Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What’s interesting about the tales that Pinker tells in her book is that many of the men who suffer from [autism, Asperger’s syndrome], nonetheless manage to pursue successful careers by working around and sometimes even taking advantage of their disabilities. In sharp contrast, Pinker also tells tales of gifted, intelligent women with promising careers, who nonetheless drop out of the rat race to spend more time with their families. Pinker’s book puts names, personal anecdotes and intimate stories behind the statistics.
Very contentious stuff. On to Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes.
Pinker pursues the same issue as Browne does, but from a slightly different perspective. While the legal scholar Kingsley R Browne advances his argument with court cases, legal precedents, and government statistics, the clinical psychologist Susan Pinker weaves her tales with client case studies, personal experiences and vivid anecdotes.
Pinker returns to Baron-Cohen’s theme of the evolved sex difference in male and female brains. Men’s greater tendency toward systemising, when expressed in extreme form, can render them clinically suffering from autism, Asperger’s syndrome and other disabilities that hinder their abilities to communicate with and relate to others. Pinker points out that boys and men are in general far more fragile and suffer from a far greater number of illnesses, conditions, and syndromes than women do. Men, not women, are the weaker sex.
What’s interesting about the tales that Pinker tells in her book is that, despite these disabilities and clinical conditions, many of the men who suffer from them nonetheless manage to pursue successful careers, by working around and sometimes even taking advantage of their disabilities. In sharp contrast, Pinker also tells tales of gifted, intelligent women with promising careers, who nonetheless drop out of the rat race to spend more time with their families. Pinker’s book puts names, personal anecdotes and intimate stories behind the court cases and statistics that Browne discusses in his book, and demonstrates that women indeed do have much better things to do than make money. They’re called life.
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Dr Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist, Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at University College London and in the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College University of London. He has written over 80 articles and chapters in psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology and biology. He shares his evolutionary psychological observations in his popular blog The Scientific Fundamentalist at Psychology Today.
