Customer Reviews

The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

In reference to the reviewer below who states that men are more "right-brained" thinkers, it is interesting to note that modern science is now demonstrating this is true. The May, 2005 issue of Scientific American discusses how men have a more active right-amgydala compared to women, in which men tend to be more central or integrative thinkers. Women in contrast tend to be more left-amgydala dominant, which is more concerned with finer-detailed aspects of cognitive processes. Experiments using the drug Propranolol have shown this striking differences between the sexes. This fits well with experience, where in conversation women tend to focus much more on details that seem superfluous to men who want it put into a context. For men, the "gist" is what is most important. Thus, in direct contradiction to Fisher's claim, it is men that are more the contextual, holistic thinkers.

Another interesting find is that women have a markedly higher orbitofrontal-to-amygdala ratio compared to men. The finding suggest that women on average might be able to then reign in their emotions better than men. This might very well be true, particularly when it comes to violent impulses. For other everyday encounters, however, it would seem judging at the rate of faux pas and other social effronteries committed by both sexes that neither gender seems particularly suited in reigning in less-than-desirable emotions. Given how some companies have had to actually have their human resource departments develop so-called "bully broad" programs, or anger-management for women managers, it would seem women do not have as an advantage the ability to control themselves emotionally. To be fair though, this might be more owed to the past trend of having looked the other way when a woman did something offensive because she was not a man, which normally would have gotten a man into trouble more readily.

At the end of the day, however, when all is said and done, the differences between the sexes boils down to differences between individuals. I tend to think visually. I cannot recall telephone numbers readily numerically but tend to recall them in terms of their geometric arrangement on the touchpad. You can say the number to me but it sometimes just doesn't register until I see in down on paper and have it visually in my head. I can usually control my emotions but I am admittedly an over-emotional and passionate man when it comes to certain political or social stances and I am not at all shy in expressing myself forcibly when a wrong has been done. I can also be impatient when it comes to having to listen to the women in my life having to go through a laundry-list of details to get to the point, although I've grown more tolerant of this as I've gotten older and think it can be quite charming at times.

In contrast, some of the women that have been personally involved in my life have run the gamut from proverbial "tom-boys," who've been keenly interested in mechanical workings and very visual thinkers as well, to women who've proved an amalgam of just about every trite stereotype assigned to women. In short, we deal with people-individuals-not some nebulous average such as "women" or "men" said to then represent its individual members. This point and consideration was thoroughly lost by Fisher, who clearly proves she has a very strong agenda of seeing women ridiculously superior in virtually every realm over man.

I don't fault all women for this error in thinking however; rather Fisher has proved that she is a very lef-amgydala dominant woman unable to see that holistic rich tapestry that is the human race in all its multivariate ways and capacities.

Reading this self-congratulatory feminist manifesto, one gets the impression the author would have us believe women of the species have just parachuted into our midst rather than being our long-time companions down here on the planet of the (male) apes. Given their complicity in all the wonders & woes through recorded time, it's only logical to attribute at least half-credit (and blame) for what humankind is and is becoming as due to their persisting and enduring influence over the eons. Yet here we find no such admissions of female culpability in the sorry state of the species. Instead, it seems to be exclusively males who have royally mucked things up so far. Yet, in the world according to Ms. Fisher, one must not despair, for all that will be changed as soon as women (the super sex) begin to come into their own. The reader is left with an uneasy impression this is all another thinly veiled sexist and virulently anti-male argument parading as social science a la Susan Faludi ("Backlash" and "Stiffed").

In all this heady prose of feminist celebration one can almost hear the faint echoes of Helen Reddy's feminist paean "I Am Woman' (Hear her roar!). Yet there is only anecdotal proof that any of what she purports is accurate or true of women in general, never mind that it will somehow ineluctably come to pass. For example, she boasts that women have "natural" talents males do not, and therefore are "better suited" biologically to excel at a whole range of complex social tasks than are males. This isn't a carefully couched scientific argument framed in terms of recognizing much wider individual variations within the female population itself than between males and females generally. Rather, it is argued as if it were a general sex-linked intellectual trait.

