Vive la Difference (New Concepts in Human Sexuality) - Hardcover

Walsh, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087975852X ISBN 13: 9780879758523

Publisher: Prometheus, 1993

Synopsis

What is the first question our parents asked about us after we were born? Probably, "Is it a boy or a girl?" No single fact about us is more significant than our sex. In any human culture, it determines how others react to us and how they treat us.

Viva Le Difference, a light-hearted exploration of sex differences, show how this view violates not only everyday experience and common sense, but the accumulating evidence of science that men and women are profoundly different creatures. Authors Anthony Walsh and Grace J. Walsh begin with a look at the genetic and hormonal bases of sex by viewing maleness and femaleness as a continuum based on the degree of masculization of the brain. Next, they explore different sexual aspects of the human body other than the reproductive organs. They look at size, strength, and endurance, and many other differences in capacity, as well as sensory (eyes, nose, ears, etc.) differences. From there, the discussion focuses on differences in the brain and mind, health and illness among men and women, and the different ways in which men and women experience emotion, with an emphasis on that most intense emotion of all - love.

Informative and entertaining, this book offers a fresh, insightful, and lively look at what makes men and women unique.

About this title

From Booklist

Women have the keener sense of smell. Men are 20 times more likely to snore. Women have greater peripheral vision, but men can see better in the dark. Female babies start talking four months earlier. Male babies are born on average a day earlier. Women get drunker faster, but men are five times more likely to be alcoholics. And so it goes. As the fashionableness of androgyny fades with the 1980s, people seem more interested in the differences between the sexes. There are many, say the Walshes, from genetic to biological to behavioral, and although they devote several chapters to the science behind the differences between the sexes, they seem to delight far more in the anecdotal and interpretive content of their book. Their style is breezy, irreverent, often tongue-in-cheek, which puts their effort more in the cocktail-party-trivia than the serious-research category. This is not to say it isn't crammed with information--it is--but the predominant purpose seems to be to entertainingly keep up the debate over just how different men and women really are. Mary Ellen Sullivan

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 087975852X
• ISBN 13: 9780879758523
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 140