and need for functioning in
relationships.... In Chodorow's perspective, the gender roles will change when the exclusive
mothering by women has been replaced by a joint parenting by women and men."
Marrie H. J. BEKKER, 1993, European Journal of Personality 7.
"Margaret Mead [1953, Growing Up in New Guinea] discovered that each of the three New
Guinea societies she studied had conceptions of appropriate temperament for each sex, but that
these did not accord with the American pattern. The mountain-dwelling Arapesh saw little
difference in the temperament of men and women; both were expected to behave in what we
might consider a "feminine" manner - emotionally warm, nurturant, and peaceful. The
Mundugumor of the Sepik River also saw little difference between male and female
temperaments, but their ideal person (of either sex) was aloof and aggressive. Finally, the lakeliving Tchambuli did recognize temperamental differences linked to gender, but these were quite
the reverse of the American pattern: the ideal women were energetic, assertive traders, whereas
Tchambuli men stayed home, occupying themselves with domestic tasks and engaging in gossip,
personal decoration, and artistic endeavours!" Philip K. BROCK, 1980, Rethinking Psychological
Anthropology. New York : W.H.Freeman.
"Only people of bad faith can maintain that men and women do not resemble each other more and
more [across successive decades]."
Elizabeth BADINTER, 1986, interviewed in
La Stampa (Tuttolibri), 26 vii.
"I think some of the [gender] differences that existed in the past are beginning to disappear.... We
control our biology; now the differences are social."
Mrs Edwina CURRIE (U.K. Junior Minister for Health), 1987. BBC IV UK, 1 iv.
""Gender" marks the sociocultural distinction between men and women on the basis of the traits
and behaviour that are conventionally regarded as characteristic of and appropriate to the two
groups of people. Feminist theory argues that gender is a social construction which is linked by
society to each sex in a wholly arbitrary way and which is learned quite independently of the
underlying biological information (e.g. Humm, 1989, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory)."
J.T.E.RICHARDSON, 1991, in R.H.Logie & M.Denis,
Mental Images in Human Cognition. Holland : Elsevier.
"....there are higher rates of mental illness for married women as compared to married men, while
the reverse is true for single men and women."
Susan LLEWELYN, 1982.
"Free Men {a generic term for "proud man-lovers"} say a shorter lifespan is a sex role
assignment. Men live, on the average, eight fewer years than women, die from heart attacks, lung
cancer and stress related diseases at much higher rates, are murdered at a three-to-one clip, and
are the only sex drafted in wartime."
Craig CARTER, 1990, 'Rights of manhood'. Coast Weekly, 14 vi.

36

"In the early 1980's research into gender differences that was informed by feminist values made
new statements about how women viewed reality and how they drew conclusions about truth,
knowledge and authority (e.g. Clinchy & Zimmerman, 1982; Gilligan, 1982).... Being 'carefocused' thinkers, [Gilligan et al. argued (1988)], young women are typically resistant to
detachment and disconnection in adolescence and during the transition to adulthood."
J.T.E.RICHARDSON, 1991, Educational Psychology 11.
"....evidence in the literature shows a higher continuity from aggression [in childhood] to
antisocial behaviour [in adolescence and beyond] for men than for women. Female career
development is also more easily influenced by current life tasks, such as child birth, than male
career development."
L. PULKKINEN, 1992,
European Journal of Personality 6, 2.
"There has been widespread empirical support for Trivers' {e.g. 1985, Social Evolution} theory of
parental investment and sexual selection across dozens of species. Among mammals, for
example, females typically invest more heavily than do males in offspring, and in hundreds of
mammalian species, it has been documented that females are more selective, whereas males
compete more vigorously in intrasexual competition....An even more compelling empirical test
came with the discovery of several sex-role-reversed species (e.g. Mormon cricket, Panamanian
poison-arrow frog, and several species in the pipefish seahorse family) in which males were
observed to invest more in offspring than did the females. In these species, females are often
larger than males, and they compete more aggressively with each other for access to the more
choosy, heavily investing males.
D.M.BUSS & D.P.SCHMITT, 1993, 'Sexual strategies theory: an
evolutionary perspective on human mating'.
Psychological Review 100, 2, 204-232.
"The !Kung Bushmen live in a relatively inhospitable desert environment which favours a social
framework based on co-operative hunting, sharing of meat, and a nuclear family unit.
Consequently the personal characteristics adapted to this environment and lifestyle consist of
good hunting skills, reliable reciprocation of altruistic acts, careful mate choosing and high
parental investment in offspring. In contrast, the Mundurucu are low-intensity tropical gardeners
living in a relatively richer ecological niche which allows the women to carry out most of the
food production. This frees males to engage in male-male competitive interactions centred around
talking politics, planning raids and warfare, gossiping, fighting, elaborate male ritual ceremonies
and occasionally, hunting game which will be traded for sex with the village women. Personal
characteristics of the successful male Mundurucu in this competitive society in consequence
consist of good verbal skills for political oratory, fearlessness, bluff and bravado, and the ability
to manipulate and deceive prospective mates concerning the resources he can offer.
The argument put forward by Harpending and Draper (1988) is that the nature of the Mundrucu's
social environment favours the expression of what they term the "antisocial trait". In males this
takes the form of sociopathy, characterized by lack of conscience, superficial charm, high verbal
skills, promiscuity, and lack of long-term interpersonal bonds. Conversely, this antisocial trait is
disadvantageous in the milieu of the !Kung Bushmen which demands high male parental effort
and reciprocal altruism."
A.RAINE & P.H.VENABLES, 1992, 'Antisocial behaviour',

37

in A.Gale & M.W.Eysenck, Handbook of Individual Differences.

Chichester : Wiley.

"Explanations....that see the differentiated conditioning and socialization of males and females as
being of primary causal importance fail because they do not explain, but merely beg the question.
The question becomes, 'Why do all societies socialize males towards greater dominance
behaviour?"
Steven GOLDBERG, 1973, The Inevitability of Patriarchy.
New York : William Morrow & Co.
"It is of course possible that socialization may not provide a full explanation [of sex differences in
empathy]."
M.L.HOFFMAN, 1977, Psychological Bulletin 84.
"Women are found to have higher rates of [psychiatric] symptoms than men in all marital status
categories."
Jennifer WILLIAMS, 1984, Psychology Survey 5.
Leicester : British Psychological Society.
"It is probable that, from childhood on, females begin to demonstrate higher Neuroticism scores
than males.... To judge from opinions on the effect of marriage on women (J.Bernard, 1971, The
Future of Marriage) it could be expected that already high female Neuroticism scores would
become even higher after marriage. Our study suggests this does not occur; and that, in fact,
wives' scores appear to fall after marriage.... male scores change little over 40 years of marriage
in this cross-sectional study, [while] female scores decline noticeably until they are equal to those
of males."
P.MOFFITT et al., 1985,
Personality & Individual Differences 6.
"For R.C.Lewontin, the essential nature of sex differences in academia is one of social power....
To have power, like riches and lovers, one has to want it, work for it and strive to maintain it. To
do so involves mental functioning, and mental functioning depends on brain functioning. Perhaps
women strive less for power because it is less reinforcing for them for biological reasons.... It
seems unlikely to me that society could be so remarkably successful in teaching a large majority
of women to shun power, to achieve only so far in mathematics, and yet prove so ineffective in
achieving other broadly accepted moral and educational aims."
Sandra F. WITELSON, 1985, New York Review of Books, 24 x.
"Most likely, biological and social factors have in the past worked in unison to overcome the
natural diversity to be found within each sex; society has tended to insist on men and women
playing roles that they were in any case pre-disposed to play by virtue of their biological nature."
` H.J.EYSENCK, 1982, in I.Al-Issa, Gender and Psychopathology. New York : Academic.
"Social learning theorists who maintain that sex differences in social behaviour are
environmentally based would have difficulty in explaining why one-to-three-day old female