Were I to argue the same thing about male math skills, natural aggression and violent tendencies, or leadership skills, I would be summarily shouted down and denounced as a reactionary sexist. Yet one finds no such recognition by the author that she is skating on the paper-thin ice of anecdotal supposition rather than on established scientific fact. Instead, she twists and turns her way through this hodge-podge of psychological, sociological, and biological data as though it were the dawning of the Age of Aquarius suddenly realized. A few sobering facts; males behave the way they do at least partially because of the way they are raised, and women are largely in control of this socialization process. Have we seen much in the way of sensitivity, wisdom, or "win-win" success displayed here? Hardly. If men are insensitive, unable to openly display their emotions, and distantly angry, women who raise them, sleep with them, and love them must share part of the blame.

Judging by the performance of women in institutions where they are in the ascendency, such as at universities and medicine, emotionally-based political correct behavior has become the rule of the day. I was recently advised by a tenured female professor at a famous liberal arts college in western Massachusetts that the female caucus in her department was told to privately counsel any potential male PhD. candidates to refrain from wasting their time applying for teaching openings. Is this not blatant sex discrimination, deliberate prejudice of the first magnitude? Evidently not, my friend explained lamely that the ladies just want more time to 'season' the new female majority position within the department. And on and on.

Furthermore, the evidence from the past indicates that omen throughout history like Cleopatra, Catherine the Great or Queen Elizabeth who have gained and wielded power have been quite as abusive in the use of that power as are men. This is not to suggest that women are any worst than men, or even the same as their male counterparts. But there is little proof that any of the giddy stuff she is supposing to be the wave of the future has any basis anywhere other than in her feminist fantasies. Thus, to suppose women are naturally superior healers, thinkers, communicators, and negotiators is just so much hot air escaping into the already supersaturated ozone layer.

Men who have worked with women find them individually to be quite as arbitrary, capricious, selfish, and petty as the men they have labored under. Women who work for women are no more eager to celebrate their feminine superiors, but rather fear the personal consequences that the social, cultural, and politically-correct agendas many of their female supervisors harbor and use to separate the working wheat from the chaff. Like "Backlash" and "Stiffed", this is a silly, superficial, and self-interested gambit to further a feminist agenda by trying to foist the intrinsically sexist notion that there are such well-defined and momentously broad-based gender differences so critical to the way we humans interact socially, economically, and politically as to portend the dawning of some hopped-up revolutionary situation. Avoid this book; it is a waste of your time, energy, and money.

Can't figure out how I pulled myself through this book
without becoming ill.
Fisher is preachy,arrogant,sounds like a "know it all" in
her rant about how her "findings" prove women have a more
well rounded,intuitive and emotional intellegence.
What findings? She lives and breathes pop psychology and
pop science and lives for the all mighty dollar which she
knows will come her way,since America is at this time
obsessed with "gender difference.
In her small world,all behavior is hard wired in your
brain.You brain dictates all behavior and your hormones
are the master of your destiny.She overlooks the fact that
we develope our brains.A girl who plays with dolls will
have a very different brain structure from a girl who
played with spatial enhancing toys.Let's face it,most girls
are raised in an overly protective environment in which
exploration is limited.Mix it with other cultural
limitations on women and girls,and you will get women who
are significantly different in their behavior and
aspirations from men.If a woman or girl has not had these
restraints placed upon her,she will have traits which most
people preceive as only a male domain.
Her preachy writing is very annoying.She comes across as
someone who becomes insecure if she doesn't feel correct
at every turn.
No,this is not women's lib.There is nothing freeing about
the book.It's agenda seems to be to dictate to women.
To make them feel "superior" by "proving" their traits
outweigh men's "gender specific traits" in every way.
Women are individuals,some are spatial,some verbal.Same
with men.To imply that every woman has fixed traits not
only hurts women's chances in math,science and engineering,
but also leaves a woman feeling she is limited by being a
woman.

I expected more from Helen Fisher. This book was poorly written, and is biased. I think it's fine to acknowledge the differences between men and women,in fact I'd like to see more discussion about this, especially the biological aspects. But why not show how both sexes have strengths and weaknesses, and how they compliment each other? Instead Fisher fills page after page claiming that women are superior at almost every task, and in most cases provides supporting arguments that are weak. Talents of males are mentioned as an afterthought. And of course in the 21st century the supposedly limited skill set of males will no longer be needed. I suppose many female readers will eat this up, but discrimination is discrimination, no matter where it's directed. The prose is quite choppy, kind of surprising, given the innately superior language abilities of women. She must have had a male editor.

