At any rate, I feel like Brenda Allen had more substantial evidence to back up her point. I also tend to agree with her position more. While I agree that Brizendine is correct in saying that biology has an influence in communication, I think the more substantial reason is culturally based. I'm more inclined to believe that the culture we interact with and within on a daily basis has more effect on how we communicate than a difference of less that 1% in our DNA. Also, if culture is the main reason people communicate how they do, this accounts for the difference in styles between social groups, in addition to men and women. Biology can make no such claim, since Asian womens' brains and Caucasian womens' brains do not have the 1% difference in DNA that men and women apparently do. Their brains are far more similar, yet still experience vast differences in communication styles due to culture.
Plus, I would like to relate this to knowledge I discovered outside of class, that suggests that lesbians have a brain structure similar to heterosexual males, and gay men have brain structures similar to heterosexual women. By Brizendine's reasoning then, lesbians should communicate like men, and vice versa. However, I've known several homosexual and bisexual individuals who communicate like their heterosexual peers of the same sex (I've noticed this particularly true of so-called "femme" and "lipstick" lesbians, and bisexual men and women). I assume this is because they were raised in a heteronormative culture, who told them how to communicate as women/men, regardless of, or unaware of, their sexual orientation and brain structure.
But again, we run into the problem that culture and biology both have so much influence on identity and communication that it is almost impossible to isolate one from the other.
Questions:
1) What do you think would happen if a child were raised in an entirely gender-neutral culture?
2) Would that be detrimental to the child's growth and development to deprive them of that construct/aspect of identity?
3) How would Brizendine account for feminine communication of some lesbians/masculine communications of some gay men?
question 1- i think that the child would be surprised by the real world- and not understand the environment around them- but learn quickly, because it is everywhere.
ReplyDeleteQuestion 2. I think it would be detrimental to a child's growth because they wouldn't know how to socialize with other people. Now a stereotype is that most homeschool kids are weird. It's because they never learned the social skills that most kids that go to a public or private school learned from an early age. Without building some sort of social identity most people will not want to interact with that person.
ReplyDeleteThere are people who enjoy being alone, but there isn't a single person that can bear solitude.
Thanks for pointing out the error in the positions for issue #5. I kept reading them over and over again and getting more and more confused. I started to wonder if I was losing my mind, which on some days is a real viable option for me. I'm glad we're not the crazy ones, but instead McGraw Hill is.
ReplyDelete