38

babies engage in more eye-contact than males of the same age, or why little girls born blind adopt
facial flirtation patterns."
Glenn WILSON, 1987, reviewing G.Collier, Emotional Expression.
Personality & Individual Differences 8.
"The Chambri, of Papua New Guinea, are well known as being the 'Tchambuli' of Margaret
Mead's influential work, Sex and Temperament', in which she describes them as a people among
whom, in contrast to Western society, women dominated over men. In Cultural Alternatives and
a Feminist Anthropology, however, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz re-analyse Mead's
data, and present original material of their own, to reveal that Mead misinterpreted the Chambri
situation, and that in fact Chambri women neither dominate Chambri men, nor vice versa."
Publisher's announcement, 1989. Cambridge University Press.
""Analytic" ability....was supposed to be reflected in the style or trait described as "field
independence", the extent to which an individual's perceptions are independent of environmental
cues. This is paradigmatically measured by the Rod and Frame Test (RFT), in which the subject
{must align to the true vertical} a moveable luminous rod contained in a {tilted} square,
luminous frame in an otherwise dark room.... Sherman (1978)....noted that the performance of
female subjects on the RFT might be disrupted by their unease at being tested by a male
experimenter under conditions of nearly total darkness. Indeed, she implied that there were
anecdotal reports of actual sexual harrassment {sic} in such circumstances [where, even] after the
removal of the [initial] blindfold, the subject is required to sit with eyes closed for periods of up
to 1 minute between successive trials....However, Bogo et al. (1970) found that men were
significantly more field independent than women even on the portable RFT."
J.T.E.RICHARDSON, 1991, in R.H.Logie & M.Denis,
Mental Images in Human Cognition. Holland : Elsevier.
"Despite decades of feminist agitation, men and women's roles remain pretty distinct all around
the world. This may well reflect not so much deliberate repression by men as a fundamental
difference in biology."
Chris BUTLER (Conservative M.P., 1987-1992), 1992,
Laissez-Faire 1, 4.

Emollient proposals
"Everyone bears within him an image of women, inherited from his mother: it determines his
attitude towards women as a whole, whether to honour, despise, or remain generally indifferent to
them."
Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits.
New York : Russell & Russell, 1964.
"Sex differences in adult dominance emotion are perhaps, on the whole, less pronounced than are

39

sex differences in the dominance responses of children and adolescents. Women are now engaged
more and more extensively in business and sports, The emotional training which they thus receive
tends, apparently, to enhance their dominance emotion and to place it more nearly on a par with
that of men...."
W.M.MARSTON, 1928, Emotions of Normal People.
London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co.
"Look at the women aviators, they are marvelous, as good as men....{In painting} in time women
might equal men in every sense; they might very well do so. A woman must merely lead a life
devoted to painting; that is all that is necessary, provided she has the gift."
Henri Matisse, reported by Dorothy Dudley, 1933-4, Hound & Horn.
New York : Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1966.
"Even that apostle of feminists, Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledged that no genius was to be
found among women. For her, 'the individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are
honoured by the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in
their personal existences, and no woman has believed herself authorized to do this'. De Beauvoir,
of course, did not consider that this shortcoming came from women's subordinate status in the
order of creation. She ascribed it to the general mediocrity of their situation'...."
Piers Paul REID, 1987, 'Sex and sin'. The Spectator 258, 4 iv.
"Yes, of course there are sex-related group differences, primarily favoring males in selected
spatial and mathematical skills; but are they important?... The reliably found differences in [these]
skills have not yet had any impact on human factors in applied systems design requiring cognitive
skills. The reasons may be due to the smallness of those differences or to the fact that most
individuals can learn strategies appropriate to task demands, given the proper training. The STS-7
six-day mission for the orbiter Challenger was an unqualified success. NASA makes no mention
of sex-related differences in cognition in its mission report (1983)."
Nancy S. ANDERSON, 1987, in M.A.Baker, Sex Differences in
Human Performance. Chichester : Wiley.
"....evidence in the literature shows a higher continuity from aggression [in childhood] to
antisocial behaviour [in adolescence and beyond] for men than for women. Female career
development is also more easily influenced by current life tasks, such as child birth, than male
career development."
L. PULKKINEN, 1992, European Journal of Personality 6, 2.
"The large, erectile clitoris of a female spotted hyena closely resembles a male's penis. Much like
many male animals, female spotted hyenas use their clitorises in greeting displays and in
dominance interactions.... Female cows commonly mount other females, a practice that seems to
help synchronize the reproductive cycle of the herd.... Even though embryonic hormones direct
neuronal development, it seems that the brain never completely loses the dual neural circuitry that
permits both homotypical and heterotypical sexual behaviour."
D.CREWS, 1994, 'Animal sexuality'. Scientific American 270.
"Testicular androgens secreted by the fetus direct development of a penis and, afer birth, virtually
everyone that interacts with that individual wil note that the has a penis and will in many
instances behave differerntly than if the individual were a female.... I find it impossible to classify

40

this chain of events as either purely social or purely biological."

S.M.BREEDLOVE, 1994, Annual Review of Psychology 45.
"Much research has emphasized the presence of sex differences in visuo-spatial processes while
neglecting individual differences in performance within the two sexes.... With the Group
Embedded Figures Test [on 176 'A' Level students], gender trait measures [of Masculinity] were
the only significant variables in differentiating performance."
C.J.HAMILTON, 1995, 'Beyond sex differences in visuo-spatial processing: the impact of gender
trait possession.'
British Journal of Psychology.

(iv) Women's Liberation?

Favourable considerations
"The ogles, the sighs, the love-tales, the encomiums on her beauty, and the fulsome compliments
[the young girl]....is eternally pestered with, decoy her unawares into placing all her happiness in
being admired, and contribute to fill her mind with vanity and impertinence."
'Sophia' (an eighteenth-century 'rational feminist'), quoted
by Angela Smallwood, Times Literary Supplement, 23-29 ix.
"Woman is born free and her rights are the same as those of a man....The law must be an
expression of the general will; all citizens, men and women alike, must participate in making
it....it must be the same for all....All citizens, be they men or women, being equal in its eyes, must
be equally eligible for all public offices, positions and jobs, according to their capacity and
without any other criteria than those of their virtues and talents."
Olympe de GOUGES, 1791,
Declaration des Droits de la Femme et la Citoyenne. Paris.
"[The marriage of the composers Robert and Clara Schumann was] a thoroughly modern, doubleincome marriage in which two creative spirits struggle to tame their wildness into tidy domestic
bliss, yet still produce the artistic good. Despite her best intentions, the wife quickly finds herself
subjugated to her spouse, shoring up his genius, sewing on his buttons and keeping her own
ambition safely tethered. He, in turn, admires her talent - he is by no means all brute - but actively
nurtures it only when the money runs out."
Fiona MADDOCKS, 1994, The Spectator, 9 iv. (Reviewing The Marriage Diaries of Robert and
Clara Schumann.)
"The wealth of a man consists of his cattle and his daughters, equally available as so much stock
for sale to the highest bidder; and the more wives he owns, still taking fresh girls or young
women into his household, if he be rich enough, to the end of his life, the more daughters he
expects to rear, and to sell for more cattle. This is truly patriarchal, and not less abominable, as I
am sure my fair readers will agree; but it is simply the truth about the Zulus and many other

41

Kaffirs and African nations."

