Cosmopolitan
Even Cosmo has started to science communicate! Imagine my surprise when a quiz in the December 2006 issue with the headline “What sex is your brain?” turned out to have nothing to do with, well, what you expect of Cosmo!
The gregarious claim that men and women’s brains are “completely different” was supported by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge. He asserts that women are “geared up for empathy” whereas men have “excellent spatial awareness.” Interestingly within the introductory paragraph to the quiz lies a contradiction. Men and women supposedly have different brains, but the Professor’s research concludes that “only 50% of each sex have the brain type that corresponds to their gender,” hence the quiz. In this article you can take the quiz to find out whether your brain is more male or more female, even though your sex should determine that already.
While I acknowledge that Cosmo readers may not be the most intellectual bunch, I wonder if such a huge contradiction went unnoticed by them. If women can have male brains and if men can have female brains, is there really such a thing as a male or female brain?
Why did I buy Cosmo? The free bag matched my shoes. My brain is male, in case you were wondering.
5 comments:
I'm surprised that you're surprised that Cosmo might have science communication in it - I always thing of women's glossies are FULL of science stories. Diet, psychology...
Also that you think Cosmo readers may not be intellectual. Have you looked into the readership demographics? I have a suspicion that they would aim for highly educated and relatively wealthy women. It would be interesting to compare coverage of this story in other women's glossies like Glamour, Women's Weekly (I think that's one?) or Grazia.
Well done on getting the bag though - I don't think there's enough coordinating accessorising today ;-)
I'm not sure if all the stuff in women's magazines is really science or just hype. I will confess that I do buy into it occasionally (I am manic about skincare) but I am not convinced by a lot of the reasoning behind, say, fad diets.
As for the intellectuality behind Cosmopolitan, I may have been making a brash assumption, but it doesn't aim to capture science enthusiasts or people of other intellectually demanding professions. People read it for fashion, sex tips, beauty advice etc.
I think this issue may be one of those "it depends on what you count as science" onces...
In terms of whether "it doesn't aim to capture science enthusiasts or people of other intellectually demanding professions" - I think you need to distinquish between people doing these jobs and acting as if they do in their free time. When I read magazines like Cosmo I want some escape from my professional life - people read, to some extent, in role.
Simon Baron Cohen's work is interesting. The idea of "male" and "female" brains is that there's a spectrum of abilities, men tending to cluster at one end, women tending to be at the other. The actual tags of "male" and "female" match up with the traditional stereotypes, thus their names.
The important point though is as noted, that many who are XX do not have what we stereotypically think of as the female brain, nor XYs vice versa. The idea thus reinforces the good liberal view that we must treat everyone as an individual, with unique talents and attributes, not as simply members of a group.
There's an online version of the tests here:
http://www.eqsq.com/eqsqtest.php
The theory also goes a long way in helping to explain the rise in autism in recent decades.
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