“Every human culture before ours has regarded female sexuality as something that is so extremely powerful that it has to be regulated. Who knows what will happen [now that female sexuality has been unleashed on the world]? The birth control pill is the next atom bomb, in terms of social and historical significance.”— Jordan B. Peterson
So, to start: how does the female brain differ from the male brain? Neuroscientists explain that typically gendered male and female brains differ in one significant area in the hypothalamus, known as the medial preoptic area, or mPOA. The actual function of the mPOA is still unknown, but we do know that the hypothalamus controls the more “beastly” human behaviors.
Simon LaVay explains in his book, The Sexual Brain, that neuroscientists think of the hypothalamus as “haunted by animal spirits and the ghosts of primal urges. They suspect that it houses, not the usual shiny hardware for cognition, but some witches’ brew of slimy, pulsating neurons adrift in a broth of mind-altering chemicals.”
What does this brain difference lead to, behaviourally?
Population studies show that on average, males often have a “fight-or-flight” response to unknown elements in the environment. This response is mediated by our brain’s emotional centre, the amygdala, and is automatic, and thus more imprecise and thoughtless.
Females, on the other hand, usually have a “tend and befriend” response to unknowns. This response is also mediated by the amygdala, but also involves higher cognitive thought processes, like recognizing others’ emotions.
What’s more, we know that females can usually form emotional memories more easily and more strongly than males, which might be associated with the neurotransmitter oxytocin in the amygdala. On the whole, females are more empathetic than males, consistently scoring higher in EQ, or emotional quotient.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the above conclusions. But it’s important not to discard the scientific evidence altogether. The fact is, most women do tend to be more emotionally intuitive, and less firmly decisive than most men — and this has had extremely significant social consequences.
Hermione Granger, Harry Potter’s closest female friend, has a much wider emotional range than her two male friends. In The Prisoner of Azkaban, her decision to take on more schoolwork and stress than she can handle culminates in a teary emotional breakdown — quite true to real life, but perhaps not so politically correct in a world where women are called upon to “man up.”
It’s interesting to note that the movie version of Prisoner has Hermione release her pent-up emotions in a very masculine way, violently knocking over a crystal ball and storming out of Divination class. Later, she forcefully punches Draco Malfoy and coolly comments, “That felt good.” This, instead of the much more emotional bitch-slap described in the book.
According to Jordan Peterson, this new societal pressure on everyone to act in a more traditionally masculine — including feminine-gendered people — has resulted in some incredibly negative psychological consequences.
“Women are now being called upon to adopt a masculine role, and that is not easy to integrate with being female,” says Peterson. “You could take a poll of female university students. First, of female undergraduates, about half of them will say that they don’t want children. Then, take a poll of 29-year-old women: maybe one would say she didn’t want children.”
Historically, women have been “sold a bill of nonsense,” according to Peterson. “It used to be that you couldn’t be in the workforce; then, it changed to you could be in the workforce. Now, you have to be in the workforce — and have to be is not the same as able to be.”
He notes that men’s jobs aren’t even very interesting. “Who’s to say that making widgets in a factory is more desirable than raising a child?”
But the most destructive social consequences have arisen in the lower classes, where women don’t have the same privilege and protection that, say, most female U of T students have.
“Our model for what a woman [should be] — aggressive and very emotionally stable — is actually a very small slice of the female population,” says Peterson. “Something that I discovered [as a clinical psychologist] that I had no idea could even happen, is that there is a large amount of women who do not know how to say no [to sexual advances].
So, [“strong women”] (like the movie version of Hermione Granger) can easily say no to, and sexually reject men. But, take someone who was already timid and eager to please, and put her in a room with someone aggressive, and she often cannot say no.” One thing that our current liberal, intellectual environment often fails to recognize is “that social structure was there to protect women,” and not simply to oppress them.
The Twilight series is incredibly unpopular among the intellectual elite, but it’s massively popular elsewhere.
Theodore Dalrymple, a psychiatrist and essayist who spent many years treating lower-class citizens in Britain, takes issue with the view of certain liberal intellectuals (like, say, Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas), who view traditional institutions as something that need to be destroyed.
In The Frivolity of Evil, Dalrymple describes a representative female patient — a 21-year-old woman who was sexually abused as a child, who has three children from three different fathers, all of whom were emotionally and or physically abusive. “With three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child […] looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both.”
