THE PROCESS OF GENDER ‘‘All this cell, brain, and organ development stuff is fascinating,’’ a frustrated parent might say to me. ‘‘But I still want to know why my little boy rushes around shooting imaginary laser guns, while my little girl prefers jump rope.’’ Many Loveweb participants raise similar challenges, citing studies showing that gender […]

During our lives, the brain changes as part of a dynamic developmental system that includes everything from nerve cells to interpersonal interactions. In principle, we can apply similar concepts to gonads and genitals. The gonads and genitals developed during fetal development continue to grow and change shape during childhood, affected by such things as nutrition, […]

Genes, then, function as part of a complex cell with its own important his­tory. Cells, in turn, operate as large, intimately connected groups that form coherent organs within a complex, functionally integrated body. It is at this level, when we look at cells and organs within the body, that we can begin to glimpse how […]

We live in a genocentric world.7 The ‘‘genes ‘r’ us’’ habit is so deeply imbued in our thought processes that it seems impossible to think otherwise. We think of our genes as a blueprint for development, linear information that need only be read out of the book of life. We go to movies in which […]

Consider a child born in the summer of 1944. Later she became a scientist. Does a portrait of her at age two (figure 9.1)—one hand holding a water-filled test tube up to the light, the other grasping a measuring cup— give evidence of the early expression of an inborn inclination to measure and analyze, of […]

Instead of trying, impossibly, to divorce ourselves from culture, claiming, somehow, that we scientists can create value-free knowledge, suppose we em­braced our cultural locations? Suppose we strove to create stories about ro­dent sexuality that look at everything from genes to culture (rat culture, that is) as part of an indivisible system that produces adult behavior. […]

Throughout the 1980s social scientists turned to biology to explain human sexual practices, while biologists found their own research paradigms influ­enced by new social acceptance and definitions of human sexual diversity. In 1981, researchers Alan Bell, Martin Weinberg, and Sue Hammersmith pub­lished a study called Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. They had […]

Beach was a minority voice in a sexually conservative era, but increasingly, scientists could not avoid hearing the political and social arguments voiced by people such as Betty Friedan, whose 1963 best-selling book The Feminine Mystique exploded the suburban family idyll. As Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (in 1966), other movements for social […]

Young’s 1959 paper electrified scientists interested in hormones and behavior. By the mid — 1960s the research literature was filled with articles validating the O/A hypothesis in rats, hamsters, mice, and monkeys. The hypothesis had become a theory and then a concept.103 And as a concept, it extended well beyond coital behaviors. As the years […]

As the cold war ideology that praised heterosexuality and ranted about the homosexual menace came to dominate the national scene during the 1950s, more restrictive readings of animal sexuality gained visibility and strength. By 1959, a new rodent emerged that was distinctly heterosexual and far more bound by gender roles than were Beach’s rats. A […]