The Differences Between the Sexes

By: Andrea Edwards

            For centuries women have long suspected major differences between men and women, when it came to love and sex.  Ask just about any woman in the world if this is true, and you’re more than likely to get the same response.  Today, we have new scientific data to support and shed some insight as to why these differences exist. 

            According to a report about love, sex and the male brain, featured on CNN.com, there are major differences that would serve to keep us worlds apart despite our overall similarities.  For starters, one of the key differences in the male brain is the dorsal premammillary nucleus. This is the area considered to be the “defend your turf” region, which is larger in the male brain and equipped with special features, such as circuits which help men to detect territorial challenges by other males.

            However, when it comes to the region responsible for empathy (mirror-neuron system), women have a larger and more active share of that pie.  For women it means that getting in sync with others’ emotions comes a lot more naturally.  It gives women an advantage of interpreting facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice as well as other nonverbal emotional cue says the article. 

            But perhaps one of the biggest differences between the sexes is that the area of the brain responsible for sexual pursuit.  This region found to be 2.5 times larger in the male brain, than in women.  Attempting to explain that “glazed-eye look” that men get when looking at a woman’s breast, the article goes on to simplify the data by using a comparison between beer and testosterone.  In so doing they state, “If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day.  But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day,” making it virtually impossible for men not to be consumed with the female body parts.  So now that we know the reasons for our differences, let’s just move on and accept the things we cannot change.