Does Size Really Matter?

Araceli Munoz

The brain is a mysterious organ that has fascinated scientists of all times. During a lot of time experts have tried to discover how it works and its connection with human behaviour. Everyday more is known about the brain and its relation to the control of our body, our emotions and our learning capacity, and regarding our behaviour and cognition. But the brain is still a big unknown for us, and a lot of times these isn’t a clear explanation of how brain works with regard to these issues.

Maybe because human behaviour and mental processes are very difficult to objectify, their study is very complex. The frontier between biological and social processes isn’t clear, though to explain human behaviour we can turn to biological or socio-cultural factors, or maybe a combination of both. And this combination implies another dilemma too: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Do some skills that have an origin in biological processes entail posterior socio-cultural changes? Or perhaps some environmental factors can involve changes in our body as time goes by? What skills are innate and which ones are acquired and a fruit of socialization?

So, some skills associated with men or with women maybe have to do more with learned habits, behaviours or practices than with innate abilities. Are men innately less emotive, delicate and sensitive than women? Or maybe this has to do more with the fact that in the majority of societies it isn’t very well looked upon that men show their feelings?

But the ambiguity of this frontier between the biological and the social also sometimes entails an abuse of biologistic[1] explanations about some skills in order to justify social relations of power between people of different genders, ethnic groups or social classes. Likewise, other times biologistic explanations have been used to try to justify the rejection and discrimination that a part of the society exerts overt minority social groups. It isn’t so long ago that homosexuality was erroneously considered a mental illness. Therefore, sometimes some manifestly social behaviours have been pathologised or medicalised, looking for reasons in biology or medicine that can justify inequality in our societies.

A lot of men have tried to justify their position of power in front of women in society saying that their intelligence is bigger than women’s or that women are better gifted for some skills related to the domestic scope. During a lot of time the idea that men were more intelligent, because they had bigger brains than women, has dominated (showing the obsession that a lot of men had and have with regard to the size of things). Currently, it has been demonstrated that brain size is only important with regard to body size, because the larger the body is, the larger the part of the brain used to controlling this body has to be (ask an elephant!). But the amount of grey matter, focused on thinking, in men is the same as in woman.

I can’t deny that biological differences between men and women exist. But I refuse to think that these differences can justify any position of power of men in front of women. People have to be careful because it’s very easy to create stereotypes based in differences and later to reify[2] them as if they are absolute truths.

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[1] Biologistic / Biologism: “Use of biological principles in explaining human especially social behaviour” (WordReference.com)

[2] Reify: “Consider an abstract concept to be real” (WordReference.com)