Thomas J. LUCAS, 1879, The Zulus and the British Frontiers.
London : Chapman & Hall.
"There can be no mating between the spiritually developed women of this new day and men who,
in thought and conduct with regard to sex matters, are their inferiors."
Christabel PANKHURST, 1913. Quoted in S.Jeffreys,
1982 Women's Studies International Forum 5.
"Adolescent girls and very young women are pre-empting the spot light of publicity in national
sports contests to nearly as great a degree as adult murderesses, mistresses of kings, and other
notable female characters pre-empted it in former generations.... ....There is sound psychological
ground....for requiring the male to share equally, at least, in the home work and the care of
children." W.M.MARSTON, 1928, Emotions of Normal People. London : Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co.
"Female development can be defined as permanent frustration."
E.G.BELOTTI (an Italian feminist), 1975, Little Girls. 14,
Talacre Road, London : Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op.
"Truly, it felt like Year One....all that was holy was in the process of being profaned....I can date
to that time....and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer
of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of
my 'femininity' was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real
thing.... ....The whole idea {of VIRAGO Press} is very tentative at the moment {c. 1977}.... I
suppose I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position
to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite
prose though it might contain. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS
would be more like it, I should hope.)"
Angela CARTER. Quoted by Lorna Sage, 1992, Granta 41: Biography.
"All domination in recorded history up to date has been patriarchal domination, so if we should
live to see not only equality of women before the law but the deployment of what may be called
the specifically feminine qualities throughout society - for example, non-violence, emotional
capacity, receptivity - this would indeed be, or could be, the beginning of a qualitatively different
society, the very antithesis of male domination with its violent and brutal character. Now I am
perfectly conscious of the fact that specifically feminine qualities are socially conditioned."
Herbert Marcuse, 1978, in televised discussion.
Bryan MAGEE, Men of Ideas. Oxford University Press.
"Lesbianism is a necessary political choice, part of the tactics of our struggle, not a passport to
paradise."
Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981,
in Love Your Enemy. London : Onlywomen Press.
"Much of family therapy is based on the notion that it is important for a man to regain control
wife and family."
Susan LLELWELYN, 1982.

42

"....it is important to examine and analyse the processes by which women come to provide so
much care for able-bodied adults - namely husbands. This can offer material insight into the
meaning and benefits of patriarchy."
Hilary LAND, 1987, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 13 iii.
"People like the Parents Right Group say that us lezzies are bent on destroying family life and
society as we know it. Oh-so-liberal lefties say, "Oh no, lesbians are good law-abiding citizens,
they don't do those things." But we say FUCKING RIGHT we want to destroy the nuclear family,
male power and the capitalist state. We're not as nice as our "defenders" would like us to be....
Beside all that political stuff, women are a lot better-looking, more interesting to talk with, and
more fun in bed. If you don't believe this, maybe you haven't met the right woman!!...."
'Feminaxe', 1987, inset to Monochrome, No. 18. London : Endopress.
"....the [Olympic] sex test obliquely tells women that they are second-class citizens in
Sportsworld, and that there is something worrying, something suspicious, perhaps even unnatural,
about women doing well at sport.... Would the roughly ten per cent difference between the male
and female record [for running the 100 metres] be diminished,....be overcome, if women didn't
have that psychological worry [that their femininity might come under suspicion]...?"
Adrianne BLUE, 1987, 'Are women scared to run faster?"
New Statesman 114, 30 x.
"[Women, Violence and Social Control, edited by Jalna Hamner and Mary Maynard] underlines
the importance of male violence in the subordination of women. The chapters display the
hierarchical nature of a society where gender stratification is fundamental and violence and its
threat play a major role in the social control of women."
Publisher's announcement, 1988. London : Macmillan.
"[Sex and the Superego: Psychic War in Men and Women, by Helen Day Lewis] makes
connections between symptoms of paranoia and depression and our culture's stereotypical
caricatures of men and women. Psychoanalytic insights reveal the role of shame in women's
depression and the role of guilt in men's paranoia. Free of technical jargon, this book deepens
Freudian, Marxist and feminist critiques of the exploitive elements of our society."
Publisher's announcement, 1988.
Hove, East Sussex : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates / Ablex.
"[Female circumcision], which involves the amputation of all the external female sex organs,
bears no relation to the removal of the male foreskin. The operation on women's genitals that
spread so widely through the Middle East in the wake of Islam and on down through Africa,
where it continues to this day, is so appalling that its survival can only be explained by a general,
total ignorance.... ....The facts are these. In a private ceremony of women, the traditional female
practitioner or 'circumcisor', chanting 'Allah is great and Muhammad is his prophet: may Allah
keep away all evils', operates on a girl child anywhere between the ages of five and eight, with a
sharpened stone, iron blade or piece of glass. In the first stage, the whole of the clitoris and its
sheath are cut away, then the labia minora are scraped off, followed by most of the inside flesh of
the labia majora. The flaps of skin that remain are then pulled together and pinned with thorns,
thus obliterating the vaginal opening except for a very small aperture kept open with a minute
splint of wood or a reed, to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. As the work

43

proceeds the mother and the other female guests 'verify' the work, putting their fingers into the
wound, along with the earth and ashes used to staunch the bleeding. When it is over the girl's legs
are tied together from hip to ankle for 40 days, to ensure that the stitched skin heals together and
will not reopen. Throughout all this, the child is held down by her female relatives and is fully
conscious. ....one French military doctor operated on a sixteen-year-old Djibouti girl to release
3.4 litres of black and decayed menstruum. ....[the stitching up] is deliberately designed to render
a woman quite unable to accept a penis. One authority described the ritual of the wedding night in
Somalia, when the husband, having beaten his wife with a leather whip, uses his knife to 'open'
her. He than has 'prolonged and repeated intercourse with her for the next three days'."
Rosalin MILES, 1988, The Women's History of the World
- or: The Phallusy of History. London : Michael Joseph.
"....The results of the present analysis [of data from 18 counties] show that the percentage of
females in the labor force in industrialized nations was a strong correlate (r = -.73) of suicide
rates."
D.LESTER, 1988, Journal of Social Psychology 128.
"It is quite clear to me that we should ordain women as soon as possible, and at practically any
cost."
The Right Reverend David JENKINS (Bishop of Durham), 1988,
quoted by R.Ingrams, The Observer, 26 ix.
"Among contemporary Anglican ordinands....established gender differences are radically
disturbed. [On Eysenck's Psychoticism, Extraversion and Neuroticism scales] female ordinands
record a characteristically masculine profile.... [and] a striking feature of the personality profile of
the male ordinands concerns their low scores on the Extraversion scale.... They are not the people
who would naturally choose to lead the dance, to knock on the door, to stand on the soap box, to
rally the crowds, or to draw attention to themselves."
L.J.FRANCIS, 1991, Personality & Individual Differences 12.
"The general consensus {according to the author's literature review} is that in a sexist society
such as ours it is highly improbable that anyone without special training in women's development,
issues and therapeutic needs could deliver adequate helping services to women."
Eileen T. NICKERSON (University of Boston), 1988, to 24th
International Congress of Psychology, in Sydney (F281).
"{A Berkshire Education Authority newsletter, proposing the merger of a girls-only school with a
nearby boys' school} does not grapple with available statistics which prove that girls often do
better at single sex schools. The cover photograph unwittingly depicts a class in which girl pupils
watch boy scientists perform experiments."
Sarah WILSON, 1989, New Statesman & Society.
"....most women in TV are hired by men according to whether or not they fancy them. The only
time you will see a baggy-eyed, grey-haired woman presenting a TV programme is when there is
a baggy-eyed, grey-haired woman in the Managing Director's office at a TV company."
Jayne Irving (TV presenter), 1989,
reported by Barbara Amiel, The Times, 13 x.

