What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [86]
This answer, while describing the facts accurately, hardly ends the debate, however. Some say there are more men at the extremes because of social learning, with talented men receiving more special attention from mentors while talented women have competing domestic responsibilities or are ignored or discouraged. This may be, but it doesn’t explain why there are more retarded men. Others say biological evolution can explain the difference: Women have been selected to be stable and reliable, whereas men have been selected for the potential of being different. This explanation collapses when one looks across cultures, however. There is more male variability in the United States, but more female variability in such countries as the Philippines and South Africa.28 If variability is an evolutionary trait, it should be the same worldwide. I believe the explanation for this difference at the extremes remains the single most important unanswered question in the study of sex differences.
Can these ability differences change? My answer is a qualified yes. At an individual level, verbal, mathematical, and spatial skills are trainable. This is what school, as well as Sesame Street, is about. Any girl’s spatial skill can be boosted with good teaching, as can any boy’s verbal skill. Emotional skill is trainable also. This is what I do as director of training in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Our aim is to take talented young psychologists and train them to be much better at emotional problem solving—for their own benefit and for that of their future patients.
But can group sex differences be shrunk? Will women, on average, catch up with men at rotating three-dimensional objects in their head? Will men catch up with women at detecting masked anger? I don’t know. But there is a hint of change. Many of the skill differences between the sexes have narrowed in the last twenty-five years, and this coincides with our society’s treating boys and girls more similarly.29
To summarize Layer IV: Sex roles can change—within limits. The sex roles young boys and young girls adopt differ radically. They are fixed and stereotyped. Raising boys to be more like girls, and vice versa, is fruitless—in the short run. In the long run, however, it may work. When they mature, children raised with parental examples of tolerance for a range of sex roles become more androgynous. There are some clear ability differences between the sexes: On average, girls are worse at spatial and mathematical tasks, but better at emotional tasks. With teaching, however, all these skills can be markedly upgraded, and there is some evidence that the group sex differences shrink when we treat boys and girls more similarly.
Layer V: Sexual Performance: Correcting Sexual Dysfunction
Assume that the first four layers of your sexuality are in good working order: You have an identity, a fixed orientation, set preferences, and a clear sex role. You are with someone who fits with your desires and you are in an erotic situation. Tonight’s the night. What can go wrong now?
Plenty. Your sexual performance can falter. If you are a man, you might
fail to maintain an erection (impotence)
climax within the first few seconds (premature ejaculation)
If you are a woman, you might
fail to get aroused (frigidity)
not reach orgasm
These problems are called sexual dysfunctions. They are agonizing and quite common problems. Until twenty years ago, they were largely unsolvable: People endured them. Marriages were strained to the breaking point. Love soured. Self-loathing and deep depression ensued. When quiet desperation became unbearable, people sought therapy, which usually failed. But thanks to a major breakthrough, these problems are, today, for the most part, curable.
Adequate sexual performance is exactly parallel in men and women. It consists of two phases: arousal and orgasm. During female arousal, a woman feels excited.