It’s no secret that men and women are different; whether it is the way they dress, the way they act or the appearance of their genitalia, but is there also a difference in the hardwiring of the male and female brain? Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender sets out to address this issue, and uncover if it is really hardwired into our brains that women are designed to better understand emotions and preform housework, while men are designed to be devoid of emotions and better suited to succeed in the professional world, especially of the math and science field. As a female college student I was especially drawn to Fine’s book. Are all my past and prospective academic achievements a waste of time? Where my parents wrong in telling I could do anything I set my mind to? Would my time have been better spent these past four years trying to find a husband and touching up my domestic skills rather than at Davidson?

The sentiments I’ve expressed above are just a few of the many gender stereotypes that Fine addresses in Delusions of Gender. The general consensus for many people these days is that men and women are equal. In western society women have equal access to political rights, educational rights and social rights, or so it would appear. Fine notes that many people, assuming this is the case, begin to question with all this equality between the genders why are women not succeeding in the same fields at the same rates as men, is the reason biological rather than social? To address this over arching question Fine has reviewed numerous scientific studies that make claims to have found biological differences within the brains of men and women. Fine however claims that its not biology but rather the environments we grow up in. “When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think and what you do.” (5) Through her systematic review of numerous studies Fine reveals flaws in the methods and conclusions of each study. Instead she claims that gender stereotypes are so prevalent in modern society that it is nearly impossible to conduct accurate studies to determine the truth about whether or not gender differences are innate.

Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British academic psychologist. She first received her BA from Oxford in experimental psychology, followed by a M. Phil from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University College London. She has conducted psychological research at Monash University in Australia, the Australian National University and Macquire University also in Australia. Fine is currently an ARC future fellow in psychological sciences and associate professor at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. Delusions of Gender is Fine’s second book, which was proceeded by A Mind of It’s Own a study of how the brain distorts and deceives. She has also written countless works that have been published in academic journals, and as chapters to scholarly books.

Delusions of Gender is broken up into three parts, the first being titled “Half Changed World’ Half Changed Mind.” In this section Fine lays out the larger arguments of her book that social and environmental factors strongly influence the mind, challenging the “biology as fallback” view. Fine first introduces notions of associative and explicit knowledge. She discusses how through influences such as the media and gender stereotypes patterns in our environments lead us to unconsciously draw conclusions that women are emotionally driven, while men are driven by rationally based decisions. She states, “close or powerful others in your life may be especially likely to act as a mirror in which you perceive your own qualities.” (10) Fine also discusses stereotype threat, the fear of certain groups fulfilling the stereotypes attributed to them, in terms of women in the work place. The pressures of stereotype threat have been shown to cause anxiety, depletion of memory, lowered expectations in oneself and general frustration. Fine attributes stereotype threat and lack of fit bias, to the lower levels of female professionals in male dominated fields rather than hardwiring of the brain.

In the second part of her book, “Neurosexism”, Fine criticizes the current available arguments and studies conducted supporting notions of sex differences in the brain. She focuses on methodical weakness, generalizations and assumptions made by the researchers in their reports of the data. One of the first theories Fine contests is Louann Brizendine’s. Brizendine claims that due to a surge of testosterone experienced in utero, for male fetuses, the left side of the male brain is affected leading to death of cells in the centers of the brain that govern communication, and instead grow cells in the area of the brain that controls sex and aggression. Brizendine states that this suppression of the left hemisphere of the brain predisposes men to preform better than women in math’s and arts. Fine quickly undermines this theory by pointing out that there has not yet been developed an accurate way to test neonatal levels of testosterone and that there is no clear evidence that this testosterone surge affects the brain at all. Fine continues to proceed in this manner debunking scientific theories that have been based on studies with methodical errors or that have been grossly overvalued, such as conclusions about the human brain that have been based on studies of primate brains. She also introduces the “file cabinet phenomenon” in which studies that are not regarding as ground breaking or not deemed interesting enough to the public are not published but rather filed away, never to bee seen again. Fine claims that this has been the fate of many scientific studies that have actually proven similarities in the brains of males and females. Finally, in this section she examines the emphasis that has been placed on PET and MRI scans. The popular belief is that such procedures are the be all end all of scientific knowledge, when in actually this technology is still in its infancy and thus is not reliant enough to base entire scientific studies on.