44

"HARARE: A man who beat his wife to death when she refused to prepare a meal has been fined
$250. The magistrate said she had been asking for trouble. A court in the Zimbabwe capital heard
that Laimon Chapusa, 56, and his wife were drinking at a beer hall when he ordered her to go
home and make food for their three children. When she refused he beat her with a stick. She died
shortly afterwards."
Reported in Sunday Times, 10 ix 1989.
"....according to Terman {in his classic study of gifted children}, while girls have higher scores
overall than boys, the boys 'are decidedly better in arithmetical reasoning, giving differences
between a president and a king, solving the form board, making change, reversing the hands of
the clock, finding similarities and solving the "induction test"'. The girls were 'superior in drawing
designs from memory, aesthetic comparison, comparing objects from memory, answering the
comprehension questions, repeating digits and sentences, tying a bow knot, and finding rhymes'.
It is fairly easy to see here that all of the characteristics for which boys are claimed to be better
provide justifications for patriarchy, while the tasks at which girls excel are the ones more
suitable for housework or secretarial work!"
John RUST and Susan GOLOMBOK, 1989,
Modern Psychometrics. London : Routledge.
"The conjunction of Lacanian-influenced psychoanalysis and feminist politics has led to major
disagreements among feminist theorists. In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by
Teresa Brennan (King's College, Cambridge) outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France and
the United States present new perspectives on feminism and psychoanalysis, opening out
deadlocked debates.... The contributors....write against the received views on 'French feminism'
and essentialism. They analyse the lack of a female symbolic. They re-read Freud for a different
theory of knowledge and set Lacan against Aristotle for an alternative account of social and
political causality. They rethink the role of Woman in Derrida's thought and psychoanalytic
critiques of it, and examine perverse sexuality amongst women."
Publisher's announcement, 1989.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
"[Language and Sexual Difference, by Susan Sellers of the Centre d'Etudes Feminines, University
of Paris] provides an introduction to contemporary French women theorists and writers who,
drawing on the theories of post-structuralist criticism and psychoanalysis, and exploring sexual
difference, set writing within a broad political framework linked to revised notions of femininity
and the sex-specific rhythms of the female body."
Publisher's announcement, 1989. Basingstoke : Macmillan.
"The world's most famous chess prodigy has much to celebrate in 1989.... Here is how she beat
Grandmaster [Glenn] Flear....
1.e4 e5 2.f5!?
What a choice of opening for the decisive last round game - the romantic nineteenth-century
favourite, the King's Gambit! Perhaps Judit [Polgar] was inspired to adopt it since her older sister,
Szofia, had beaten Glenn with it in Brussels in 1987.... The game clinched first prize for Judit in
the Challengers, ahead of England's own boy prodigy, 14-year-old Matthew Sadler, as clear
second."
Raymond KEANE, 1989, The Spectator 262, 14 ii.

45

"{We regard East Germany's new law providing for the military conscription of women} not as
an expression of their equal rights but as inherently contrary to their nature as women."
Letter of protest, signed by 300 people, to Erich Honecker,
General Secretary of East Germany's ruling Communist Party.
Quoted in R.Woods, 1990, Opposition in the G.D.R. under Honecker.
New York : St Martin's Press.
"[In the 1980's] New Right "pro-family" campaigners such as Barbara Lahaye and Connie
Marshner, who built high-powered political careers while ad
ocating women's return to domesticity, sent their kids to creches and relied on their husbands to
keep house. And anti-feminist guru Michael Levin, who believes men are innately superior at
maths, is married to a mathematical philosopher with whom he shares a strict child-minding rota.
The man who claims women are genetically programmed for housework waved Susan Faludi
[author of Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women] good-bye from his home wearing an
apron."
Julie WHEELWRIGHT, 1992, New Statesman & Society, 3 iv.
"Hannana Siddiqui is a member of Southall Black Sisters, an organisation that supports Asian
women facing domestic violence, and of Women Against Fundamentalism, a group set up in the
wake of the Rushdie affair. She says: "Women are being forced into arranged marriages,
homelessness and denial of education. The multiculturalists fail to intervene and support these
women. For them it is all part of a culture and religion which must be tolerated. And the antiracists allow this to continue because they see the fight against racism as the central struggle."
Julia BARD, 1992, New Statesman & Society, 1 v.
"We understand why [feminism has come to support abortion], but we do not intend to share this
ethic. Abortion is intended to free women, not from male oppression but from their children - as if
children are the enemy, which they are not. Central to the feminist ethic is the rejection of
biological determinism - the 'natural' superiority of men. Central to the pro-life ethic is the
primacy of inalienable human rights. Both ethics reject eugenic ideals, therefore
pro-life feminism is not a contradiction in terms but a consistent and reasonable philosophy."
Pauline CONNOR (founder-member of Feminists Against Eugenics),
1992. Quoted by Angela Kennedy, New Statesman & Society,
21 viii 1992.
"In most of the world, women have children as a consequence of the exercise of male sexual
desire.... 'How do you manage not to have children? Tell me, but it must be something I can do
[that] my husband cannot find out about' is a fair paraphrase of the burden of conversation of
these women in the Third World."
George LINES, 1994, The Spectator, 10 ix.
"A man in Albania bet his wife as a wager with another man on the outcome of the [Soccer World
Cup] Argentina match [in the USA]. He is very upset to have lost her, as he loved her very much.
Imagine how she feels!"
Classic F.M. Radio, U.K., 16 vii 1994.
"....there are many able women in the world today who are uneasy because they are not married

46

and having children.... But they are not suffliciently unhappy to marry unsatisfactory men, as they
would have done a generation ago.... This is the great force for change today: the growing selfconfidence of women in their capacities, their willingness to display this pride in practical ways,
the first stirrings of female triumphalism.... The Japanese....will leap-frog the West by enabling
women to jump directly from a posture of supine subservience to aggressive leadership.... The
21st century will be the age of Madame Butterfly - still beautiful, I hope, but no longer the victim,
more the perpetrator."
Paul JOHNSON, 1994, The Spectator, 10 ix.

Less agreeable considerations

"[Like his justification of slavery,] Aristotles's strictures against the political role of women also
rest on biological arguments. Since women have the "faculty of deliberation" only
"inconclusively", he maintained, they do not qualify for citizenship and must submit to rule by
men."
Alan GILBERT, 1990, Democratic Individuality. Cambridge University Press.
"I remember my mother, the day that we met
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But Mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance at somebody's bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me."
G.K.CHESTERTON, Songs of Education.
"Fads such as bobbed hair, rolled stockings, feminine smoking and general 'flapperism' are based
upon the desire to arouse the interest of the opposite sex." Floyd ALLPORT, 1924, Social
Psychology. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.
"....it has sometimes seemed to come about that, as it has lately been put, the emancipation of
women has merely meant an escape from one cage to another and drearier cage."
Havelock ELLIS, 1930, Man and Woman, 6th ed. London : A. & C. Black.
"It is never advisable to educate boys and girls as if they had precisely the same tasks ahead of
them. If we are to have skilful mothers, girls must be educated for motherhood and educated in
such a way that they like the prospect of being a mother, consider it a creative activity, and are not
disappointed by their role when they come to it in later life. Unfortunately our western culture
does not regard motherhood highly."
Alfred ADLER, 1931, What Life Could Mean to You.

47

Oxford : Oneworld Publications, 1992.

"Some men believe that women are irrational, illogical, incompetent, emotion-driven and
unreliable. Women's Lib sets out to disprove it by the spectacle of sloppy, bedraggled, unfocused
females stomping down the streets and chanting brief slogans, over and over again, with the
stuporous monotony of a jungle ritual and the sulkiness of a badly spoiled child. Denouncing
masculine oppression, Women's Lib screams protests against the policy of regarding women as
"sex objects" - through speakers who, too obviously, are in no such danger....Proclaiming
woman's independence from and equality with men, Women's Lib demands liberation from the
consequences of whatever sex life a woman might choose, such consequences to be borne by
others: it demands free abortions and free day nurseries. To be paid for by whom? - By men!"
Ayn RAND, 1971, The New Left. New York : Signet.
"Expanding women's rights are a long-term sociological accompaniment of the expanding
manpower needs of industrial society."
An analysis attributed to Raymond Aron, circa 1970,
by M.J.Lasky, 1988, Encounter 71.
"....it is not entirely clear exactly what value a college diploma is to most women, other than
attracting an eligible husband and achieving unrestricted passage to middle class respectability
(there are, of course, some exceptions)."
B.K.ECKLAND, 1971. Reprinted in A.H.Halsey, 1977,
Heredity and Environment.
""....As all ideologies do, 'radical' feminism sidestepped the trivial issue of whether, factually, it
was right or wrong that women are universally discriminated against and subject to conditioning
which makes them unable to perceive themselves as discriminated against: '....many women do
not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality
of their conditioning' (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics)."
Johanna FAUST, 1986, The Soul of Woman under Socialism.
London : British Association of Libertarian Feminists.
"The quality of daily life is what matters, the taste of good food on the table, the light in the
room, the peace and wholeness of the moment."
Germaine GREER, 1986, The Madwoman's Underclothes.
London : Picador.
"I....still remember the last women's liberation conference I went to. It was held in Edinburgh, and
at it the 'sexuality' demand was endorsed: women's right to define their own sexuality. It was a
demand which had no meaning for me. My own sexuality seemed a mysterious part of existence,
needing shared thought and analysis rather than voluntaristic self-definition."
Rosalind DELMAR, 1986, New Statesman, 25 vii.
"....women are less likely to advance in engineering than their male colleagues, and are more
likely to consider leaving the field because of poor career prospects.... Women can become
engineers, but this may not be a personally wise decision."
P.NEWTON, 1987,
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 40, A20.

