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By Root 617 0

This evidence comes from thirty-eight cases of a rare congenital disorder in the Dominican Republic. Called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, this disorder causes its male possessor to be unusually insensitive to the effect of testosterone before birth. As a result, such people are born with female genitalia and reared as girls. Suddenly, at puberty, their testosterone level rises and they turn into almost normal men (the main difference is that they ejaculate through a hole at the base of the penis). Yet, despite their childhood as girls, these men have for the most part adapted fairly easily to male roles in their society, which suggests either that their brains were masculinized even as their genitalia were not, or that their brains were still adaptable at puberty.19

Puberty strikes a young man like a hormonal thunderbolt. His testicles descend, his voice breaks, he begins to grow like a weed, his body becomes hairier and leaner. The cause of all this is a veritable flood of testosterone from his testicles. He now has twenty times as much of it in his blood as a girl of the same age. The effect is to develop the mental photograph laid down in his head by the womb’s dose, and to make his mind into that of an adult man.20

Sexism and the Kibbutz Life

Asked about their ambitions, men from six different cultures replied with much the same answer. They wanted to be practical, shrewd, assertive, dominating, competitive, critical and self-controlled. They sought power and independence above all. Women from the same cultures wanted to be loving, affectionate, impulsive, sympathetic and generous. They sought to serve society above all.21 Studies of male conversation find it to be public (i.e., men clam up at home), domineering, competitive, status-obsessed, attention-seeking, factual and designed to reveal knowledge and skill. Female conversation tends to be private (i.e., women clam up in big groups), co-operative, rapport-establishing, reassuring, empathetic, egalitarian and me-andering (i.e., to include talk for talk’s sake).22

There are, of course, exceptions and overlaps. Just as there are women who are taller than men, so there are women who want to be assertive and men who want to be sympathetic. But, just as it is still valid to make the generalization that men are taller than women, so it is none the less valid to conclude that these adjectives listed above are fairly typical of the natures of men and women. Some must be related to the differences between hunting and gathering, the most uniquely human of the sex differences. For example, it cannot be a coincidence that men enjoy hunting, fishing and eating meat much more than women do. Some may be more recent, reflecting social norms that the sexes have imposed on themselves through peer pressure and education (education was not always as sex blind as it strives to be today). For example, the male desire to be self-controlled may be a modern attribute, a recognition that he has a nature that needs controlling. Others may be more ancient, reflecting basic patterns that all apes share and that baboons do not: such as the fact that a woman generally leaves her group on marriage and lives with her offspring among what were hitherto strangers, whereas a man lives among kin. Others may be more ancient still, and shared with all mammals and many birds, such as the fact that women nurture babies, while men compete with other men for access to women. It surely cannot be a coincidence that men are obsessed with status in hierarchies, and that male chimpanzees compete for status in strict hierarchies of dominance.

The Israeli kibbutz system has proved to be a large natural experiment in the persistence of sex roles. Men and women were initially encouraged to drop all sex roles in kibbutzim: haircuts and clothes were unisexual; boys were encouraged to be peaceful and sensitive, while girls were treated like tomboys; men did household chores and women went out to work. Yet three generations later, the attempt has largely been abandoned and kibbutz life is actually more sexist than