The final part of Delusions of Gender , “Recycling Gender”, discusses the highly gendered society in which children develop. Despite attempts of parents to “parent gender neutrally” it is nearly impossible to do so in todays society due to common conventions such as media and pre school socialization. Children have been shown to be able to acknowledge gender differences as early as one year old, and are some of the strictest gender polices. For instance Fine notes numerous studies where it is actually the peers of individual students who criticize cross gender interactions.

With all this knowledge Fine is arguing that as a society we have not yet conducted thorough enough tests to determine whether or not there truly are gendered differences within the brain. Instead the ways we are socialized regarding gender from extremely young ages transforms the malleable mind to reflect gender differences.

Through her witty language and meticulous research Fine addresses the complex question of inherent gender differences with ease. Her biting criticism of sloppily conducted studies and humorous asides make the book accessible to those without backgrounds in science or gender studies. Fine does a great job of canvasing a plethora of studies and detailing why each one should be discredited. This is evidenced through her summery of each scientific study she has researched, the reasons she gives for debunking the study and through the 81 pages of footnotes that follow the main content of her book.

Due to Fine’s mass debunking of current scientific research conducted in the area of gender differences Delusions of Gender received a large backlash from the scientific community. At times it feels as if Fine has oversimplified the issues faced in the scientific studies and does not give credit to individual aspects of each study. She belittles any information gleamed from scientific research that she does not agree with. Furthermore, when discussing gender stereotypes prevalent in children’s television shows, movies and books she makes vast generalizations stating that girls are always seen preforming stereotypically feminine roles. While this may have been true during the time Fine was writing, only 5 years ago, I feel that there has recently been a turn to diversify the messages we are sending to children through media. Finally, with the exception of one mention in part two about the work place experiences of transsexual women, Fine does not address individuals that identify as anything other than male/female or man/women. She does not allow room for discussion regarding transsexuals, pansexuals or issues of intersectionality. She also does not dedicate anytime towards considering how sexuality may affect the binary of male vs female brain.

Accepting the belief that there is something inherent within men and women that are the source of the gender binary would be the easy way out. It is much more difficult to accept that the reason for the continual inequality between men in women is societal and that to improve these inequalities we will have to completely alter societal norms. Fine presented a clear and convincing argument of exactly this issue in Delusions of Gender. The book is thought provoking as it encouraged me to question my own personal beliefs regarding the gender differences between men and women, and how such beliefs have been presented and reflected in my actions from a young age. The book also provided me with better insight of the challenges I might face as I continue on in my life as a women with high academic and professional ambitions, and as a women who hopes to one day raise children in a gender neutral setting not defined by pink and blue. One of Fines final quotations “gender difference is the product of gender inequality, and not the other way around” really resonated with me, and something that I will continue to strive to undermine.

Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of Gender. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.

By: Marin Williams

Sex work is finding itself raging in contemporary debates – should it should be legalized, and if so, how it should be regulated. Rather than plunging into the oh so typical debate of legalization of sex work, Kim Price-Glynn takes a different angle in her ethnography, Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work, looking at the organizational structure of the institutions that house most of the United States sex work, the strip club. Sex work relates to “the exchange of sexual service, performances, or products for material compensation. It includes activities of direct physical contact between buyers and sellers as well as indirect sexual stimulation.”[1] Price-Glynn does not offer a clear definition of what she understands sex work to include other than stripping, prostitution, and pornographic films. In order to gain a better understanding of sex work and explore the issues of gender and power related to sex work, Price-Glynn took an interest in studying a strip club in Railton, a small, rural, northeastern town. For fourteen months, Price-Glynn fully emerged herself in her research by working in “The Lion’s Den” as a cocktail waitress, enabling her ability to observe, conduct research and analyze a strip club from an inside position. During her time at the club she conducted interviews and observed the organization in order to either prove or disprove her theory. Although the United States has several other institutions dealing in sex work, Price-Glynn specifically chose a strip club because she felt that there was a lot to uncover about what drives women to becoming sex workers and what attracts sex patrons to strip clubs, and that by uncovering these answers, we can gain a better understanding of the gendered, organizational, and economic benefits for strip clubs and their sex workers.