48

"We have grown out of the darkest days of feminism"

John MORTIMER, 1987, BBC IV UK, 1 iv.
"Twenty-eight per cent of women read romantic fiction, often with the same compulsion that men
show towards pornography (though Barbara Cartland has a chocolate box gentility which is very
far from the illicit thrills of blue movies).... One reason for this [female] lack of enthusiasm [for
explicit visual pornography] might be that women's sexuality is more diffuse than men's....
Particularly disturbing for feminists is the fact that many women undoubtedly do have
masochistic fantasies of rape and submission which they would repudiate utterly in their daily
lives."
Kirsty MILNE, 1987, 'Porn: what do women want?'
New Society 82, 23 x.
"The feminist movement is 'all roll over in bed and go to sleep'."
Joyce McCartan (Organizer of Women's Drop-in Information
Centre, Belfast, herself a 'family feminist'), 1988.
Quoted by Amanda Mitchison, New Society, 19 ii.
"For a long time, feminism seemed to hover uncertainly between two contradictory assertions:
that male and female were fundamentally identical, and their differences purely the result of
social conditioning; or alternatively that male and female were basically different.... [Today]
feminism seems gradually to be settling down in favour of the second alternative: that males are
innately imbued with the so-called masculine aspects of human nature, in other words that they
are incurably that way. And the feminist hope of the sixties that an attack on role conditioning
would produce an androgynous New Man, without all those objectionable masculine
characteristics, has faded."
Clifford LONGLEY, 1988, The Times, 20 iv.
"Christ called as his Apostles only men. He did this in a totally free and sovereign way."
Pope JOHN PAUL II, 1988, quoted in The Observer, 26 ix.
"Symbolically, masculinity is associated with taking the initiative and femininity with the
response. Now that matches, as I see it, our relationship to God the Creator. He is the Creator. We
are because He has made us. As C.S.Lewis put it: "Both Creation and men and women are
feminine to God."
The Right Reverend Graham LEONARD, 1988, interviewed in
The Times, 12 xii.
"A man brings a dignity to the altar which a woman could never hope to equal."
Mrs Faith Powell, quoted by Adam NICOLSON, 1992, The Spectator,
21 xi. {Written just after the Church of England had voted to
ordain women as priests and(/or) ministers.}
"[Lesley Northrup, a forty-year-old woman priest in the Episcopalian Church] introduced sperm
into her body from three donors [resulting in the birth of a daughter]. The mother does not know,
does not wish to know, which of the donors is the biological father. Nor do they wish to know.
Two of them are priests in her church.... The director of the Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition in

49

Washington, D.C., states that one in twenty lesbians have had babies through artificial
insemination.... It is strange when feminists who accuse men of reducing them to their sexual
organs go one better."
Donald DEMARCO, 1989, 'Sex for one: women who prefer turkey
basters to men'. The Idler, No.24. (255, Davenport Road, Toronto.)
"The result [of the feminist critique of male-dominated 'science'] is what [one] feminist theorist,
Blanche Dubois, calls "Passionate Scholarship": "Feminism withdraws from the patriarchal
construction of reality." Ironically, Michael Levin (Feminism and Freedom) notes, this sounds
very much like the traditional misogynist argument that women are incapable of putting aside
their emotions - with the difference that the misogynist values "thinking like a man", while the
feminists abhor it."
Peter BRIMELOW, 1988, The Times, 25 iv.
"[In my experiment] a female weather forecaster is praised by a male newsreader with
compliments on her new hairstyle. It was predicted that the implicit downgrading of the woman's
professional effort by ignoring this in favour of her appearance would lead to less favorable
evaluations by young viewers. However, there were indications that the woman was seen slightly
more favorably in the conditions including the sexist appraisal."
K.DURKIN, 1988, to 24th International Congress of Psychology
in Sydney (S47).
"WELLINGTON. ....Radio New Zealand has banned 151 'sexist' words, including manhole,
snowman, bridesmaid and masterpiece.... "Women", [Ms Beverly Wakem, Director General] says,
"are not a subspecies of men."
Among the words banned are girl and boy because females over the age of 16 are women
and....males of 16 and over are men.... Dancing girl is banned and becomes dancer, and Dear Sir
is replaced by Dear Madam or Sir.... Other banned words include barmaid, fatherland, fireman,
fisherman, foreman, gamesmanship, Girl Friday, hen party, heroine, landlord, maiden voyage,
man over board, master of ceremonies, mother nature, one-man show, paperboy and stewardess."
The Star, 15 vi 1988.
"....in the 1980's, anthropologists, like scholars in other disciplines, have been forced by the
criticisms of black feminists, and by the nature of the evidence available to them, to come to
terms with difference, with the simple fact that there are differences between women. The result
has been widespread rejection of 'women' as a homogeneous category."
Henrietta MOORE, 1989, 'When God created woman'.
New Statesman & Society, 3 iii.
"....quadrant analysis revealed that feminine, non-feminist women were both wider in pelvic
outlet and more sexually satisfied than other women."
G.D.WILSON & A.E.READING, 1989, Person. & Indiv. Diffs. 10.
"....surgery is not a discipline that one can leave for a few years to have a family and pick up
again like a piece of knitting.... And then there are the physiological and psychological problems.
Surgery, the reparative strategy, is destructive in tactics; because women, thank God, are what
they are, their natural tendency is to shrink from the ruthlessness of the knife."
David LE VAY, 1989, letter to The Times, 15 vii.

50

"M.E.Levin (Feminism and Freedom, Transaction Books) demonstrates the existence of [an
empirical] conflict between feminist ideology and recent developments in anthropology,
neurology, child psychology and behaviour genetics. He concludes that many feminist policies
are based on ideological error, run counter to classical liberalism, and violate the principle of
freedom."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1990, Personality & Individual Differences 11.
"Some feminists have recently argued that women tend to have a whole different way of looking
at morality than men do; and that this different approach, 'the ethic of care', may be superior to, or
at least as good as, the 'male-dominated focus of justice and rights'. Will Kymlicka
(Contemporary Political Philosophy, Clarendon) shows, however, that whether 'the ethic of care'
can be both unequivocal and plausible is far from clear."
Brad HOOKER, 1991, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69.
""Feminists regard medical knowledge as part of the means by which gender divisions in society
are maintained," according to some authors of feminist 'perspective' [in J.Orr, Women's Health in
the Community, Wiley]. What, all of it? Is there no objective truth in it, no facts?"
Digby ANDERSON, 1991, International Journal of Nursing Studies 25.
"[E.P.Thompson, Customs in Common] expresses weariness with the view that "all that one can
find in relations between men and women is patriarchy", and argues convincingly that the sale of
wives [in eighteenth-century England] is not "male chauvinism" but a primitive plebeian form of
divorce, which required the wife's consent. Needless to say, this well-constructed thesis, when
presented in North America, was regarded by the custodians of political correctness as itself a
form of "male violence"."
F. McLYNN, 1991, New Statesman & Society, 8 xi.
"[My mother] was convinced that only male lyrics were truly worth singing. She believed that as
men had their priorities right, only they could sing about love and its disenchantment with the
proper authority. Women, being so unpredictable, were prone to emotional exaggeration and,
therefore, could get boring by singing about their loves. Dietrich, the {married} woman who sat
by the telephone all day mooning over her married lover while pining for her {lost} Frenchman,
actually believed herself exempt from her critical judgment of all women."
Maria RIVA (daughter of Marlene Dietrich), 1992,
Marlene Dietrich. London : Hodder & Stoughton (Coronet), 1994.
"A double-bind is applied [by feminists] whereby any difference between men and women is
interpreted as a consequence of oppression.... Greater incidence of neurotic mental illness in
women is seen as following on from lifelong persecution. But a longer female life expectancy is
not interpreted as evidence of having a better life than males-if anything it produces another
"women's problem" of being old, frail and single....
Whether or not feminism counts as a good thing....depends upon the relative need of the
oppressed group.... The work of the donkey sanctuary is, in itself, a decent enough activity; but
the fact that it is the fifth largest animal charity must strike most people as a bit over the top.... I
suggest that the same argument applies to the setting-up of "counselling" services at "wellwoman" clinics."
Bruce G. CHARLTON, 1992, Psychiatric Bulletin 16.

