Apparently, it's completely acceptable these days to assume that the gender status quo is biologically prespecified (convenient, huh?). I've been reading a lot of stuff lately about this that makes me quite angry, but I won't cite it here because I presume it's calculated to stir up krrrrazy feminists like me. Feminists who want an egalitarian society and pretty much get along with men. Anyway, the most amazing instance of this is that someone actually made up a part of the brain that differs between men and women. Then, he made up a person who named the brain part.

I very much like what Mark Liberman had to say about this "neuro-indoctrinology" on Language Log, so I repeat it here:

In the first place, the ideas about what men and women are like haven't really changed much from the days when such theories were used to argue against women's suffrage or careers for women outside the home. The stories are now usually framed so as to make fun of males and praise women, but that's just a matter of how the advertising copy is written. These authors generally present a rather unpleasant picture of what boys and men are like: uncommunicative, out of touch with their emotions, distractable, obsessed with sex, aggressive and competitive. The idea seems to be that this is OK as retribution for all the years of negative stereotypes of girls and women -- and after all, similar ideas have been endorsed by many feminist writers. But the inverse picture of girls and women, though now framed in positively-evaluated terms, is pretty much the same the old negative stereotype of women as over-sensitive, over-emotional, manipulative gossips, who need to be protected from the rough-and-tumble world of men.