Price-Glynn situates herself in an outsider/insider approach, one that she adopts from Eleanor Miller and Wendy Chapkis. Eleanor Miller produced the study, Street Women in 1968, which studied prostitution and other forms of street hustling. Miller, an outsider, by means of a bar job, interviews, and courthouse visitations, gained access to the street women of Chicago. By connecting on a personal level, Miller was able to view the prostitutes’ lifestyles in ways more than just illegal activity. Later in 1997, Wendy Chapkis brought a new approach to researching sex work by participating as both an insider and an outsider. She collected reports and conducted interviews of multiple sex workers in the United States and abroad to shed more light on the “sex wars” debate. She later participated in a co-taught sexual massage class and even used the techniques learned on other women. By acting as both an outsider and an insider, Chapkis brought a radically different approach to sex work research. Inspired by both Chapkis and Miller, Price-Glynn acted as both an outsider and an insider in her research. As an insider she was a waitress in the strip club. As an outsider she keep a professional relationship with those she interviews and met in the club. Although her research method is adopted, Price-Glynn distinguishes herself from previous sex-work research because she looks at how the strippers are marginalized by the organizational structure of the club rather than by the work itself or by the gender inequality in the work. With her research, Price-Glynn, is opening a new door to the way sex work could be mitigated in order to benefit the workers.

Fourteen months of working at “The Lion’s Den” provided Price-Glynn with a vast amount of research and observations. Not only was she constantly observing the environment and the actions within the strip club by means of her waitressing job, she also collected information through interviews of nearly every person involved in the business: waitresses, strippers, doormen, patrons, business owner, etc. From the beginning, she had a goal of ameliorating the professional lives of sex workers saying, “it is my hope that what emerges from studying a strip club as an organization is an intimate portrait of life and work in the strip club”[2]. She planned to use this work as a platform to offer proposed changes in order to improve the work life of those involved in sex work. She found, as she had assumed, that the strip club was organized in a way that benefits male employees and patrons who visit the club. This intense masculine culture is responsible for marginalizing the strippers. Price-Glynn’s objective however is not to demonstrate that sex work contributes to the gender inequality problem in America, but rather to propose that it is actually the organizational structure of a strip club business itself that is responsible for marginalizing the strippers. This research eventually led her to the conclusion that the working environment for sex workers, specifically the strip club, must be improved. This improvement must stem from a reorganization of the strip club institution itself in order to allow women to feel empowered rather than enslaved by the work they are doing.

By immersing herself into the club scene, Price-Glynn gets about as naturalistic a view as she can get about the lives of sex workers, without actually becoming one herself. Her job as a cocktail waitress allows her to analyze and examine what truly goes on between patrons and the strippers, between the strippers and the boss, and even between strippers and other strippers. This insight allows for a more complete depiction of the strip club life, which unfortunately does not reflect positively of the current strip club life. While working there, Price-Glynn had the unpleasant task of listening to the horror stories and the emotional pain that strippers are subjected to every day and night. Some strippers told stories of how they had been digitally raped while performing on stage, others spoke of how they were expected to perform oral sex (even when touching is explicitly prohibited on the job), some even vocalized their feelings of abandonment when bouncers turned their heads when patrons touched and groped them. But one story that almost every stripper shared was their desire to keep their work life completely separate from their real life, and how complicated and tiresome the struggle was to do so. One stripper recounted that she refuses to touch or be near her partner until she showers saying, “I don’t feel clean, and I don’t feel like I want to touch him or I want him to touch me.”[3] Another described the importance of showering, describing her routine in detail…

