Mars vs Venus vs Something Else Entirely

I don't take an entirely constructivist, nor an entirely essentialist view of gender. It's far too multifaceted to be limited to just nature or just nurture explanations. (Read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl -- she breaks it down far better than I can.) That being said, whenever someone comes forth and makes the dubious claim that there are "male" brains and "female" brains (with the female brain usually being the defective version), I roll my eyes hard.

I largely agree with Samantha Eyler's post, and while I'm glad that the notion that there are more differences among men and women than there are between them is being accepted as the de-facto school of thought (at least in the feminist blog world), universalizing the experience of "girlhood" remains one of my pet peeves.

As a woman told for her entire childhood that her dreams of becoming an astronaut, a doctor, or a Senator would always be impossible because that was not what God intended for her as a girl, I can attest to the damage wreaked on my soul (yes, I did just use that loaded word: soul). I actually started to believe my intellect would always be told where it could and couldn’t go, that my life’s course was not my own to decide.

I know this isn't what she's intending to do here, but when I read that, I thought to myself "hmm. I never once entertained the idea that I couldn't do something because I was a girl; however, I know that that becoming an astronaut, a doctor, or a Senator was entirely out of reach because I was poor." What do you do when you can't parse every aspect of your life through a solely feminist lens? Don't, I guess, but there's little room in feminist discourse when it comes to the intersections race and class.

Eyler's is the kind of article that will probably get quite a bit of attention among feminist bloggers as it rightfully should, but the hyper-focus on gender alone means that a lot of people are going to be left out of the discussion.