I stand firm in my belief that both sexes contribute equally in nearly, if not, every way and aspect of human living and life. Women who think their sex race will one day conquer the Earth, or anything of that sort, speak, in my opinion, from an unfair stance. Obviously, that woman has not seen the many ways both man and woman contribute to life as we know it, and have known life throughout the history of humankind. Therefore, I suggest she take another look!

I read this book twice because honestly my spatial brain could not handle all the fluid vague wording.This sort of book appeals to those who want to say their sex is better or worse at something,,It's a coffee table book for those who want to spend hours a day discussing which sex is good at this or that.What honest value does this have in a society already beaming with hate,misunderstandings and frustrations.What good does this do for a woman who doesn't have the characteristics meantioned in this book.
The author makes an attempt to praize women,but what a way to praize us!We are all different,each woman is a unique human being,some of us have verbal gifts and some find math really easy,as myself,I find math easier.To the writer this means I have a male brain or I'm fashioned somehow to that degree that I have male characteristics.
Strange how women have been assigned verbal skills and men have been assigned spatial and math abilities by the Ivory Tower set.
Makes me wonder sometimes.It's just John Gray revisted,nothing more.

The notion that genders posess competitive advantages is well known to anyone who understands cumulative evolution by selection. The premise that selection favours one gender over the other, or that it provides future advantages is at best speculative, at worst utter nonsense. Evolution does not, cannot act with future consequences in mind. Gender differences are present because they were selected. Males competiveness relates to mating but can be carried to many other spheres. Woman's advantage is less dynamic, more static, due to diminished requirement for mate competition . Most all else stems from these basic premises. The author tends to believe that the female strength will appreciate in the global economy. There is no reason to believe that competition for female mates will diminish in the future. Male's will continue to expand their inherent strengths in a future where fertility will surely decline. The authors conclusions are arrived at through ideology rather than vision.

When I was a second year graduate student, I remember this book being recommend in the Editors Recommend section of Scientific American. I loaned out a copy and read the book over the weekend. Unlike some readers, I was not angered. Quite the opposite, I was genuinely amused and had confirmed what I already knew about women, namely that they are primarily left-hemispherical thinking people, mistaking their "in the box" cosmos for the universe at large. One only needs to look at the fields that place heavy demand on broad ratiocination and multivariate contingency thinking. Men dominate in those fields, such as engineering, computer science, and business to name a few. Women are comparatively rare. Even in physics and computer science, in which much has been spent in government funding to increase female enrollment, women do not pursue these fields. Often women get flustered in trying to focus their attention on tasks that have a multitude of components. Compared to men, women are not as apt to attenuate their mental efforts while simultaneously keeping a global perspective. A case in point is object oriented programming. A programmer must have a global understanding and vision of the task while concurrently being highly focused on the modular aspects of the program, seeing how each component synergistically fits together. If you've ever taken a programming course, you will undoubtedly have noticed that the female student body had a much harder time grasping these global and locally-integrative methods and struggled at programming tasks noticeably more than their male counterparts. The difference cannot be owed to a sexist dichotomy in teaching the sexes. It is clearly biological in origin. Another area where similar observation is made is in strategy games, which too place heavy burden on players to be highly focused yet have a very broad, highly contingency-based thinking, and a global breadth in both time and space. Such a game is chess, and men innately excel over women at this game by orders of magnitude. Even in the most rapidly expanding areas of scientific thinking where paradigm shifts are needed, in which seeing a new pattern or integrating synergistically facts with new understandings is required, men excel over women in this capacity. Genomics is one such field, in which men out number women tremendously in terms of contributions, even though biology as a whole is the most balanced field of science in terms of gender and in which contributions to this field can be literally made by anyone having access to the internet to access publicly accessibly databases. This is not to say there are no great female scientists or women who excel in math and science and have natural inclinations towards these area (I know because I am dating one). Comparatively, however, they are much more rare than men with such talents. As a whole, women see the world in a far more limiting fashion and often present their opinions as observations or, worse yet, as facts. They mistake their range of their thinking for the whole in a given area of consideration and seldom can think outside the proverbial box in a paradigmatic right-brained fashion. It's important to see the forest from the trees, but it is also important to recognize that the forest behaves qualitatively differently than the proverbially trees alone can account. Lastly, I find it interesting that some recent female authors such as Fisher and Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography) are focused on the topic of "female choice" in mate selection. In this day of age where Britney Spears parades half naked on stage and neither sex is in want of opportunity for selection, I find these authors, who are to put it politely not the first choice a man would have in mind when seeking pulchritude, revealing their own internalized fantasia of having complete sexual choice to assuage the painful reality that their prospects are restrictive compared to many other women. True intelligence and beauty is a rarity by themselves. Together they are a most rare combination. After reading this book and seking the picture of Ms. Fisher, it does not surprise me that she is "single" and at least in her fifties now. It is safe to say then that the clear intellectual limitations of this author and her restrictive sexual prospects, coupled with her being in a male dominated field has created some bitterness expressed under the guise of "equality." Hers is that classic role-reversal fantasy that many women from Fisher's era unfortunately suffer. The book is a genuine embarrassment for any claim of the innate superiority of women, given this poorly written and reasoned book was written by a woman.

