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Article from the Spectator

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23 November 2002

 

Why women can't read maps

 

The high incidence of male autism reveals basic mental differences

between the sexes, says Rod Liddle

 

Almost everything we find out about autism is disturbing. Our worry

increases exponentially with every new nugget of information, just as

the numbers of those children diagnosed as suffering from one or

another autistic disorder seem to increase exponentially year on year.

 

There are the middle-class parents who, terrified, keep their

children away from those frightening MMR injections, believing, with

ferocious conviction, that the government is deliberately inflicting

autism on the under-five population either for reasons of economy, or

out of stupidity, or through some undisclosed malevolent intent.

 

There are plenty of wacko conspiracy theories, evolved from the minds

of paranoiacs and other assorted madmen, about the state and autism;

cruise the Internet and see for yourself.

 

But even discounting these, the picture is pretty grim. Look at the

figures for diagnosed cases of autism (and the milder Asperger's

Syndrome) and you'll see that they have risen from four cases per

10,000 children only a few years ago to one in 200 in some areas. (Or

one in 150 if you live in Silicon Valley, California, where autism is

referred to, with a certain cruel accuracy, as Geek Syndrome.) Much

of this rise is down to an increased likelihood of diagnosis these

days - autism, like asthma, has a sort of horrible fashionableness about it.

 

But it's probably not the sole reason for the astonishing jump in the

number of children afflicted. And nobody is very sure what, actually,

is responsible.

 

So, all of that is certainly worrying. And then there's the stuff the

researchers are coming up with in order to understand the condition

better - and this, in a way, is going to give us a lot more to think,

and worry, about.

 

Autism, in its many guises, is an overwhelmingly male affliction,

characterised by an abnormality in social development and

communication skills and, usually, an obsessional interest in all

sorts of weird, mechanistic stuff, from an early age (usually between

three and five years). The current thesis among those studying autism

holds that the condition is simply an extreme example of male behaviour.

 

Simon Baron-Cohen, at the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge

University, has put forward the 'Extreme Male Brain' theory of

autism; simply that those abilities typical of the 'average' male

brain - an ability to systematise, a facility for mechanistic

analysis such as mathematics, computer programming and engineering -

become, in their extreme form, part of what is now called a spectrum

of autism. At the other end of the scale, the extreme female brain

would be characterised by an extraordinary ability to empathise but a

greatly impaired ability to, as he puts it, systematise. By

'systematise' he means an ability to read maps, do mathematical

calculations, understand technical systems and so on; all those

things which, colloquially, over the years, men have accused women of

being hilariously useless at. The trouble is, men may now have the

beginnings of scientific proof for what was previously seen as

chauvinistic prejudice.

 

Baron-Cohen's latest work, published in the magazine Trends in

Cognitive Science and to be developed in a book early next year, is

quite clear about the division between the average female brain and

the average male brain. 'Systematising and empathising are two key

dimensions in defining the male and female brain ...not all men have

the male type brain and not all women have the female type brain

...the central claim ...is only that more males than females have the

male type brain.'

 

Whatever these careful caveats, the implication is pretty

straightforward: the average male is biologically suited - the

crucial phrase - to certain kinds of occupation; the average female

is suited to other, very different, kinds of work.

 

Now this runs counter to those attempts at social engineering, de

rigueur for the past 30-odd years, which insist - with mounting

hysteria and, more often than not, government-approved targets - that

there be an even distribution between men and women across the

multifarious professions and trades.

 

Obviously, Baron-Cohen's argument does not run counter to the notion

of equal opportunity - we are talking only about 'average' female and

male brain types, and not about individuals. But for those people who

howl in complaint when it is found that, for example, the engineering

profession is overwhelmingly male, the answer is pretty clear: the

reason for this may be a natural disinclination and, even more than

this, a biologically determined lack of ability among women as much

as a 'sexist' recruitment process.

 

(Engineering, actually, is a good case in point. Asperger's Syndrome

is sometimes called 'the engineer's disorder'; the child suffering

from Asperger's is almost always obsessed by the design and mechanism

of some kind of machine or other. It is virtually a precondition of

the affliction.)

 

In fact, the idea of a natural division of sexes within the labour

force seems to be borne out already, and for anyone looking in at our

society from the outside it is a case of the glaringly obvious.

