Whipple - X and why: the rules of attraction: why gender still matters

To Catherine

For, among many things, attempting to explain to our nanny why the kitchen calendar had an entry reading Sex Party!!!!

Tell me more, tell me more, did you get very far? Tell me more, tell me more, like does he have a car?

Olivia Newton John and John Travolta

One spring day in 2009, Laerke Bjerager spotted a man she fancied, walked up to him on a busy Copenhagen shopping street and asked him for sex. He said yes.

Then she went and asked another, and another, and another.

She found the men didnt always say yes, at least not immediately. Sometimes, they were worried they might be part of a practical joke. Then, she had to convince them. They were apprehensive, and curious, she says. Which seems reasonable; nothing in their life so far would have convinced them that this was a plausible scenario. Notwithstanding, most took a punt on it eventually and agreed to sleep with her.

Those that didnt generally had girlfriends. So they had to, regretfully, decline. They were apologetic, they didnt want to hurt your feelings. It was, she says, a very efficient confidence boost.

Elsewhere in Denmark, Kaare Bro Wellnitz was asking the same question but having the opposite experience. His confidence, in fact, was taking a bit of a bashing. By the end of his first day he had had no real yeses. There was one woman who said yes, but she was laughing and it was more a yeah, sure rather than a yes, please.

At least this woman wasnt offended or worse, scared as many were when he asked them for sex. One girlwas afraid if I was some kind of lunatic. He could see her point. He felt slightly mad too. It was very hard to put yourself up to it. It wasveryvery strange.

It wasnt so strange, though, that he wasnt sure what he would say if the roles were reversed, and he was asked for sex. If a girl came up to me, I would be one of those guys whod say, Yeah, sure. Its a nice opportunity.

If he had said yes then, like all the other men, a few seconds later he would have learnt the offer was a sham. Because no one ended up having sex. These Danish students were repeating an experiment on gender differences in casual sex that is not just a classic in the field, it is probably the classic in the field. In fact, it has even inspired a pop song.

A few years ago I covered a science festival for my newspaper, The Times. There was a talk about gender, and on the stage a panel of scientists and sociologists argued about whether the term even made sense. Could gender itself, they asked, be a social construct?

Its a fair question. Between bisexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals, pansexuals and asexuals, are we not just all on a spectrum? If a trans man can in theory have a genetically related baby through a surrogate mother, fertilised using artificial insemination from his male partner, what, in every sense of the word, is sex?

In a decade spent writing about science, I have seen and experienced the controversy about gender the behaviour that attaches to our chromosomal sex and what it means. I have seen scientists attacked for suggesting there are innate differences between male and female brains; I have seen scientists attacked for saying there arent. I have seen male chess grandmasters claim that their game is a uniquely male pursuit; I have seen female chess grandmasters get rather cross with them.

I have covered stories in which professors on two sides of the gender debate were simultaneously sending me abusive emails about the other.

In that tent at that science festival, though, it was not the discussion that struck me as interesting, but the people watching it. Here was an audience of all ages happily listening to ideas that even in their lifetimes would have seemed ludicrous, but today are utterly uncontroversial.

It seemed everyone in the marquee was on board with the idea that pink toys for girls are pernicious. They were equally united in the belief that toy guns and swords for boys are restrictive, that girls are just as good at science, and that a lack of paternity leave harms men and children alike. More than this, many left that marquee apparently content in the idea that gender identity can be a choice not a chromosome.

Then, on leaving the marquee, a large portion of them turned right. They walked along the path and came to another tent. And here they queued up for the toilet perfectly happy with the idea that they happened to choose the one determined by their sex. In a very minor way, minutes after the talk, biological differences had already affected behavioural ones.

Sometimes change never seems to come. Sometimes it happens so fast that you only notice it afterwards.

Two years earlier I had myself gone on five months of paternity leave. I was the first in my office to take advantage of a new UK law that made this possible, and colleagues made jokes about how I would have to learn how to lactate. One friend helpfully suggested my baby would soon be able to suckle using the disgraceful remnants of [my] fast-withering ball sack. But by the time I returned to work, two other new fathers had already made the decision to do the same and their choice went unremarked upon.

Gender is shifting. But is gender disappearing? Are we really seeing a reassessment of not just the relations between men and women but the very idea of men and women, at least beyond the physical facts of our birth? Is this the last, and greatest, battle of the sexual revolution of the 1960s?

Perhaps. If so, though, it is clear that this is still a work in progress something society is cautiously, tentatively, trying to understand. There are unresolved contradictions. If, for instance, gender really is a social construct, if there is no such thing as a female and a male brain, then how can we also argue that gender is so important we should operate on people whose brain tells them they are a different sex?

Statistics tell us that 99 per cent of those present in the marquee that day given there were fewer than 300 people there, quite possibly 100 per cent were comfortable in their gender. Estimates of the proportion of people with gender dysphoria hover around 0.3 per cent.gender fluidity is about a timely resettling of stereotypes, but that gender itself still remains, as strong as ever. Because if gender is a social construct, for now it feels remarkably well constructed. And, for most people, it still defines our lives in ways that no amount of social conditioning can explain.

Maybe as a girl you preferred to play with tractors, and climb trees with boys? Wonderful. But when you went through puberty, you still knew that if you had sex with one of those boys it was you who would get pregnant. A womb is not a patriarchal creation.

Or were you a boy who enjoyed pushing dolls around in prams and watching cartoons starring Disney princesses? Theres nothing at all wrong with that. But as a teenager you would have still experienced a surge in testosterone and been aware that the basic act of reproduction involved the effort not of nine months but ten minutes.

The physical facts of the body cannot always be thought of as an inconvenient mask, irrelevant to our behaviour.

This is a book about the place where biology meets behaviour. It is about where sex differences in our bodies most closely (but not always) translate into gender differences in the choices we make and what we do. It is ultimately a call to remember that, amid the tumult of changing politics, gender matters. The biggest psychological difference between the sexes, after all, is one so ubiquitous many do not even notice it as a difference. That difference? Most women find men attractive; most men do not.