“First, I suds up from head to toe and rinse the foreign touches, foul odors, sweat, and grime from my body. After I consider myself squeaky clean, I make the water as hot as I can stand, and rotate slowly under the shower, making the temperature hotter still. The burn is purifying.”[4]

In addition to the interviews with the strippers, Price-Glynn collected information about the strip club’s business structure such as the way things operated during the day and the way wages were calculated. She found that security and safety were compromised regularly because the success of the club was valued more than the safety of the strippers. For instance, the intense masculine culture in a strip club causes the desire for physical boundaries to be broken, and if patrons want or think that physical contact is a possibility, then the club will be more successful with more customers and customers spending more on average. The collateral damage of the club’s success is the strippers’ safety and comfort. She also discovered the way wages were divided in a strip club. The strippers do not actually receive any money other than the money that patrons placed on their bodies while performing. But not only do they not receive a fixed wage, they must pay the strip club in order to gain the “right” to perform there.

The information gathered by means of truly working and integrating into the life of an employee of a strip club immensely validates the accuracy of her research and her conclusion of the organizational structure of a strip club needing reform because it is currently an unsafe place for women. The women who work in the strip club industry are extremely susceptible to psychological, emotional, and in some cases physical harm due to the way the structure marginalizes them. In order for stripping to become a safe type of sex work for women, Price-Glynn advocates for a restructuring of the organization of all strip clubs in order to empower the women rather than continuing the suppress them.

[1] Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, edited by Ronald Weitzer, Routledge, 2000.

[2] Price-Glynn, Kim, Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work. (New York, 2010), 3

[3] Price-Glynn, 134.

[4] Price-Glynn, 135.

Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction (2009), was written by anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn. The title alone gives an overview of what the reader should expect to see throughout the book. Men and Masculinity are understood to be the Second Sex in Inhorn’s title when the topic of reproduction occurs. The book cover consists of a female egg being fairly lager than the sperm that are surrounding it. The cover also portrays a sort of male dominance, yet at the same time, it could be interpreted as the males being left out and secondary. Inhorn writes about a variety of topics dealing with reproductionn and how men are always put on the back burner as the “The Second Sex” (Inhorn 1). She did a thorough job on observing men and their involvement during pregnancy.

Inhorn’s book has four different sections: Masculinity and Reproduction, Fertility and Family Planning, Infertility and Assisted Reproduction, and finally, Childbirth and Fatherhood. The chapter that conveyed her book as a whole, and what I would like to focus my analysis on is chapter 11 in the Childbirth and Fatherhood section. This chapter resonated with me as Inhorn analyzed the male role in reproduction and gave me a focus on male gender roles during pregnancy.

More recently, there has been conversations in the scientific field that men are becoming more involved during pregnancy. They are more likely to accompany women during doctor visits (especially ultrasound screenings), major decision making (such as amniocentesis), and even birthing courses. But pregnancy is still not fully equal amongst men and women. Inhorn questions the man’s involvement during pregnancy by explaining how she observed the cover of a Hebrew textbook on gynecology. The cover has a pregnant woman and her gynecologist physically touching while the woman’s partner is standing on the side. Inhorn questions the view of the male perspective on his female partner by asking “how does she look from his perspective” (Inhorn 281)? Through the lens of an anthropologists, Inhorn shifts her focus onto Israeli men in chapter 11 to “add a culturally situated account of men’s involvement in pregnancy” (Inhorn 282).

In chapter 11, “We are pregnant”: Israeli Men and the Paradoxes of Sharing, Inhorn immersed herself in the Israeli culture in 2003 as well as 2006 (287). She observed 39 couples, most of whom were married except for one. Most of the couples were first time parents with different social statuses, different ages, and different religious backgrounds (288). Inhorn conducted her work through an anthropological perspective which I appreciated because it allowed for in depth research. Since she was there once, she could observe changes during her return and analyze the differences between her 3 year gap. Inhorn refers to anthropologist and feminist writers that mention “various tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions” when men were involved during pregnancy (283).