51

"What women have to realize is their dominance as a sex. That women's sexual powers are
enormous. All cultures have seen it. Men know it. Women know it. The only people who don't
know it are feminists. Desensualized, desexualized, neurotic women.... the perverse, neurotic
psychodrama projected by these women is coming from their own problems with sex....
Women's studies is a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks,
doughface party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopianists, and bullying, sanctimonious sermonizers.
Reasonable, moderate feminists hang back and, like good Germans, keep silent in the face of
fascism.....Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women
can neither think or write....Now when people say to me, "Oh, you're always talking about
feminists as if they're monolithic. We're not monolithic. We're very pluralistic. We have so many
different views." No, excuse me: the date-rape issue shows that I am correct. Because there is one
voice speaking about date rape from coast to coast, one voice, one stupid, shrewish, puritanical,
sermonizing, hysterical voice.... [In a recent case resulting in a rape charge] the girl has met the
guy once before, this is the second time she met him, they were at a party, she invites him back to
her room, its three A.M, she falls asleep, and then suddenly something happens.... Now, pardon
me, wake up to reality!.... [White middle-class girls today] don't understand what's going on, that
there's a sexual content to their behavior, that maybe there's a subliminal sexuality, a
provocativeness in their behavior. "Don't say 'provocative! Because then you're blaming the
victim!" Well, women will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their
sexuality. "
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).
"[The] self-criticism sessions imposed by the ever-burgeoning harassment industry have eerily
familiar overtones of Chairman Mao's China. A Boston Globe columnist....learning a friend had
ceased attending basketball games since getting married, told a colleague, 'Yeah, he's pussywhipped these days.' This colourful American version of our phrase 'henpecked' [cost him] a
public apology and accepting the company's fine of $1,250 (to be given to a women's charity)."
David ENGLISH, 1993, The Spectator, 30 ix.
"In mammals, male aggression seems to have evolved to fulfil two important and complementary
functions: to compete with other males for sexual access to females, and to maintain territorial
integrity. The vital reproductive role of females dictates that males use violence selectively. They
do not use their greater strength to "dominate" females, if this unfortunate term is taken to mean
that males typically monopolize critical resources such as food or shelter."
R.K. LORE & L.A. SCHULTZ, 1993, American Psychologist 48.
"In [a large-scale survey] of British adults....when confounding factors were partialled out,
Neuroticism and Extraversion [were] greater in the women but not in the men who had separated
or divorced.... Although the size of the correlations was small, the results of this study suggest
that marital stability may depend more on the personality of the wife than the husband."
D.CRAMER, 1993, Personality & Individual Differences 14.
"There is a newish-well, 20-year-old-kind of "feminist methodology", celebrated by [Shere] Hite
and many other feminists, which rejects the scientific mentality in favour of subjective
understanding-the feely-touchy school of "feminist scholarship". The terrible thing is that it
confirms all the old (untrue) prejudices that women are capable of thinking only in personal

52

terms. It is a terrible betrayal of common sense, of the mental powers of our sex, and of the idea
of knowledge. Science is not just the patriarchal province of white males. Science is the best
method we have of communicating with each other about what might be so and what might be
possible. How could there possibly be a "feminist scholarship"-as feminists claim-that is not the
same as ordinary scholarship?
Minette MARTIN, 1994, 'Shere rot about men'. Sunday Telegraph, 27 ii.
"The follies of extreme cultural relativism, deconstruction and so on [make] a sensible middle
ground almost impossible to defend.... What thoughtful advocate of women's rights cannot be
made to wince at the notion of 'feminist algebra'?"
D.KENNEDY, 1994, 'Muddleheadness exposed.' Nature 368, 31 iii.
(Reviewing R.Gross & N.Levitt, Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with
Science.)
"[At the yam harvest in the Trobriand Islands] women go on the rampage. No man is safe to walk
alone, day or night. He fears an ambush and, indeed, rape. In gangs of 30 or more, women lie in
wait for a victim. ....Two or more women may be satisfied in one ambush, depending on the
degree of anxiety exhibited by the victim.... an islander who had been raped twice implied it was
a surprisingly pleasant experience, [but humiliation followed later]. The women bite off their
victims' eyebrows and eyelashes to prove he has been "had", so that he returns to his village
bedraggled, bitten and eyebrowless for several weeks' relentless teasing.... [A trained Trobriand
doctor] suggested that the yam contains substances which, taken in large quantities, arouse the
sexual appetites of women.... Despite their sexual freedom, the Trobriand woman has not found
some feminist nirvana. She wields little power in daily life."
Isabella TREE, 1992, London Evening Standard, 11 xi.
"For Women and Love [in which the vast majority of
American women claimed to be dissatisfied with their marital relationships and to find their
partners insensitive, unfeeling, destructive, emotionally withdrawn, chauvinistic, confused, lazy
and, on occasion, unspeakably cruel] Shere Hite had sent 100,000 questionnaires to women's
groups round the country. Only 4,500 responded. [To criticism] Hite retorted that 4.500 women
was 4,447 more than Freud had interviewed.... She claimed that the president of the American
Sociological Association had said her "methodology was great", which the president denied,
claiming that he had not yet read the book."
Amanda MITCHISON, 1993, The Independent (Magazine), 6 ii.
"When J.Donald Silver likened belly-dancing to "Jell-O on a plate with a vibrator under the plate"
he was struggling for an example of a simile....But several women in his writing lecture objected
to his choice of language, not on grounds of ineptness but because they believed Professor Silver
violated the University of New Hampshire's policy on verbal sexual harassment. For the past two
years Professor Silver, 59, who is also a pastor at a New Hampshire church, has been suspended
from his job. He has been been without pay for the last year."
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 7 x 1994
"Apparently there has been a startling rise in the employment of male prostitutes, which must
offer one of the few growing job opportunities to school-leavers. The pay is 60 a time and
around 150 for the night, and a young black chef from Guildford does a roaring trade. One
client, a 46-year-old doctor's receptionist, told the Guardian: 'I am deeply ashamed of doing it,

