The Summer Without Men

be the most fatigued and endangered through the over exertion of the female brain.” The thought-shrivels-your-ovaries theory had a long and robust life. Dr. George Beard, author of American Nervousness, argued that unlike the “squaw in her wigwam,” who focused on her nether regions and popped out one child after another, the modern woman was being deformed by thinking, and to prove it, he cited the work of a distinguished colleague who had measured highly educated uteruses and found them to be only half the size of those never exposed to learning. In 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke, following the noble Beard, published a book with a friendly title: Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls, in which he argued that menstruating girls should be banned from the classroom and cited hard evidence from clinical studies conducted at HARVARD on intellectual women which had determined that too much knowledge had made these poor creatures sterile, anemic, hysterical, and even mad. Maybe that was my problem. I read too much, and my brain exploded. In 1906, the anatomist Robert Bennett Bean claimed that the corpus callosum—the neural fibers that bind the two halves of the brain together—were bigger in men than in women and hypothesized that the “exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity.” Big thoughts = Big CC.
    But no one utters such nonsense now, you say. Science has changed. It is based on facts. And yet, colleagues of my wayward husband are hard at work measuring brain volume and thickness, scanning its oxygenated blood flow, injecting hormones into mice, rats, and monkeys, and knocking out genes left and right to prove beyond all doubt that the difference between the sexes is profound, predetermined by evolution, and more or less fixed. We have male and female brains, different not only for reproductive functions but in countless other essential ways. While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings, each sex has its own KIND of MIND. Dr. Renato Sabbatini, for example, distinguished neurophysiologist, who was a postdoc fellow at the MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE, enumerates a long list of differences between us and them and then announces: “This may account, scientists say, for the fact that there are many more [male] mathematicians, airplane pilots, bush guides, mechanical engineers, architects and race car drivers than female ones.” Study all you want, girls, you will never solve a Riccati equation. Why? The wigwam idea returns without bringing in Native Americans (it is no longer possible to demonize or idealize the wigwam; we must retreat to peoples who can no longer be insulted): “Cave men hunted. Cave women gathered food near the home and took care of the children.” But not to worry, our esteemed professor assures us (citing an even higher paternal AUTHORITY, that great “‘Father’ of sociobiology” at HARVARD, Edward O. Wilson), you might not have evolved to make it as a bush guide, but “human les tend to be higher than males in empathy, verbal skills, social skills and security seeking, among other things, while men tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, rank-related aggression, and other characteristics.” Our superior “verbal skills,” if we follow the professor’s own logic, explain why women have dominated the literary arts for so long, nary a man in sight. I am sure you have also noticed that when the titans of contemporary literature are referred to, both in academia and in the popular press, the numbers of women among them are, quite simply, overwhelming.
    I am happy to say that my own (or used-to-be own) Boris would not agree with Dr. Sabbatini. Up to his ears in rats as my old man is and attached to evolution and genes as he also is, he knows that genes are expressed through the environment, that the brain is plastic and dynamic; it develops and changes over time in relation to what’s out there. He also knows, despite our commonalities, that people are not rats and that the higher executive functions in human beings can be decisive in determining what we become, and he knows that good science one day can become bad science the next, as was true of the sensational discovery in 1982 that the corpus callosum, the selfsame fibrous brain-hemisphere connector of Dr. Bean, especially one part of it known as the splenium, is actually LARGER in women than in men. This study, soon to be trumpeted to the