Most people, without thinking about it very much, elide sexual differences between men and women with gender, the cultural categories of masculinity and femininity. Surely, one might imagine, the more scientists discover about the former, the more refined and true will the latter become. These two books undermine that view. People are aware that non-Western cultures have different ideas about gender from our own, but no one is disturbed by that for a moment: their ideas, we say to ourselves, are based on ignorance and strange religions and values. We think we are different: we have science, which is gradually and inexorably analysing those difficult questions which lie in an unsorted jumble at the back of our minds - ideas of natural propensities, hormones, the left and right sides of the brain, feminine nurturing or, even more hazily, genetic programming for differences between the male and female brain. These books do not deny that science is making advances, but in different ways make the point that we need to be able to stand back some way in order to know how to think about them.

LRB 19 April 1990 | PDF Download