During Inhorn’s analysis, she viewed the couples without interrupting their natural thinking process. Instead of conducting interviews, she sat in on birthing courses to hear couples speak. For these birthing courses, the brochures provided had images of men physically involved with the woman unlike Inhorn’s observation of the Hebrew textbook on gynecology. One of the brochures had the name of “Giving birth together” in hopes to make men feel included (285). These courses were all about establishing equality and were more academic rather than relaxing. Inhorn observed American birthing classes as more relaxing techniques and a “rite of passage” (286). On the other hand, Israeli birthing classes were more academic, but not strictly medical (300). Having larger groups rather than having just the woman, her doctor, and her partner, allowed for a more social atmosphere, as Inhorn noticed while attending these birthing courses.

Furthermore, Inhorn’s research provided some interesting topics that I agreed with. A gender role that is usually accepted throughout pregnancy is the woman researching and gaining knowledge about giving birth while the man is only expected to participate once the woman goes into labor. In the course of her observations, Inhorn became aware of the many tensions that occurred while getting men involved. For instance, a couple named Yoni and Tali presented a central tension which usually deals with a “shared pregnancy” problem (298). The couples issue has to deal with the fact that the pregnancy takes place in the woman, not the man, so how can it be shared? These tensions happen frequently, but they are usually resolved later on. Inhorn goes on to describe an experienced midwife’s “interesting” birthing courses that gives the couples a tour of the “birthing room” that would be in a hospital with medical equipment. However, Ruth was being stereotypical because she saw men as observing the monitors on the medical equipment instead of using the massage techniques she taught them.

Nevertheless, there were a few instances I did not agree with during one of Inhorn’s observations. Inhorn viewed men being accommodated during the birthing courses. On the day of the World Cup soccer tournament, the couples decided to come to the birthing courses regardless of the hoopla that surrounded the soccer game. At the beginning of the course, the instructor goes on to say “They must love you a lot, girls, you should appreciate them” to affirm the men and their bravery for missing the World Cup (289). I disagreed with this appreciation of men because if they wanted to be a part of the pregnancy they had to be willing to be there and it was not a “special effort” to miss a soccer game (289). In addition to the male accommodation, some Israeli men felt that there was too much fuss about pregnancy and that the women are being “spoiled” with all of this attention (296). The men saw some pregnancies where women gave birth and continued working right after. What they fail to understand is that every birth is different. Some births can be smooth and within a few hours while other births can be tedious and long. The accusation of the Israeli woman being “spoiled” was constructed from both genders because they both view Third World countries as people who can go through these experiences with less focus or fuss about them (296). Furthermore, when the Israeli men tried to understand pregnancy, they compared it to physical work they have done. One main example men try to compare pregnancy to is their work in the army. They undermine the importance of woman’s pregnancy by trying to make it seem easy because they went through something similar (293-4).

Overall, Inhorn did a great job providing in depth research about male participation during pregnancy. This was a well informing book for those who did not about male involvement during pregnancy. However, I wish Inhorn would have answered the question as to whether men should or shouldn’t be involved in pregnancy, but from her information that was given, and my personal observances of male involvement during pregnancy, it is a tricky question to answer. Many women believe that pregnancy is a woman’s field and no matter how much people try to involve the male partner, there will never be a true understanding of each other. A man cannot understand the physical demands that a woman’s body goes through. A woman cannot understand the loss of connection a male has during pregnancy, but they can be equal in other ways. The road to equality should be to start the journey of pregnancy together. Learning and growing at the same time would help cut down on the misunderstandings they have between each other.

Works Cited

Inhorn, Marcia Claire. <i>Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction</i>. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Print.

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