 

It is in those professions where equality of opportunity between

males and females is most advanced that one sees the greatest

diffusion between men and women towards certain types of job. In the

medical profession, for example, there are very few female surgeons

and very few male speech therapists. One job requires many of those

attributes associated with the male brain type, the other demands

those attributes one associates with the female brain type. And so,

naturally, men gravitate towards surgery and women towards speech therapy.

 

The essential difference between the two sexes has been noticed in

babies as early as one day old - i.e., too soon for their lives to

have been blighted by our ghastly and injurious attempts at

gender-stereotyping. Day-old girls will become responsive to human

faces shown on a television screen; boys go for things such as guns

and trains and other inanimate, mechanical objects.

 

So, quite apart from helping us understand the nature of autism, this

may also have a profound impact on social policy. Should we still

insist that women constitute half of the workforce of computer

programmers, engineers, maths and physics teachers and, conversely,

men take up jobs in speech therapy and pre-school teaching?

 

Other researchers, though, have taken the theory even further. Chris

Badcock's paper 'Mentalism and Mechanism' suggests that there are two

distinct types of cognition - male and female. They are, he argues,

essentially 'non-commensurate' and incompatible. This should give the

liberal social scientists a bit of fun. They will have to face the

idea that we are different, men and women, and that legislation

designed to negate those differences will be worse than useless.

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23 November 2002

 

 

The essential difference between the two sexes has been noticed in

babies as early as one day old - i.e., too soon for their lives to

have been blighted by our ghastly and injurious attempts at

gender-stereotyping. Day-old girls will become responsive to human

faces shown on a television screen; boys go for things such as guns

and trains and other inanimate, mechanical objects.

 

 

Hmmmm, day-old babies going for guns? ......... :blink::blink:

 

C.

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(Engineering, actually, is a good case in point. Asperger's Syndrome

is sometimes called 'the engineer's disorder'; the child suffering

from Asperger's is almost always obsessed by the design and mechanism

of some kind of machine or other. It is virtually a precondition of

the affliction.)

This paragraph to me sums up everything that is wrong with the way Autism/Aspergers is perceived.

 

1. The child is suffering. The child. I thought he was talking about male and female brains and how this affects the workforce ratios and the ability to read maps and all that? I've never seen a one year old read a map before, so why does he refer to children when he actually refers to someone with 'the condition'.

 

2. At least I presume it's a male, or a very uneducated female, to virtually conclude that this is a male 'condition'. What about all us females out there who couldn't give two hoots about maths but are Aspergic all the same?

 

3. I guess it also means that I couldn't possibly be AS because I'm not obsessed with maths or design or technology and mechanisms. Oh I know he says 'mostly' but coupled with the fact that it is a male thing I swear I should go back to my consultant and ask him to re-think his diagnosis.

 

4. I do not suffer with Aspergers, never will, never have. The only times I have trouble is when I don't understand the way in which Aspergers affects me fully or when I come across a new situation/experience where I'm not yet sure how to cope/adapt. I also struggle when other people don't understand Aspergers and how to talk to me and be around me. I don't suffer sitting here everyday going woe is me. I am more prone to illness as a result of being born early/possibly related to Aspergers and I do have digestive problems if I eat the wrong foods, but, with a little bit of insight and understanding about myself these discomforts have been virtually eradicated. I haven't been cured, far from it, but the negative 'side effects', that affect the way our bodies function that can come about from being Aspergers/not having a fully functioning immune system have been lessened. Yes it is hard being Aspergers and yes life can be incredibly difficult, but to refer to me as suffering from something, as if I can cure my social shyness/awkwardness and sensory overloading with something, just makes me really angry.

 

5. As does Aspergers being referred to as an 'affliction'.

 

Thanks for the article Canopus, it was still interesting to read, but apart from highlighting the obvious differences between men and female (I think it's just the media who like to pretend that revealing these truths is somehow news to us) the article is just a load of old tosh in my opinon :lol:

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No, I don't, to be fair though until you just said I didn't actually know what The Spectator was.

 

I wasn't commenting on my disappointment in what I perceived should be a quality piece coming from an established source, I was simply expressing my dismay at the way in which Autism/Aspergers is covered in general of which this article was a perfect example due to the sheer number of stupid expressions/assumptions he managed to fit into one paragraph.

 

Emily

xxx

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Do you honestly believe the Spectator is a quality source of information? It is a politically biased entertainment magazine.

Well SBC's views etc. sound like they are represented accurately. Plus I don't know if Boris Johnson still has anything to do with the Spectator, but I recently read one of his novels and he mentions autism quite a bit, and seems to have a decent grasp of it.

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