Gender and Our Brains by Gina Rippon

Rating: WARTY!

This was subtitled "how new neuroscience explodes the myths of the male and female minds,"which struck me as odd. is the author goignt o argue that neither male nor female has a mind?! But I thought this would be more interesting than it actually was. My main problem with it was how long and dry it was. It felt more like reading an academic paper than it did a book aimed at the general populace, but maybe it wasn't aimed at the genpop. Who knows. For me it was interesting only in parts. One problem with it was that it spent so much time digging into the history of the misperceptions about female brains, but it seemed to me that anyone reading this would be already familiar with all of that - to one extent or another, so a simple précis of that history would have been more than sufficient. This author disagreed!

Once I realized that, I gave up any pretense of reading it and simply skimmed it, stopping at points that interested me for deeper reading. Curiously, one of the most fascinating parts to my mind was the discussion of gender differentiation among babies and infants - where there is little to none, not surprisingly. Paradoxically, I was more interested in learning if the brains were in any way different, and if so why and how, but there seemed to be very little on that topic - unless I missed it.

Maybe the overall message was that they're really not, which is largely what I was expecting. Clearly men and women are not alike, but that doesn't mean they should not be treated alike wherever possible and sensible. I mean it's foolish to pretend we're so alike to the extent that we ignore that women have a womb and a period among many other things, and are underrepresented in medical testing for drug safety, for example. Obviously, with some understandable differences in the chemicals raging through a body, there have to be some differences, but I wasn't able to easily find any real discussion on that topic. I found parts that touched on it, but the discussion seemed to whiplash between 'well they're different here', and 'but not much', or 'they're different here', and 'whether this is nature or nurture is unclear' and so on.

In short, the whole thing felt it was a bit of a an exercise in fence-sitting to me, and I became frustrated with all the pussy-footing around. At little more pedagogy would have been appreciated, but what there was seemed lost, like seawater buried under the foam when the wave rolls ashore leaving nothing but shifting sand and froth. So if you're into deep academic papers, then this might work for you, but as a teaching tool for those of us who wanted some clear idea of what, if any, real differences there are, why and how these come about, and what they might rationally mean, this book failed me. I therefore can't commend it as a worthy read.

X-Novo by Ken Hagdal

Title: X-Novo
Author: Ken Hagdal
Publisher: Niflheimr (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Erratum:
p71 "Her Holiness' reliquary..." should be "her Holiness's reliquary..."

This novel was really hard to get into - I mean really hard. I'd gone 30 pages in and I still had no clue what was going on here which was equal parts frustrating and irritating. I had a really tough time trying to grasp where the setting was, and what the women I was introduced to were actually supposed to be doing, or even where the story was going, let alone where it came from. This removed much of my incentive to continue reading. It was at this point that I set a goal of reaching the halfway point (about 130 pages) and giving up if it didn't improve, but I was truly struggling to maintain that resolve, especially when it didn't improve.

It's evidently a story wherein the tables are turned and instead of women being typically subjugated, men are instead and decidedly so, being kept as slaves or almost as pets by the ruling females.

The sorriest thing - apart from feeling uncomfortably in the dark that is, was the unpleasant taste of misogyny I got from this. The women seemed to be rather bitchy, and focused on make-up, clothes, and men. I found that disturbing to say the least. Women are not the inverse of men - not unless your entire focus is solely on the primary sex organs.

The main character, Lisa Fenrich, who narrates this (yes it's another first person PoV unfortunately) seems to think of nothing but men in her free time. She apparently had some sort of relationship (it's not specified exactly what, except that she liked him - at least in the part I read) which was terminated by an accident, and she's not dealing well with it. Pressured by her colleagues, she decides to revisit the "Pool" where she can find a replacement man.

Now here is where it gets odd. The first guy she looks at is a bank executive, so now I'm completely confused, because clearly you cannot have a slave or a pet become a bank executive, so what, again, exactly, is going on here? I had no idea, and we're past page forty by this time.

I simply could not get what was going on, or how it was that women had apparently and rather suddenly become the dominant gender. Was there a war? Was there a vote? Did the entire male population surrender? Why were there not men who fought this - literally? Most of the military is male, sad to say, most of the business leadership is male, most of the police force, most of the government, so how was it exactly that women became so overwhelmingly dominant? None of this was explained in the pages I read to the point where Lisa video-conferenced prospective "husbands", and that was becoming a serious nuisance.

She'd narrowed her list down to three choices including one who was scowling in his photograph, and had avoided filling out as much as he could get away with on the questionnaire. So by what criteria did he show up in Lisa's narrow list? Again, it makes no sense. It's obvious from the start that he's going to be the one, yet he has no respect for her and she has none for him. She berates him for judging a woman by her appearance, yet that's precisely what she's done with these three men. Am I supposed to root for a shallow hypocrite like her? Despite their disastrous interaction, she chooses him for no reason other than it's the plot. Knowing that he will be arriving before very long, this dominant Lisa's first reaction is to clean her home. Seriously? I guess it makes as much sense as neon black for a "color"....

There's another thing I don't get here, either. The women all use the word 'goddess" - as in "Thank Goddess for that!" or "Good Goddess what's going on here?" Which goddess? I have no idea - and how did that start? The majority of women believe in a god - a male god. How did they suddenly all start believing in a female god? The even have a new Bible, with "New Genesis", which reduces the fairy-tale of Adam and Eve to a story not about the abuse and subjugation of women, but merely about sex and who gets to be on top. Seriously?

The church hierarchy is mostly male, and religion is very male-centric, especially for the big three monotheistic religions, so how did that all disappear? No explanation - no sense. There's also a female movement called the B party and even by page one hundred, I had no idea whatsoever what that was all about. Neither did I get what the deal was with cosmetics. Women are now dominant, yet for some reason they're still buying into the need to wear cosmetics the application of which has zero utility to women except in that it enables them to please men? They still dress-up for men? This made little sense to me.

When I got to pages around the mid-70's, the text became nothing but info dump/tirade and was truly boring, so I skipped several pages of that. There was another annoyance in that words describing people's occupations tended to have -ess appended to them even where it wasn't appropriate, so we had words like "scientistess" and "guardess", and "officeress". That struck me as not only silly, but also, from the female characters' perspective, as counter-productive. I just didn't buy that these women would debase their currency with that kind of thing.

So, in short, I cannot recommend this novel at all.