53

but it makes me feel more alive. After all you only get one life, don't you?'"
John MORTIMER, 1994, The Spectator, 26 iii.
"The true nightmare facing Englishwomen is not, as the lady columnists tell us, that they will be
excluded form the economy when they want to have babies, but that women will end up doing all
the work, paid and unpaid; and men will watch television or do dope, as in Harlem, or sing, as in
Sumatra."
James BUCHAN, 1994, The Spectator, 23 iv.
"It is hard to have a heroine these days.... Winnie Mandela blotted her copybook rather badly,
Hillary Clinton is hopeless, Andrea Dworkin has become the man she loves to hate, Germaine
Greer has become a scolding nanny and too much zipless sex in the Seventies has turned her
compatriot-in-arms, Erica Jong, into a wild-eyed lunatic in the Nineties...."
Jan MOIR, 1994, The Scotsman, 18 xi.
(v) Men's Liberation?
Favourable considerations?
"Can man be free if woman be a slave?"
SHELLEY, The Revolt of Islam.
"{During the radicalism of the 1960's} men would come home from a demo, wipe the tear gas
from their eyes, lie down on the sofa, and wait for dinner to be prepared."
Betty FRIEDAN, quoted by Angela Neustatter,
Hyenas in Petticoats. London : Harrap.
"I had this guy once, he was quite nice to talk to when he was being sociable, before any sex. He
lived in a beautiful big house, drove a white Porsche, really wealthy; his wife was a fashion
designer. He was a good-looking guy. His old lady was in France, at this big fashion show; it was
being televised and everything. He was one of those Hoorah Henries, Eton and all that. He paid
me, and I mean he paid me well, beforehand; then he says to me, 'Please, please, I feel
embarrassed over what I want to do. I don't really want to have sex with you as such, and I won't
ejaculate in you or anything like that; don't think it wrong but - I wanna shout at you and abuse
you verbally. It feels like I'm getting all my frustrations out.' And he's calling me a fucking
bastard and a cunt and 'ya slut, ya slag!' and 'you're all the same you women, you're whores!'
you're this, you're that. And as time went on I was getting a bit fed up with it, because he was
really getting all his aggression out; his frustration; he was scowling so much. He was nearly
frothing at the mouth, swearing and abusing me. And I said, 'That's enough,' and straight away he
changed, and said, 'Yes, all right then, thanks ever so much.' And I felt sorry for him. I thought,
'You pathetic man.' Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, you know."
'Chloe: a prostitute woman', in Nickie ROBERTS, 1986,
The Front Line. London : Grafton.
"Men with a history of sexual aggression experienced more interest and subjective arousal
[during guided imagining of a realistic, non-eroticized rape]....but they also, contrary to
expectations, experienced more affective anger, distress, fear, shame and guilt."

54

D.L.MOSHER & R.D.ANDERSON, 1986,

Journal of Research in Personality 20.
"[Elisabeth] Badinter....announces the fall of the last barrier: the pregnant male, she proclaims in
her latest manifesto [L'Un est L'Autre], is a viable possibility." F.GONZALEZ-CRUSSI, 1988,
On the Nature of Things Erotic. London : Pan Books.
"[My] study of 1,688 [schoolchildren] shows that the degree of masculinity [hard, rough,
unfeeling, loud] or femininity [soft, smooth, sensitive, quiet] of their gender identities accounts for
a significant proportion of their school grades.... the more feminine the gender identity of both
boys and girls, the better their performance.... the magnitude of the effect of gender identity does
not vary by school subject."
P.J.BURKE, 1989, Social Psychology Quarterly 52.
"The basic type of [male] attachment love probably continues to consist in looking for a woman
who can be kicked the way one kicked one's mother."
Klaus THEWELEIT, 1994, Object-Choice (All You Need is Love). Verso.
"Stokely Carmichael {the Black consciousness leader} memorably remarked that in the civil
rights movement "The only position of women is....down"."
Rosie BOYCOTT, 1989, Sunday Times (Books), 2 viii.
"D.H.Lawrence, who believed he was writing something "beautiful and tender" [in his Lady
Chatterley's Lover] uses a wealth of detail to portray his own unhappy misconceptions about
women's sexuality. "The old rampers have beaks between their legs," says Mellors in disgust at
the female genitalia. The nearest he gets to foreplay with his Connie is arranging wild flowers
between her thighs."
Amanda HEMINGWAY, 1989, Sunday Times (Books), 17 ix.
"Men have responded to feminism with feelings of anxiety, guilt and unease. It has taken time for
men to consider ways of changing themselves rather than hiding behind feminist rhetoric....
[V.J.Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity,] argues that, historically, masculinity has been identified
with reason and femininity with emotion, so men have been trained to speak for others before
learning to speak for themselves."
Publisher's announcement, 1989. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
"The shock of Cleveland {where much sexual abuse of children had been discovered, and even
more alleged} was, in fact, the number of middle-class men under suspicion, and the extent to
which this generated disbelief. Cleveland confirmed what many of us have been saying for years,
namely that male violence is endemic in our society and that no particular "type" of man is most
guilty."
Jayne EGERTON, 1989,
letter in New Statesman & Society, 28 iv.
"....it will not be enough to legislate for a few months' paternity leave.... If we want men as well
as women to take responsibility for bringing up their children, we have to enable them to do so
without sacrificing their ability to earn a living. And if we can swing it for the men, we will also
win increases for women, who often settle for poorly paid, part-time work in order to cope with

55

the inconvenient needs of their school-aged children."

Beverly ANDERSON, 1989, New Socialist, vi/vii.
"A policeman who won a national award for a project to curb sexism has been sacked for sexual
harassment."
The Independent, 12 vii 1994.
"[Robert Bly, Iron John] claims that American men are possessed by a secret despair": they are
"father-hungry". Modern working methods have wrenched fathers away from sons; worse, men
have been made to look ridiculous in their own homes. "The emphasis placed in recent decades
on the inadequacy of men, and on the evils of the patriarchal system, encourages mothers to
discount grown men", says Bly. The result, he claims, is "psychic incest", whereby dissatisfied
modern women look to their sons for emotional satisfaction."
Kirsty MILNE, 1993, 'Every day in Mother's Day'.
New Statesman & Society, 19 iii.
"[Kenneth Polk, 1995, When Men Kill, Cambridge University Press, studied] 380 homicides that
came to official notice in Victoria, Australia, in 1985-89.... The result is the identification of four
major scenarios of masculine violence:
sexual intimacy where jealousy and control formed the dominant motivation;
confrontations "arising out of defence of honour";
situations where the "homicides arose out of other criminality"; and
homicides resulting from violent attempts to resolve conflicts."
T.JEFFERSON, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1175, 12 v.
"Feminists are problematizing theories of rationality that exclude emotions,
the body, and intuition from the knowing process, and are critiquing the
ways dominant theories of rationality involve colonialist and imperialist
interests."
CALL FOR PAPERS (1996) from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University
of Oregon for their "EnGendering Rationalities Conference" to be held 18-20 June 1997.

Less agreeable considerations?

"[It should be] the great Business of our Lives to Plant and Propagate our Kind, To throw our
Seed into every fruitful Corner, To get it vigorously into the gaping Bottom of every sweetwatered Vale...."
The Reverend Daniel MacLauchlan, 1735, An Essay upon
Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great-Britain and
Ireland, by Fornication, justifying the same from Scripture
and Reason. By a Young Clergyman.

56

"Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly."
NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"No nice men are good at getting taxis."
Katharine WHITEHORN.
"[According to feminism] the souls of men-their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive
character-had to be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo-the
polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in men's
souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty-was the villain, the
source of the difference between the sexes.... Men tend to undergo this re-education somewhat
sullenly but studiously, in order to avoid the opprobrium of the 'sexist' label and to keep peace
with their wives and girlfriends. And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them "care"
is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail."
Allan BLOOM, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind.
New York : Simon & Schuster.
"While some of you may miss an oriental Miss, our cabin crew more than compensate with their
common sense, conversation, sense of humour and knowledge of the cricket scores."
Advertisement by QUANTAS Airline, 1987, The Times, 6 v.
"There is a hunger out there for something to ease the troubles of men, but the cry is, ironically,
coming more from women than from men. Men's Rights Inc. still gets most of its calls for help
and information from women.... And it's mostly women who attend men's studies classes."
Craig CARTER, 1990, Coast Weekly, 14 vi.
"Contemporary feminists....insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and
female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their
mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create the complex structures of society, art,
science, and technology....If civilisation had been left in female hands, we would still be living in
grass huts."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).
"Bruce Lee [in the film 'Dragon'] was certainly a graceful physical performer and his machinetooled torso had the sleek, military seductiveness of an F-16. But to pretend this was the essence
of his appeal, or that kung fu films are primarily exercises in choreography, is wilfully
disingenuous. This is the kind of bullshit middle-class men come up with at parties when they're
interrogated by feminists about why they like martial arts movies. It's an excuse, like saying you
get Playboy for the interviews. The feminists are right: the reason we like Bruce Lee is because
we'd like to be able to knock someone senseless with a single snap of the wrist."
Toby YOUNG, 1993, The Modern Review, x/xi.
"What worries me is our generation [of men] (cos' we've got something to say). We were set up to
be all sensitive, nice, respectful, and to lower the toilet seat each and every time. And now that
we're so nice, what do they go and do? They invent the Chippendales and start making adverts
which celebrate a female pornographic gaze which would have been unacceptable (in reverse, of
course) even in 1974. It's all come as a bit of a shock really."

