Programmed To Love

Teen girls are the media rage these days -- especially mean ones.

They've been featured on recent cover articles in The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek and are the stars in two best-selling books, "Queen Bees and Wannabes," by Rosalind Wiseman and "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls," by Rachel Simmons. The Washington Post calls nasty girls the "teen-age crisis of the moment." Oprah has done a show on the subject, and anxious parents have been flocking to seminars on what to do about the problem.

Wait a minute. Wasn't it only yesterday that the media was claiming that girls were not aggressive enough? Weren't they wilting Ophelias (so dubbed in the best-seller "Reviving Ophelia" by Mary Pipher) lacking in self-esteem, wimpy, unable to stand up for themselves? Didn't worried parents drag their daughters off to "self-esteem seminars" for a quick fix?

Have whiners become bullies and has girl culture turned on a dime?

No, it hasn't. Any female of any age who remembers sixth grade knows all about mean girls. Girls have not suddenly become snarling she-wolves, nor were they ever as deficient in self-esteem as the alarmist books said they were. As Newsweek's Barbara Kantrowitz notes, the mean girls books and articles "rely largely on anecdotal evidence rather than new social science to prove their point." And, of course, you can "prove" any point you want by selecting the right anecdotes.

New Book Claims Girls' Brains Don't Measure Up

But more worrisome than the tomes that say girls are mean or lacking in self-esteem is a new book by a best-selling author that says that girls' brains just don't measure up.

The new book that's selling briskly, "The Wonder of Girls" by Michael Gurian, makes this latter claim. Gurian believes that nature intends girls primarily for having and nurturing children, and that, if they put too much emphasis on achievement and careers, they will suffer lifelong misery.

In January, Gurian told an education conference in Canada that no more than 20 percent of girls can aspire to be engineers or architects, and that women lack natural technical ability. He proffers a theory he calls "bridge brains" to document this notion. He says that only girls with brains that work like boys' brains can understand spatial concepts such as math and sciences. He claims that the structure of most girls' minds make it too hard for them to grasp subjects like calculus and physics. News report on the Canadian conference said that teachers were "lining up" to buy his books.

Gurian, a family therapist, is only the latest addition to a dismal list of people who try to use brain "science" to make sweeping statements about human nature. Most of the time, such statements turn out to be dead wrong.

Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould described how 19th century scientists took skulls, packed them full of lead and weighed and measured them. They concluded that blacks and women had tiny, immature brains and were thus not capable of the higher intellectual functions achieved by white men.

Today, nobody argues that women have tiny brains that make them unfit to go to college. Women fill more college seats then men. But they are being told that their brains are suited primarily to motherhood and relationships and that their whole lives should be geared towards this end. Misery is the price to be paid if they deviate from this path. Gurian presents 30 studies that he says "prove" his thesis that women's brains are utterly different from men's.

But few scientists would agree with such ideas as "bridge brains." Neuropsychologist Doreen Kimura, a researcher based in British Columbia, told the Christian Science Monitor that there are indeed structural differences in the brains of some men and women, but "in the larger comparative context, the similarities between human males and females far outweigh the differences."