Grace Reading Series

Our second weekly entry on the questions of difference between men's and women's writing and how that might impact bylines, from the delightful and formidable JESSICA DULONG:

So, last week I set myself up quite nicely, didn’t I? (“Truth is, I'm not convinced blind admissions would actually solve the problem,” I wrote.) That little cliffhanger suggested I would, herewith, begin to reveal the REAL reason so few women’s bylines appear in the big-time, ooo-ahhh magazines (New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic, etc.).

I was meaning to regale you with all measure of penetrating truths on the topic. Really I was.

But I got diverted.

Scene One: Guilt.

I know my hunch about the notion that “a point is something men invented” merits further study. No doubt plenty of feminist psychology texts have delved deeply into the topic. I could learn a lot from them. I wonder what they are.

Scene Two: Crash course.

Go to Google. Type in the phrase ‘women think.’

Scene Three: Holy shit.

The juxtaposition of the words ‘women’ and ‘think’ reveals/provokes more than I ever could have imagined.

The number-one result, I kid you not, is “What Women Think About Male Masturbation.” Turns out male masturbation is “a fact of life,” and most modern women “take it in stride,” according to JackinWorld, the Ultimate Male Masturbation Resource.

Result number two, meanwhile, offers the findings of a survey of 200 women “about their favorite topic . . . penis size.”

Result number three informs us, “Men are like mascara; they usually run at the first sign of emotion.”

Is this all that ‘women think’?

Okay. Maybe it’s wrong to let Google search-engine results signify some kind of zeitgeist. Perhaps I should presume some clever programmer had his/her hand in this and is trying to Make A Point. [For proof of this particular theory, try typing in the word ‘failure’.] But I have to admit, this has me worried.

Finally, with result number four, we’re actually getting somewhere.

It seems “research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white.”
I kind of like this color-coded theory of mental processing.

Human evolution, it appears, has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior.

Researchers say these findings could help explain why men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing like math while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language.

Integrating and assimilating information. Isn’t that how effective writing comes to be? And if women are biologically better at this, wouldn’t that garner them more bylines if the playing field were even? I wonder, does “localized processing” light up some particular part of the brain when a man Makes A Point? Hmmm . . .

Okay, let's skip over the next few search results, including musings on why “so many women think rape is a woman’s fault” and what “women think about men wearing their panties.”

The tenth entry, the last on the page, is the one that has me trembling. This anonymous Craig’s List “Missed Connection” post offers a Dear Diary comparison between Girl and Boy. Girl’s diary recounts a slew of misread signals and hurt feelings that culminates with her weeping, post sex, about how the relationship’s in turmoil. Meanwhile Boy’s entry about the same day reads: “Today the Leafs lost. At least I got laid.”

How quaint. Boys are simple brutes while girls are overcomplicated, oversensitive ones.

Is this the dangerous water I’m treading by even positing that differences in women’s and men’s brains might be at the root of byline disparity? Is Mary Wollstonecraft going to take away my membership card?

"I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm eulogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers." —Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, September 1796).

--JESSICA DULONG