57

Gregory M. ROWLAND ("The Practical Home Onanist"), 1994, The Idler, iv/v.
"....men and women are not alike. They have different sexual roles to perform....everything that
the Book (from which comes Judaism, Christianity, Islam) has to say about sex is wrong....The
male's function is to shoot semen as often as possible, while the female's function is to be shot
briefly by a male in order to fertilise an egg, which she will lay nine months later. Although there
is nothing anywhere in the male psyche that finds monogamy natural or normal (the scientific
search for monogamous, exclusively heterosexual mammals has been sadly given up, while our
feathery friends - those loving doves too - have let the natural lawyers down), the monogamous
concept is drilled into the male's head from birth because, in the absence of those original tribal
support systems that we discarded for the Book, someone must help the woman during gravidity
and the early years of baby rearing."
Gore VIDAL, 1992, 'Get gay and save the planet'.
New Statesman & Society, 14 viii.
"On the Copacabana Beach [in Brazil], mahogany-coloured bodies in G-strings are plastered in
the sand. No one looks twice at a group of shrieking men with long hair, make-up and 44in.
breasts. At a glance they look like girls, but close up it's clear they're men.... They are
travestis....gay men who want the body of a woman - but still have a penis. They use silicone and
hormones to give themselves female characteristics - sometimes overdoing it to the point of
death. ....a travesti is often a prostitute [who] can earn more than a female prostitute [because] a
man who uses a travesti prostitute feels less guilty about acknowledging his homosexuality.
Linda UDALL, 1994, The People, 17 vii.

Epilogue.
"'The Wife of Bath's Tale' is preceded by a lusty prologue in which she condemns celibacy,
herself having outlasted five husbands. Her tale recounts the story of a knight who must answer
correctly within a year, under pain of execution, the question, 'What do women most love?' An
old witch gives him the answer, which is "sovereignty", with the provision that he marry her. He
carries out his promise, reluctantly, and the witch is turned into a beautiful young girl."
Thesaurus of Book Digests. New York : Avenel Books.
"I am sure the Queen is very angry with you. I am afraid you contradict her notions too boldly.
You fancy she will hear reason, when in fact all you say only proves to her that you are
determined to act on the line she disapproves.... I am sure it would be better if you said less to her,
even if you act as you think best. You always think you can convince people by Arguments, and
she has not reflection or sense to feel the force of them.... I should treat what she says more
lightly and courteously, and not enter into argument with her, but lead her on gently, by letting her

58

believe you have both the same opinion in fact and the same wishes, but take sometimes different
ways of carrying them out."
Lady Palmerston, wife of the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston; writing to him in 1848
after a period of growing tension regarding Palmerston's bombastic handling of foreign affairs.
Cited by R.W.Seton-Watson, 1937, Britain in Europe 1789 - 1914.
Cambridge University Press.
"Never let your husband see your sleeping face."
Traditional Japanese advice to wives.
"Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money;
but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them."
Wilkie COLLINS.
"We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the 'superiority' of one sex to another,
as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes
the other and is completed by the other; they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and
perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can
give."
John RUSKIN, 1865, cited by M.Billig et al., 1988,
Ideological Dilemmas. London : Sage.
"[Nora, the wife of James Joyce] wondered that great men found his books, which she never read,
remarkable ; but his fame let her into a bigger world than Galway or Dublin, where Andr Gide
kissed her hand and she could buy her dresses from the grand couturiers."
Anthony BURGESS, 1988, The Observer, 19 iv.
"My dearest sweet, I hope and pray that future years may bring you serene and smiling days, and
full and fruitful occupation. I think you will find real scope in the new world opening out to
women, and find interests which will enrich your life. And always at your side in true and tender
friendship as long as he breathes will be your ever devoted, if only partially satisfactory, W."
Winston CHURCHILL (Minister of Munitions), 1916,
to his wife, Clementine.
"Dr H.W.Long advises the male to lie beneath the woman, instead of in the more common
position expressive of male dominance.... In this admirable advice, the doctor recognizes the
necessity for the woman's captivation response [expressing her role as love aggressor] to prevail
throughout the relationship."
W.M.MARSTON, 1928, Emotions of Normal People.
London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co.
"Watching the Olympic Games ice-dancing the other night on television, I was struck by the
primordial poetry of a man and woman together - each sex with its different fleshly center of
emphasis and style of contour, each with its special biological assignment and evolved social
expectations, but partnered, mutually compensatory, supportive and amusing and excitingly,
maddeningly strange to each other, together making a single species. As the couples flashed and
glided over the ice, intertwining, some sweet brute truth hulked dimly out of our animal past,
from near where sex was invented by the algae and ferns, and I wanted to cry in joy, feeling

59

humanity, mine and the ice-dancers', as a spot of warmth within vast dark coldness."
John UPDIKE, 1989, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. London : Andr Deutsch.
"....beside every good man lies a good woman. Without one, no chance of the other.... no liberated
women, no liberated men either."
Michael FOOT, 1990, The Observer (Review), 22 vii.
"....influenced by the work of Carol Gilligan on different styles of moral thinking {in men and
women}, Annette Baier (1995, Moral Prejudices, Harvard U.P.) seeks a bifocal moral vision that
incorporates both notions of care and justice. Whether or not these notions are linked to female
and male perspectives respectively, they form alternative approaches to morality which Baier
teaches us to see not as rivals but as companions. She develops the notion of "appropriate
trust"....as a way of marrying love (a more female concern) and obligation (a more male
concern)."
Paula BODDINGTON, 1995,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1163, 17 ii.
"The greatest enemies of great women have often been lesser talents, hoping to find favour as
agents of conventional opinion. The contrive to switch attention from a woman's art to the flaws
of her life. Anne Rigby did this to Charlotte Bront in the late 1840's when she said that if Jane
Eyre were written by a woman, it must be one who had forfeited the society of her sex. Anne
Stevenson did it to Sylvia Plath when she suggested that the poet was given to excessive - that is,
unfeminine - "ambition"."
Lyall GORDON, 1994, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 14 x.
"[Taslima Nasreen, the exiled Bangladeshi feminist writer], for all her vituperative remarks about
men, seems passionately drawn to the opposite sex. At 32, she has been married (and divorced)
three times, and the Bengali scholar Carolyne Wright recounts how women poets and journalists
were often snubbed at literary gatherings as Nasreen chatted to male editors and writers."
Simon TARGETT, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1164, 24 ii.

FINIS
{Compiled by Chris Brand, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh}

For more coverage of sex differences

in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.

60

Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.

"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political hot potato. But Brand in this
extremely readable, wide-ranging and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists". This short book
provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in April, by the 'publisher'
because it was deemed to have infringed modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May 2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly purposes, and others'
comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition of his views on race and
education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html

A reminder of what is available in other Sections of 'P, B & S.'

Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh University Psychology Department
Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements in the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.

61

7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.

Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing-especially, the role of g in 'life-span development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles' and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage out'?
=============================================

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