The American Spectator

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p> strong> Taking Sex Differences Seriously br> by Steven E. Rhoads br> (Encounter Books, 374 pages, $27.95) /strong> /p>

IN AN EXPERIMENT DONE in the mid-1990s, a researcher asked fifty sexually active college students to react to the statement: "Even if I think I don't want to be emotionally involved with a person, if I have sex with her/him a few times, I begin to feel vulnerable and would at least like to know she/he cares about me." Fifty percent of the males disagreed with that, but only 4 percent of the females did.

Asked whether such a result -- obtained, to repeat, not in the 1950s but in the 1990s -- reflects an innate difference between males and females, many feminists will deny it and say social conditioning creates the difference. Such feminists adhere to what Steven Rhoads calls the "androgynous world" ideology -- a highly influential ideology claiming that males and females are innately exactly the same, and the best and truest world will be one in which their personalities and roles are identical.

Well, how about this: a study of fourth and sixth graders found that during playtime boys competed with each other 50 percent of the time, while girls competed with each other 1 percent of the time. Or, studies done from the 1920s to the 1990s found that preschool girls are more interested in dance, preschool boys more interested in balls and rough-and-tumble play.

Nope, feminists will say. Those grade-school kids, those preschool kids, have had plenty of time to be molded by a patriarchal order that teaches males to be strong and assertive, females to be weak and docile.

O.K., how about this:

"[An] experiment exposed day-old infants to a battery of sounds including wild animal calls, computer-generated language and the unhappy cries of other infants. All the babies cried the most when they heard the sounds of other crying infants, but the female babies cried longer."

That's the nitty-gritty-sex differences at one day old, when even the grimmest feminists can't claim the patriarchy has had a hand in it --and there's a lot more nitty-gritty in this outstanding book. (Another example: three-day-old girls will maintain eye contact with a silent adult for twice as long as boys will.) Rhoads, who teaches public policy at the University of Virginia, worked on the book for ten years while reviewing hundreds of studies. He summarizes the evolutionary and biological literature in a way that overwhelmingly establishes the case for nature -- that is, for natural sex differences.

SOME OF THE MOST striking findings involve females with high levels of testosterone, the "male" hormone (actually, both sexes have testosterone, but men typically have ten times more of it). Such females have been extensively researched, and it's been found that, as girls, they tend to prefer boys' toys, to like rough-and-tumble play, to be more competitive than other girls; as women, to be more career-oriented, more ambivalent about having children, more interested in casual sex -- and the list goes on. Not surprisingly, low-testosterone women show opposite, more "traditionally" feminine tendencies.

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