The Twilight series, for all of its literary (and, some argue, socio-political) flaws, at least understands this and communicates it to its mostly young female readership. The main character, Bella Swan, chooses to court and marry her dream man Edward Cullen — a vampire who warns her that he has the power and potential to harm her (as all men do; here it is metaphorically represented with beastly vampire powers).
However, Edward then says, “Just because we’ve been […] dealt a certain hand […] it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above — to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted. To try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.” This is the exact message that Dalrymple tries to communicate to both his psychiatric clients and his readers.
In his essay “Sex and the Shakespeare Reader,” Dalrymple notes that “beastliness […] means sexuality without the human qualities of love and commitment: for without love, sex is merely animal — beastly in the most literal sense. And, as [Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure] makes clear, the animal triumphs over the human when laws or institutions are too weak. The baby is not socialized by the nurse but beats her whenever it is thwarted in a desire, which in infancy can only be instinctive. It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.”
In Twilight, Edward becomes “fully human” by literally listening to the beat of Bella’s heart. This experience makes him realize that “it won’t be so hard again.” If that isn’t an obvious metaphor, I don’t know what is. The Twilight series communicates that love and trust can help humans to conquer any self-centred, savage impulse.
The Twilight books function as an improvement on Beauty and the Beast for modern times. The institution of marriage is no longer as relevant as it once was, so it would be wiser for a young girl to go for a beast who has already tamed himself (as Edward has) before she sleeps with him. For one, on the off-chance that she does get pregnant, he’ll be more likely to stick around and help her raise the baby.
But, far more importantly, it will protect her brain from trauma in a literal, chemical way. Psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, in his bestselling book, The Brain That Changes Itself, notes that post-orgasm, the human brain floods with oxytocin, which provides “the ability for two brains in love to go through a period of heightened plasticity, allowing them to mold to each other and shape each other’s intentions and perceptions.”
If we empathize with our lovers post-coitally (as girls tend to if they do in fact like the person), this means that we are actually getting an imprint of our lover onto our brains. What’s more, if you actually did some of the work, exercise-wise, then your hippocampus probably grew new brain cells, and you are even more likely to remember the event.
Our culture has traditionally associated a masculinized gender with the male sex, and a feminized gender with the female sex. Historically, people who deviate too far from these norms have been socially punished. But, in reality, sex is about masculine and feminine elements connecting between two brains — it’s the nerves under our skin, and not our bodies’ outer shells, that make sex happen.
As Human Behavioral Biology lecturer Professor Franco Taverna explains, “Sex is not in the [reproductive] organs — those are just the plumbing. The brain is the true sex organ. Without it, your organs won’t do you much good.”
The female brain seems to have evolved for the ultimate sexual experience to be with someone it loves and trusts, which takes time and commitment. Neuroscientific evidence points to higher-quality female orgasms when the insula is activated (this typically occurs when you think of the person whom you “love”). It takes full devotion during sex to completely lose yourself, and reach that moment of transcendent ecstasy.
This is something that both Hermione Granger and Bella Swan will benefit from, since both characters, as far as I can tell, wait until they have a solid emotional bond with their man before engaging in sexual acts.
Hermione is not an archetypal hero. Unlike Harry, she doesn’t, for example, face a lurking serpent (which represents the unknown), conquer it, and find a virgin mate (Ginny) as a direct consequence.
What Hermione does seem to represent is the struggles of being a modern woman. She has a feminine emotional range, and yet she finds a way to mediate between masculine and feminine, and grows up to have a successful career.
Bella represents a much more traditional woman, one who dedicates her life to her husband and child.
One thing that I hope modern feminists will concede is that both Bella and Hermione are better role models than, say, Miley Cyrus in the song, “Can’t Be Tamed.” That song is essentially the alpha-straight-male’s nightmare, isn’t it? Jane Goodall discovered that without the taming of unifying social structures, primates will rip each other to shreds. Human beings can be downright beastly. We need to be tamed to function in society. That’s why it’s only socially acceptable for us to bite each other during the “terrible twos.” Clinical psychologists (or, at least, psychoanalysts) say that an adult who throws a temper tantrum is regressing. And, look at what happened to Chris Brown after he so viciously regressed — complete social ostracism.
