Pink Brains vs. Blue Brains

There’s nature and then there’s nurture. Nature builds you from the ground up and leaves you there. Nurture shapes you. Nature uses blueprints that were evolved over millennia, nurture further molds you to fit your environment. If your environment shapes you in such a way that your blueprints are especially fit for the environment, those blueprints further evolve. But nature can’t make your blueprints so adaptable that nurture can make you into any old shape, nor can nurture be so aggressive that it breaks the original blueprints into something unrecognizable. More or less, no matter what nurture has done to you, you can always look back at where nature started you off.

So, at any given moment, it would be all too easy to confound nature and nurture unless we’re looking at your very beginning. A series of articles popping up all over the world today are claiming that men and women have different brains. But they’re not studying men and women at their very beginning—so is what’s being seen nature or nurture?

On the one hand, it’s a moot question. Who cares. If men and women are different, then they’re different, and no need to ask why. But the problem is, the strictest definition of one’s sex is determind by nature, at the moment of conception. At this point it’s just a label, devoid of connotations, and useful only to predict how the developing zygote, and fetus will shape itself.

But “being a man” and “being a woman” for anyone over the age of a few seconds is full of connotations, and those are connotations everyone holds in their heads… and as social creatures, we tend to reinforce those connotations on developing people i.e. children. And so we, the nurturers, shape and mold those who have been given certain natural characteristics until they are fit for their environments.

Or, not to put too fine a point on it, we reinforce existing stereotypes by using those stereotpyes to identify people with particular characteristics. We dress little girls in pink. We might be able to prove that girls are born with a natural preference for pink, but the point is, when people see pink, they treat the person “like a girl.”

Surrounding all of these articles about the differences between male and female brains are even more articles about brain plasticity, that is, the way the brain literally changes shape over time. The brain is plastic because of nature; the brain’s plasticity allows it to change by way of nurture. 

Therefore, all of these articles that are pointing out that “men and women have different brains” are essentially saying “men and women are different.” That’s as a determinant statement as ‘the word ‘man’ and the word ‘woman’ are different words.”