Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 10101011 2379 days ago
Dr. Brizendine's books are hyperbolic pseudoscience.

I stopped taking "The Female Brain" seriously when I read the stuff about how young men think about sex once a minute and young women think about it once every couple of days. Both those numbers are pretty ridiculous :^)

And indeed, none of the papers she cited contain any evidence to support that statement. Source: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003668.h...

1 comments

I don't think that article provides any reason to discredit her, or the average differences in the size and density of different brain regions, which is what I was referring to.

In fact, that article presumes that Dr. Brizendine's footnotes provide any source for that particular statement you're concerned about, when in fact it doesn't. Her book is clear in her footnotes to which of her statements they apply, and none are cited to that.

Ah, so instead of bogus citations, she provided no citations at all. Glad we cleared that up!
Your skeptic attitude is baseless. Her book is not meant to be an academic text. It's a casual read by an MD. You think an MD writing a casual book should cite everything? Ridiculous.
She makes the very specific claim that "85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds".

Given that she places this statement among others that ARE cited, it should also be cited.