Well, this was another one of those books I picked up to try to understand my mother-in-law better. Thank the gods that I found it used! This book is yet another one of those "women are the nurturers" sorts of books: just the sort of thing to give my MIL a present, after all, remember, "women are tied to mother earth by virtue of their menstrual cycle!" Remember that, and remember it well, for it will guide you in making sense (well maybe not SENSE, per se) of this unfortunate mishmash of sociobiology/genetics/post-feminist ramblings.

You're probably wondering, in light of that last sentence, why I am giving this book three stars instead of the one that you would expect. One of the primary reasons is that, despite the sketchy facts, and the overall silliness, and the evidence that leads one to form the OPPOSITE conclusion to that the author seems to be promoting, this really is an amusing book, especially if you think that women and men are the way they are due to socialization.

Opposite, eh? Well, by page 10, the author has asserted that only 50% of women express the genes that lead to the internetworked functions of both hemispheres in the cortex which results in the traits of "web thinking," "contextual thought," and nurturing that she associates with all women. Women, and only women, are capable of thinking in web-like and interconnected terms, according to the author, and her entire theory of women's pending ascendency in the world economoy is completely based upon these traits. However, there is one HUGE problem: the half of the female population that does NOT express these traits. So, will these spatially inclined, non-verbally fluent women who make up 50% of the female population be left behind in the coming business revolution? It is unclear, since the author never addresses any of these issues.

I am one of those women who doesn't conform to the author's stereotype of women as the networkers; the emotionally literate person who can guess what a person is feeling and what he or she needs; who cares about family and group harmony above all else. In fact, frankly, I loathe emotional confrontation, family gatherings, and I could give a rat's patootie about harmony. I may be verbal and a "web thinker" but I am also rational, unemotional, unexpressive, and non-nurturing (that's not to say that I'm uncaring-- I'm very supportive-- but the other person has to tell me what he or she needs, despite Fisher's assertion that I should just be able to "tell" somehow, psychically).

This founding fact upon which Fisher bases her entire analysis appears to indicate little that would contradict the theory that most gender differences are due to socialization rather than biology. Fisher's subsequent factoids and blurbs throughout the book do little to support her contention that men and women are designed differently in their capacities, or that they have evolved differently enough to justify them taking different roles in society. I thought that dreck had gone out with the feminine mystique, but it looks to be alive and well today, despite all fervent efforts to expunge it.

At least Fisher managed to convey this all in an amusing way (well, to me, anyway. Maybe it was just the absurdity of it all...), which was something that the authors of "The Female Power Within," a book about this same sort of dreck, didn't manage. So, if nothing else, that, at least, made this book somewhat worth reading.

I never did mention what the third star was for. It's for Fisher providing me with a Christmas present for my mother-in-law, which she will love to death. Thank you, Ms. Fisher, for this small boon!

As I was reading this book I felt the author's premise was downright silly. She uses biological research to make incomplete and overly simplistic arguments to support her view that women are superior to men. I think she misjudged the reading public in taking what she - or the publishers- thought would be a popular political/social position that would sell books, especially to women. Honestly, I felt this book was so poor that I was too embarrassed to put it on my bookshelf.